Keywords

The neuro- or brain sciences have been afforded increasing explanatory power in relation to a broad range of social issues and in fields as diverse as education, health, child protection, and criminal justice systems. Rose and Abi-Rached (2013) have termed the 2000s the decade of the ‘brain sciences’, the decade in which neuroscience escaped from the laboratory and entered key sites of social, cultural, and political discourse. This chapter engages with Nikolas Rose and Joelle M. Abi-Rached’s work to explore aspects of the uptake of a neurobiological approach to trauma in the field of violence against women. This is a field of practice, which with its origins in the second wave women’s movement continues to be governed by an explicitly political social change agenda. Yet, in the Australian context, it has also been an ‘early adopter’ of the neuroscience of trauma. In this chapter, I use Rose and Abi-Rached’s (2013) elucidation of the key economic, theoretical, and biopolitical developments that have enabled the diffusion of the ‘brain sciences’ to help make sense of what can appear a troublingly conservatising influence. This is important because, as I discuss, it enables me to engage in a critical though reparative dialogue (Sedgwick, 2003) with feminist scholars who have dismissed trauma discourse variously as pathologising, the result of ‘professionalisation’, and evidence of the ‘cooption’ of feminism by medicine and science. In what follows, I first provide a brief overview of my research and outline some of the issues I encountered when engaging with feminist scholarship on the uptake of trauma in feminist work against sexual violence. This provides the contextual background for the remainder of the chapter which is essentially a reflective account of the way I have come to understand or, perhaps more accurately am coming to understand, how to use Rose and Abi-Rached’s work to progress my own.

Engaging with Feminist Work on Sexual Violence and Trauma

Neurobiological explanations of social issues have now entered sectors as diverse as health, child protection, mental health, and criminal justice (Fitzgerald et al., 2016; Rose, 2010, 2015; Rose & Abi-Rached, 2014). My own research examines this phenomenon, focusing on neurobiological understandings of trauma and the impact of this thinking on policy development and practice in sexual assault service provision. Specifically, I am interested in exploring the uptake of the ‘brain’ or neurosciences in feminist work in the field of violence against women. This research programme began with my doctoral research, which used a Foucauldian methodological approach to investigate the trajectory of sexual assault as trauma (PTSD or complex trauma) into Australian feminist sexual assault services, and has continued into my current study, which extends to a broader consideration of the implementation of ‘trauma informed care’ policies and practices in the field of violence against women. I am interested in how the concept of trauma, a concept that particularly in its current form is very much associated with medicine, psychiatry, and increasingly neuroscience, has been used in applied feminist work against sexual violence.

At ‘first glance’ this appears somewhat incongruous, given that the work (intellectual and activist) of feminists agitating for and setting up rape crisis and sexual assault centres in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s was largely in response to the medicalisation, pathologisation, and disbelief of survivors’ experiences by the medical and psychiatric professions. Indeed, when I worked as a sexual assault counsellor/advocate in the late 1990s through to the mid-2000s, an anti-medicalisation stance remained discernibly explicit, evident in myriad ways, from the routine encounters with medical staff that occurred as part of our crisis work, in everyday workplace conversations, through to more formalised polices delineating and circumscribing the medical role in responding to the needs of survivors, and via work-based training workshops (Egan, 2020). Even at that time, however, the influence of neuroscience was evident in nascent form in the work of Judith Herman’s highly influential trauma-and-recovery model (Herman, 2015), in the training programmes provided by the Education Centre Against Violence, and through the conferences and workshops by US trauma specialist Bessel van der Kolk.

My initial research project arose from these early observations and experiences and essentially evolved from curiosity: the wish to explore the place of feminism/s in contemporary Australian sexual assault services and the place of and relationship to trauma discourse through an empirical research project. In a nutshell, I wanted to explore and understand how it is that a feminist field of practice has taken up ideas that come from science, psychiatry, and neuroscience. In trying to understand this phenomenon, I engaged with a body of feminist scholarship on the uptake of trauma in feminist work on sexual violence, which I will outline briefly below. While this scholarship raises some important issues, I did not feel that it helped me ‘make sense’ of what I was ‘seeing’ in my research. I felt that what I needed was an alternative lens or framework, one that could ultimately help me engage in a dialogue with and perhaps contribute to it. This was my initial reasoning for turning to Rose and Abi-Rached’s work.

Encountering Limits in Feminist Work on Sexual Violence—And Trauma

Internationally—at least within Anglo-American feminist scholarship—the uptake of what Marecek (1999) has referred to as ‘trauma talk’ in feminist work has been a source of concern and some fairly sustained critique (Gavey & Schmidt, 2011; Lafrance & McKenzie-Mohr, 2013; Stark, 2009; Whittier, 2009). Typically, there is an underlying concern, sometimes implicit and sometimes explicit, about the incursion of medicine and psychiatry that this is understood to represent. While there are some nuanced arguments and critiques, they tend to be grouped around the following concerns. Firstly, that trauma discourse individualises the issue of sexual violence, reducing a social and political problem to one of mental health and individual adjustment (Lamb, 1999; Mardorossian, 2002; Marecek & Gavey, 2013). For example, Burstow amongst others argues that the adoption of diagnostic categories and symptomology pathologises survivors by treating the effects of sexual violence as deficits to be fixed (Burstow, 2003, 2005; Wilkin & Hillock, 2014). Secondly, and related to this point, the uptake of trauma (whether framed as diagnostic categories or a model stemming from those categories) in feminist counselling and within rape crisis and sexual services has typically been understood as symptomatic of a decline in feminism as social and political movement (Lamb, 1999; Mardorossian, 2002; O'Dell, 2003; Whittier, 2009)—indicative of the ‘professionalisation’ of sexual assault workers and organisations at the expense of a grassroots activism that characterised early rape crisis collectives.

I found this positioning of trauma as representing a decline or co-option of feminism unhelpful in trying to think through and understand what I could see in my research. As I have laid out elsewhere (Egan, 2016, 2019a), in Australian sexual assault services feminism continues to hold influence (Egan, 2019b). Indeed, feminist understandings of sexual violence have assumed a position of dominance in these services, no longer always needing to be explicitly identified as such, but rather embedded in the architecture of the services. Moreover, the research found that practitioners were actively incorporating trauma theory (PTSD, complex trauma) into their established repertoire of feminist practices, and it drew attention to their mobilisation of neuroscientific trauma research (e.g., Briere, 2002; Briere & Scott, 2014; van der Kolk, 2002, 2015). By the term the neuroscience of trauma I am referring to the ways in which psychological trauma is embedded in and effects the body, for example, the ways in which traumatic memory is often recalled and experienced in sensory (as feelings and images) rather than verbal form (Dombrowski et al., 2009; Van der Kolk, 2015).

I also found a level of reflexivity in the interviews I conducted with sexual assault workers, a knowing rather than an unknowing uptake of trauma discourse. In particular, those with lengthy working histories in the sector identified the increasing influence of trauma in the field of sexual assault service provision as one of the key changes over time and pointed to what could perhaps be seen as a certain irony in drawing on the work of male psychiatrists and psychologists such as Bessel van der Kolk and John Briere. Essentially, I was looking for a framework that would allow me to explore the nuances and to consider compatibilities—rather than incompatibilities—between feminism and trauma discourse. I want to think through, to theorise, the ways in which the sexual assault workers who participated in my research study were able to use their understanding of trauma—and in particular the neurobiology of trauma—in ways that are enabling, rather than disabling or pathologising, and which they considered compatible with an integral part of their feminist practice.

On Developing a Relationship with a Theorist’s Work: Sketching the Terrain

Nikolas Rose has an extensive body of work and has been instrumental in developing Foucault’s theories and concepts—on governmentality, on biopolitics, and on the rise of the ‘psy’ experts. Some of this work I had engaged with as I wrestled with Foucault during my doctoral research. I appreciated Rose’s ability to explain and apply Foucault’s at times obtuse writings with clarity. I was also somewhat in awe of someone who (along with his selected co-authors) had such a breadth of understanding of Foucault, as well as a strong grasp of the effects of disciplinary and geographical context on the reception, translation, and transformation of Foucault’s work.

During my doctoral studies I discovered Rose’s research project the ‘Brian, Self and Society in the 21st Century’, which in part involved bringing together researchers from across the neurosciences, social sciences, and humanities via a series of symposiums and networks. Rose, who trained as a biologist before moving to the discipline of sociology, seemed uniquely positioned to facilitate this type of dialogue, together with co-author Joelle Abi-Rached, who, with qualifications in biology, medicine, and public health, was employed as a research officer on the Brain, Self and Society project. Abi-Rached has since completed a PhD in the History of Science from Harvard University, where she is now a lecturer. Their monograph Neuro: The new brain sciences and the management of the mind (2013) is essentially an outcome of this research project.

Initially, an attraction of the project for me was the accessible way the research team made their work readily available via series of working papers often authored by Abi-Rached as the project’s Research Officer. This meant that I could access material much more quickly than via journal publications, which, given the required format and often very lengthy peer review process, can mean there is a considerable time lag before becoming publicly available. In time I was able to attend some presentations as well as a master class Nikolas Rose gave while visiting Australia. I found him a captivating and considerate speaker. For example, I was impressed with the ease with which he seemed to be able to communicate with both general and academic audiences. And while I am not sure how ‘legitimate’ a reason this might be for inclining towards someone’s work, I do think that this more personal encounter with Rose has been a factor in my continuing engagement and interest in it. If I am honest, my personal encounters with theorists do often play a role in how I engage with their work. Perhaps this is not so uncommon. For why would we travel (often great distances) to hear particular academics present their work ‘in person’ (as sponsored keynote speakers, for example)?

But I digress. Perhaps this is the point where I should be getting around to ‘fessing up’, as the saying goes, that Rose and Abi-Rached’s (2013) work did not really feature in my final PhD dissertation. One of the more profoundly disappointing aspects of my doctoral journey was that I was unable to do a lot of the theoretical work that I wanted to do, particularly in terms of theorising (thinking through) the uptake of the neuroscience of trauma in sexual assault worker practices. At the time I thought that it was because I had run out of time, that I had somehow not worked hard enough or fast enough to do this. I now understand that it was not a deficit on my part, but that there is only so much that one can do in a single research project, that a PhD dissertation is actually a starting point rather than an endpoint, and that research does not always confirm to a linear temporal quality—the discrete project may have a finish date, but the thinking and development of that work often continues, for some people over the lifetime of their academic careers. These are things about the academic life that I did not quite understand at the time. Perhaps if I had, I would not have felt quite so profoundly disappointed in myself. So, with this ‘strange’ temporality in mind, I am going to move on to the question that has been preoccupying me on and off for some time, which is how to engage with Rose and Abi-Rached’s work in a way that helps me to progress my own. And given that as Rose et al. (2009) have pointed out—again in relation to the reception of Foucault’s theories across disciplines, time, and geography—that ‘intellectual innovations do not fall out of a clear blue sky’ (p. 13), I begin by drawing attention to the trajectory of Nikolas Rose’s intellectual work.

Engaging with Rose and Abi-Rached: Or the Problem of Where to Focus One’s Attention

What, ask Rose and Abi-Rached (2013), has enabled the neurosciences to leave the enclosed space of the laboratory and gain traction on the outside world, and to what extent is neuroscience ‘configuring some of the ways in which individual and collective problems are made intelligible and amenable to intervention’ (p. 227)? This work can be understood as an extension of Rose’s work on the influence of the ‘psy’ disciplines (psychology, psychiatry, psychotherapy, and cognate disciplines) on social professional practices across the twentieth century. As Rose and Abi-Rached (2013) point out:

The various psychological conceptions of the human being in the 20th century had a major impact on many practises: on understanding and treatment of distress; on conceptions of normality and abnormality; on techniques of regulation, normalisation, reformation, and correction; on child rearing and education; an advertising, marketing, and consumption technologies; and on the management of human behaviour in practises from the factory to the military. (pp. 7–8)

Indeed, across the twentieth century psychological training and language became dominant in training and domains from child guidance to social work and human resources, effectively reshaping our understandings of ourselves including ideas of identity, autonomy, and self-fulfilment in psychological terms (Rose & Abi-Rached, 2013). Are the neurosciences, ask Rose and Abi-Rached (2013), assuming and perhaps overtaking the ‘psy’ disciplines in their social, political, and personal impact? For example, they point to the extent to which long-standing proponents of the importance of the early childhood years are increasingly reframing their arguments and attempting to influence social policy through recourse to the experiments and imaging techniques of the brain sciences. Indeed, they point to the extent to which the ‘neuro-’ prefix (e.g., neuro-psychiatry, neuro-economics, neuro-law) is coming to be used as an explanatory framework, in a manner similar to how in the first half of the twentieth century, the ‘psy-’ prefix became ‘attached to many fields of investigation of human behaviour, seeming to link expertise and authority to a body of objective knowledge about human beings’ (Rose & Abi-Rached, 2013, p. 6).

Neuro: The new brain sciences and the management of the mind (Rose & Abi-Rached, 2013) is something of a tour de force: a detailed, complex, and rigorous genealogical examination of the history and current influence of the brain sciences. The book is both conceptual and empirical. It draws on and closely examines the arguments made in scientific literature produced by neuroscientists and in policy literature referring to neurobiology. It details time spent with researchers in various laboratories, as well as informal dialogues enabled through interdisciplinary networks (e.g., conferences, workshops, symposiums) designed to bring together researchers, scientists, and scholars on the neurosciences.

Drawing on this ‘data’, they conduct a genealogical analysis of the emergence of the neurosciences as a distinct disciplinary formation, identifying the 1960s as the period when disciplines such as chemistry, neurology, and the behavioural sciences began to converge around the study of the brain. They describe and analyse a number of ‘key mutations—conceptual, technological, economic and biopolitical—that have enabled neurosciences to leave the enclosed space of the laboratory and gain such traction in the world’ (Rose & Abi-Rached, 2013, p. 225). For example, they point to the way in which the human brain has come to be understood in terms of ‘plasticity’; as both exquisitely vulnerable in the early years but as amenable to change (both structural and functional) across the life course (Rose & Abi-Rached, 2013). With the brain now understood as open to environmental change (rather than determined by genetics and set at birth), there has been an increasing focus on the brain in everything from parenting in early childhood, the treatment of mental illness and understandings of criminality, through to popular understandings of the self (the imperative to manage and improve the self via the brain). With these few examples, I have barely skimmed the surface of their work. It is, as I have said, a dense, complicated, and complex piece of work.

One of the major preoccupations for me has been in deciding how to engage with Rose and Abi-Rached’s work in a way that would be of most benefit to progressing my own. This may seem a rather obvious dilemma, but is probably worth exploring. How does someone with a perhaps more modest, and certainly more granular, research agenda take on board and use such broadly conceptual ideas? Eventually, after toing and froing, that circular process of reading and rereading, thinking and rethinking, I decided that what was most useful to my project was the spirit of ‘critical friendship’ with which they approach the neurosciences and which is evident throughout the book. While concerns about the potential medicalisation and individualisation of social issues are acknowledged, from the outset the authors explicitly remove themselves from the overgeneralised and perhaps simplistic critique of the neurosciences more typically found in the social sciences. This is difficult to pin down as it infuses their entire book and is evident in the careful way with which they develop their key arguments. However, I am reminded here of a paper tracing the reception of Foucault’s analytic of governmentality by Rose et al. (2009) where they dissuade the reader from slavishly trying to adhere to the theory or implement it in some sort of ‘step by step’ way. Rather:

What is worth retaining above all from this approach is its creativity. We should not seek to extract a method from the multiple studies of governing, but rather to identify a certain ethos of investigation, a way of asking questions, a focus not upon why certain things happened, but how they happened and the difference that that made in relation to what had gone before. Above all, the aim of such studies is critical, but not critique—to identify and describe differences and hence to help make criticism possible. (Rose et al. 2009, p. 26)

This injunction served me well during a quite intensive doctoral period of working with Foucauldian theory and methodology. So it is with this spirit of creativity, of retaining a certain way of approaching an issue or problem, that I decided also to engage with Rose and Abi-Rached’s theorisation of the rise of the neurosciences.

How Did This Theory/Theorist Affect the Way I Approach the Issue?

As discussed, the problem or issue I encountered in my research was wanting ‘make sense’ of how it is that a feminist field of practice (one which has typically been if anything hostile to medicine) has taken up ideas that come from science, psychiatry, and neuroscience. Moreover, I wanted to do this in a way that took as its starting point one of the key themes running through the practitioner interviews I conducted, which was that trauma was understood as not only compatible with, but also an integral part of feminist practice in sexual assault services.

Rose and Abi-Rached’s work has had three key effects on my research. First, it has helped to give me the confidence to engage with my own research findings in the manner that I wanted to: in a similar spirit of critical friendship, alert to the possibility of the medicalisation of sexual violence via the uptake of the neuroscience of trauma, while simultaneously open to the possibility that this does not have to be a forgone conclusion. Importantly, it has enabled me to engage respectfully with the knowledge, views, and experiences of feminists who are ‘at the coal face’, so to speak, and gave me space to ‘take on board’ what the data was telling me—that for these workers, trauma was neither oppositional to feminism nor evidence of a decline in feminist influence, but rather had become synonymous with feminist practice in the field of sexual assault service provision. Indeed, I think these practitioners demonstrate this ethos of ‘critical friendship’ on the ground, beyond the confines of the academy, and perhaps even in ways that could be instructive to the academy. Because what they demonstrated was a knowing rather than unknowing uptake of trauma discourse, mindful of the considerable harm medicine and psychiatry has caused to women, yet able to use its ideas on the neuroscience of trauma to enable them to work with survivors around with the embodied effects of sexual violence (e.g., hypervigilance, startle response, nightmares, recall of the abuse in images and sensations rather than verbal narrative).

Second, I have found Rose and Abi-Rached’s work useful in terms of being able to position my own emerging research and scholarship within a body of scholarly work. It has helped me to build the all-important narrative about my research and research trajectory. I have come to understand my research as part of an emerging body of work that is interested in the translational process, in exploring how the concepts, languages, and practices associated with neuroscience are deployed, appropriated, and otherwise put to work in local contexts and in the messy context of real-world practice (e.g., sexual assault services). Third and related to the above point, it has inspired and helped me to frame two further research projects. One that is currently underway maps the neuroscience of trauma and its influence on Australian policy formation and responses to sexual assault. In this study I am particularly interested in examining how the concept of ‘trauma informed practice’ has become almost ubiquitous as ‘best practice’ in so many fields, including sexual assault, domestic violence, mental health, and child protection. The second, still in the preparatory phase (which essentially means I am looking for funding), involves undertaking a genealogy of the neuroscience of trauma in the Australian field of sexual assault service provision. This latter project will focus on key institutional sites, such as the training organisations that typically provide work-based training to sexual assault practitioners, as well as particular sexual assault centres known to be influential in the uptake of trauma (e.g., so-called trauma specialist services and trauma counsellors).

Conclusion

So here we are, at the end of an unfinished story, one which like most will likely be subject to changes and ‘revisions’ over time. Will I recount this ‘exact’ same story of my encounter with Neuro (2013) once I have finished my next two projects? Maybe. Yet the narrative will change, and certainly it will expand and extend as I move along—and around and between—my own intellectual and research trajectory. Both Nikolas Rose and Joelle Abi-Rached have since moved along in their own separate ways through related fields of interest. Rose, for example, has for some time been exploring city living, the brain and mental health. This is interesting work, but perhaps not so directly useful to my own. Moreover, there is a burgeoning body of work in the now established field of critical neuroscience which provides multiple perspectives on possibilities for critical dialogue between the social sciences, humanities, and neuroscience (see, e.g., Choudhury & Slaby, 2016; Fitzgerald & Callard, 2015; Meloni et al., 2018; Slaby, 2015; Slaby & Choudhury, 2018; Tomasi, 2020). And feminist scholars are engaging with the neurosciences across some areas of feminist concern (see, e.g., Bentely, 2020; Duchesne & Kaiser Trujillo, 2021; Shattuck-Heidorn & Richardson, 2019; Roy, 2016; Walsh & Einstein, 2020).

In this chapter, I chose to focus on Rose and Abi-Rached’s work. It can be helpful I think to take singular focus for a bit, to engage with just one theorist, one book, one essay. It can help, or at least it has helped me, in gaining a sense of mastery, or more precisely a sense of containment—a space where I block out all the other ideas and theories that compete for my attention, if only for a moment. Yes, there is always a chorus of exciting, interesting, and very complex ideas out there. But as I have been writing on Rose and Abi-Rached’s Neuro (2013) for this chapter, considering the lessons it has taught me, they have been kept in the background. Now that I am finished here, they will have a critical friend’s attention again.