Dissertation project: A Social Science Perspective on “Transgender Brains”
Short description
For decades now, examinations of brains belonging to people with transgender experiences have been reported in the scientific literature. What questions that are asked, why and by whom, as well as what results that are presented and the technologies involved, contributes to how such brains are perceived and understood. Different conceptions of “transgender brains” have also for long been picked up and come to matter (or not) outside of the medical and scientific sphere. With a multi-sited ethnographic approach, this doctoral dissertation project interrogates into how scientific- and other practices, materialities and concerns have contributed to different constructions of “transgender brains”, from the mid 1950s and onwards.
The project is theoretically grounded in perspectives from symbolic interactionism and Science and Technology Studies (STS). The purpose is to give an empirical and theoretical contribution to social scientific research concerned with the neurosciences. It contributes with novel understandings of how culturally and historically situated actors, discourses, materialities and concerns takes part in producing, challenging and give meaning to conceptions of different “kinds of brains”, gendered brains and “transgender brains”.