THE QUEER BRAIN: RHETORIC, AESTHETICS, AND THE CULTURAL IMAGE-INARY OF NEUROSCIENCE

This project examines science’s engagement with the queer brain, body, and face and the cultural engagement with brain science in popular culture and the space of the science museum. It outlines the ways that science actually constructs what it purports to discover or describe and how, in that construction, science invokes—often through metaphor, but also through mechanisms like operationalization and generalization—previous epistemes of knowledge or what Sylvia Wynter calls “descriptive statements.” In this work, I contend that what is ultimately being produced through these measures is who counts as subject/Man and who is object—available for plasticization, reanimation, and other forms of debilitation (Jackson 2020; Puar 2017). For the queer embodied brain in culture—the queer person—some of the most salient discourses that shape scientific discourse are discourses around gendered brains, rhetorics related to genetics and heritability, and, in the context of the United States, a rhetorics of sin and choice. Bringing together work from rhetoric of science, (feminist) science and technology studies, queer theory, and cultural studies, this project demonstrates how these seemingly disparate discourses are, in fact, mutually constitutive, discursively knotted, and overlapping, creating a palimpsestuous queer subject-object that bears the traces of multiple descriptive statements. Drawing from anecdotal theory, fleshing out and contesting its implicit juxtaposition of data and anecdote in traditional science discourses, I include autoethnographic vignettes and engage, especially in the later chapters, with tweets, memes, songs, poems, and other thematically associated texts that elucidate my own thinking and knotted associations with the objects of analysis. By attending to the level of culture, of particular concepts, and of rhetoric, this project produces insights into the ways that the rhetorical articulates to the cultural and the conceptual with respect to science’s relation to the brain and to queerness.