Victoria Bergvall will present her current research examining medical rhetoric used to justify sex differences as they relate to brain scans. She will present:
“But words will never hurt me? Critiquing media messages about sex, gender, & brain differences”
Thursday, April 7 at 7pm in Whitley Auditorium
Modern neuro-imaging technologies have provided stunning, colorful, seductive images of living human brains, yet the media seem flooded with stories and graphics that purport to tell us their true colors: pink and blue. A closer look at data across a range of media reveals a more nuanced tale. Certainly, there are neurological variations, but they do not fall into the simple dichotomies of female and male brains that sound bites of this science would have us believe.
This talk draws on visual and textual sources from the popular media (e.g., brain scans, graphs, and graphics; science journal papers, popular scientific books, blog posts, headlines). It reveals how complex gendered neurological variations are oversimplified into binary representations of sex differences through a number of discursive strategies and sleights of hand.
The dangers of such oversimplification are great; we are cast as alien species from different planets (Mars and Venus), engaged as enemy combatants in Gender Wars, unable to do math or empathize because of a belief in fundamental and insurmountable sex differences. Seeing the Female Brain and the Male Brain as discrete, non-overlapping entities has fueled calls for sex-segregated schools and cuts to NSF funding that encourage girls to pursue STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) careers.
We need instead critical media literacy to combat misperceptions and to understand exciting new findings in the plasticity of the brain, including how our brains are shaped through textual and visual practice, repetition, and experience into a diversity of gendered variation.
Bergvall is Associate Professor of Linguistics at Michigan Technological University. She is the past president of IGALA – the International Language And Gender Association.
This talk is part of the Togetherness in Difference Lecture Series and is funded by a Colleges of Arts and Sciences Fund for Excellence Grant.