Anelis Kaiser

• Professor at University of Freiburg

Gender inequality and diversity in STEM is a challenging field of research. Although the relation between the sex/gender of the researcher and the scientific research practices has been previously examined, less interest has been demonstrated towards the relation between sex/gender of the researcher and the way sex/gender as a variable is explored....

Entrevista entre Andrea Vera Gajardo (Género y Ciencias, Universidad de Valparaíso, Chile) y Anelis Kaiser Trujillo (Estudios de Género en STEM, Universidad de Friburgo, Alemania). Andrea y Anelis se conocieron en junio de 2023, durante la preparación de un evento de Feminist STS celebrado en Chile.

Gender inequality and diversity in STEM is a challenging field of research. Although the relation between the sex/gender of the researcher and the scientific research practices has been previously examined, less interest has been demonstrated towards the relation between sex/gender of the researcher and the research topic. Here, we examine, from a...

Intersectionality contends that sex/gender is constituted of and with other social categories, and that the social structures giving rise to inequality should be addressed in research. This is a powerful and important perspective from which to investigate the processes and consequences of social group memberships, one which has been overlooked by m...

Along with genetics and genomics, the neurosciences currently share the dubious honor of being considered able to enlighten us on fundamental questions of human existence. One of these questions is the issue of sex/gender—in science, this boils down to an urge to explain whether women and men differ from each other. Comparisons of women versus men,...

In this lab meeting, six feminist scholars who engage with the sciences from various perspectives and have been collaborating over the last decade as members of the NeuroGenderings Network, share a sustained discussion on the responsibilities of a feminist scientist—particularly in light of our current moment. In a time when ongoing acts of anti-Bl...

This paper contributes to this field first by reviewing some outstanding issues pertaining to the question of sex/gender in the human brain, with a special focus on neuroimaging data; second by proposing several methodological interventions for more accurately interrogating sex/gender differences; and third by applying these interventions to an exa...

Anelis Kaiser examines the sciences of the brain and the brain itself as contested sites for the exploration of sex/gender in material terms. She draws from Barad’s understanding of materiality to explain the subsurface of bodily matter and finds in this concept, to some extend, a way to approach the brain in its material becoming. The author shows...

In 2014, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) proposed a new policy to promote “sex parity” in research. As an extension to the 1993 NIH Revitalization Act which mandated the inclusion of women and minorities in clinical trials, the new NIH policy will require scientists to include “sex” as a variable in both animal model and in vitro cell line-...

Numerous structural studies have established that experience shapes and reshapes the brain throughout a lifetime. The impact of early development, however, is still a matter of debate. Further clues may come from studying multilinguals who acquired their second language at different ages. We investigated adult multilinguals who spoke three language...

Within the field of neuroscientific research on second language learning, considerable attention has been devoted to functional and recently also structural changes related to second language acquisition. The present literature review summarizes studies that investigated structural changes related to bilingualism. Furthermore, as recent evidence ha...

Neuroimaging (NI) technologies are having increasing impact in the study of complex cognitive and social processes. In this emerging field of social cognitive neuroscience, a central goal should be to increase the understanding of the interaction between the neurobiology of the individual and the environment in which humans develop and function. Th...

Why is popular understanding of female-male differences still based on rigid models of development, even though contemporary developmental sciences emphasize plasticity? Is it because the science of sex differences still works from the same rigid models?

Feminist and queer repoliticizations of the brain The historical relationship between biology and feminist politics is one of tensions and contradictions. Today, this is especially flagrant in the present golden age of neuroscience, when the older arguments of superiority of masculinity over femininity, the inevitability of sexual difference, and t...

When is an observed dissimilarity between brains of females and males a ‘‘sex’’ difference and when is it a ‘‘gender’’ difference? The aim of this conceptual paper is to pinpoint the understandings of ‘‘sex’’ and ‘‘gender’’ within neuropsychological research, as these terms implicitly lead to overlapping and nonspecific associations when variables...

Are women taking contraceptive drugs brighter than women not using the birth control pill? Does testosterone make people’s behavior more masculine through its effects on the brain? And can there ever be a neuro-gaydar?

Again and again, attempts have been made to find correlates of sex/gender differences in the human brain. Despite the insistence with which differences have been stated, empirical results have not been unequivocal: evidence for and against the influence of sex in the makeup of men's and women's brains has been presented. This article focuses on the...

It is generally accepted that the presence of a second language (L2) has an impact on the neuronal substrates build up and used for language processing; the influence of the age of L2 exposure, however, is not established. We tested the hypothesis that the age of L2 acquisition has an effect on the cortical representation of a multilingual repertoi...

This study focuses on sex/gender and language in fMRI research. We explore the question of similarities and differences in 22 men and 22 women, respectively, in a fMRI language production task of fluent narration in which covert language production was contrasted with an auditory attentional task. In women, a left-lateralised activation concentrate...