Original Article

Sex, cash and neuromodels of desire

Isabelle Dussauge
Centre for Gender Research, Engelska parken, Humanistiskt centrum, Thunbergsvägen 3G, Box 527,
751 20 Uppsala, Sweden.
E-mail: isabelle.dussauge@gender.uu.se

Abstract In the twenty-first century’s biological culture, pleasure and desire seem to be widely
reconceptualized as processes of the brain. The neurosciences of sex and money are two fields of
crucial interest in this cerebralization of desire. On the basis of a cross-reading of neuroimaging
studies of sexuality and of neuroeconomics, I analyze the specific notions of desire/pleasure at work
in the neuroimaging experiments. What is lost, and what is claimed to be found, in the neu-
rosciences of desire for sex and cash? With particular attention to notions of rewards, I argue that
transfers of metaphors from neuroeconomics naturalize economized notions of sexual desire.
Moreover, I argue that neuroeconomics and the neuroscience of sex essentialize desire as the drive
of our behavior, and that this, in turn, relates to the neurosciences’ re-invention of the social in the
terms of a late capitalist society.
BioSocieties advance online publication, 11 August 2014; doi:10.1057/biosoc.2014.23

Keywords: neuroimaging; sexuality; emotion; desire; commensuration; neuroeconomics

‘I feel like a pioneer at the edge of a giant forest’, [sexologist Meredith] Chivers said,
describing her ambition to understand the workings of women’s arousal and desire …
‘The great question that has never been answered and which I have not yet been able to
answer, despite my 30 years of research into the feminine soul, is, What does a woman
want?’
(Bergner, 2009)

[W]e can now answer the question ‘what do people want?’ [from a biological and
neuroscientific perspective] … [W]hat people want is to maximize the return on their
goal directed behaviours.
(McCabe, 2008, p. 356)

[W]e will call metaphor all those ideas, models, concepts, or theories that have been
transposed from their original discipline on to another, or from the science to non-
scientific subsystems or everyday discourses and vice versa.
(Maasen and Weingart, 2000, p. 20)

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Desire
What is desire?
A few years ago, neuroscientist Knutson launched the public lecture “Visualizing Desire” at
Stanford University with the question: “What is desire?” (Stanford University (Producer),
2009). Knutson’s talk dealt with neuroeconomics, the experimental science of mapping
the mechanisms of economic choices in the human brain. Along with brain imaging experi-
ments on monetary gains, “visualizing desire” featured experiments on rats and people with
schizophrenia. In the 1950s, two experimenters equipped rats with brain electrodes, which
they could – and did – trigger repeatedly, obviously unable to stop stimulating a newly dis-
covered neural center of pleasure. In another experiment in the 2000s, people with
schizophrenia participating in economic experiments did not feel the excitement of hoping
to gain US$10 in contrast to non-schizophrenics, neither did their brains, as neuroimaging
data showed. In Knutson’s talk, both experiments exemplified the promises offered by
neuroeconomics: to develop a better theory of human decision making.
In the twenty-first century’s biological culture, pleasure and desire seem to be widely
reconceptualized as processes crucially unfolding in the brain. Symptom of this cerebralization
(Vidal and Ortega, 2011): the widening scope of behavioral addictions by which not only the
overconsumption of alcohol and drugs, but also of gambling, food and sex, become described
as processes in which people are ‘hijacked’ by their brains (Schüll, 2006; Elam, 2010). Other
symptoms: the expanding quantity of neuroscientific investigations of consumers’ taste, of
people’s monetary risk-taking and gains, the growing body of neuroimaging experiments on
human sexuality. Symptomatic as well: the recent books and articles bringing together some of
these themes, like Kringelbach and Berridge’s (2010) Pleasures of the Brain, or experiments by
Knutson et al (2008) in which pornographic pictures shown to volunteers increase their
economic risk-taking – or should I say their brains’ risk-taking.
The contemporary cerebralization of desire (Vidal and Ortega, 2011) seems to ride on the
last two decades’ interest for emotions and the social in neurosciences, and on a behavioral
turn in other scientific fields such as genetics (for example, Holmberg, 2005) and economics
(Schüll and Zaloom, 2011).
Although it has not taken place because of neuroimaging technologies, the cerebralization of
emotions, like recent neurosciences, has been increasingly based on functional neuroimaging
methods, that is, tools that make it possible to investigate aspects of the workings of the living
brain through visualizations based on measurements of correlates of brain activity.1 These
methods of functional neuroimaging have been available to scientists since the 1960s/1970s
and more widely disseminated since the 1990s. They have been used for neuroscientific
research about cognition, but also emotions, behavior and more recently ‘social neuroscience’.
With functional neuroimaging methods (in the present study, PET, fMRI and SPECT),
neuroscientists produce maps of activation patterns in the brain, which relate to a given task

1 Brain activity is not measured with such functional neuroimaging methods. Rather, these methods track
changes in the magnetic properties of the blood (in fMRI) or the site of cellular consumption of radioactively
marked metabolites (in PET) and assume that these changes are related to changes in brain activity.
Historically and in terms of experimental psychology, such methods for functional neuroimaging also owe
to the use of electroencephalography earlier in the twentieth century. For the sake of textual smoothness,
I sometimes use phrasings such as “brain activity” or “brain activation data” as shortcuts, with the
expectation that readers keep in mind their literal inexactitude.

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 Sex, cash and neuromodels of desire

or behavior. For this, experiments need to be designed in which participants lie in a scanner,
their head fixed, while doing specific tasks such as watching images on a screen. In much
neuroimaging-based research on sexuality, correlates of the brain activity of the research
subjects are measured while they are experiencing sexual arousal or pleasure in the controlled
environment of the brain scanner. In neuroeconomics research, the correlates of brain activity
of the research participants are studied while they are presented with different kinds of money-
related situations, such as the perspective of losing or winning money, or situations where they
have to make cash-related decisions, such as trust games where people are asked to engage in
risky but potentially profitable lending of money.
In this article, I turn to how economic metaphors come to describe sex in neuroscience and
I begin to answer the following question: what does the cerebralization of desire entail – in the
neurosciences of sex and cash? I argue that they share conceptions of desire, and that this, in
turn, relates to the neurosciences’ re-invention of the social in the terms of a late capitalist
society.

The lost and found social of neuroscience

Interestingly, much of recent neuroscience embrace the social rather than overtly positioning
the biological against it, as witnessed by the recent burgeoning of new neuro-disciplines of the
social, such as neurodidactics, neurolaw, neurotheology, neuroeconomics or social neuro-
science (Ortega and Vidal, 2007).
However, this ‘social’ found in neuroscience seems to bear only little relation to social/
cultural sciences’ notions of the social. Cultural historian Vidal (2009) has argued that the
“cerebral subject”, the cultural figure of the human, which equates the individual with the
brain, is a historically modern subject. The brain is necessarily the location of the modern self,
Vidal argues, “insofar as modernity gives supreme value to the individual as autonomous
agent of choice and initiative”, with a “corresponding emphasis on interiority at the expense
of social bonds and contexts” (Vidal, 2009, pp. 5, 7; with reference to Ehrenberg, 2008). The
cultural construct of the brain thus implies a specific framing of the human as an individual
subject detached from the world it lives in.
Summarizing academic (cultural) critique of social neuroscience, anthropologist Martin
(2010) writes:

The reduction in social neuroscience claims to explain phenomena on one scale (those
embodied for example in social relationships, places, practices and institutions that
have a material existence outside the brain) by means of phenomena on another
scale (those embodied in the brain). Social practices involved in gift giving, child
raising, courting, working, cohabiting, co-organizing and a myriad others – all
situated in particular contexts, times and places – fall out of the picture and do not
return … On this and allied views, the neuronal doctrine should be subjected to vigorous
critique.
(p. 369)

In other words, from the perspective of social and cultural sciences, something beyond the
level of the individual – which we usually call, for instance, ‘the social’ or ‘culture’ – is lost in
neuroscience’s reduction of the human. At the same time, Martin also justly points out that
reductionist accounts of the brain are no less generative of social relations, meanings and

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identity work, and we therefore need to devote our critical attention to them. Moreover,
neurosciences also claim to give their own account of the social/cultural human – this is what I
will refer to as found, as in the ‘lost and found’ social of neuroscience.
Investigating the lost and founds of neuroscience, I argue, goes beyond criticizing
neuroscientific representations of the social for being reductionist – we already know they
are (among the broad range of critical literature, see, for example, Bleier, 1984; Martin, 2000;
Lancaster, 2003; Ortega and Vidal, 2007). Rather, investigating the lost and founds implies
asking what world neuroscientific metaphors are productive of. I engage with neuro-
reductions, in the form of models and theories, as metaphors for what they describe: here,
desire. In the following, I study the transfers of meaning performed through these metaphors
between the neurosciences of sexuality and economics.
This endeavor therefore begins with the insight that metaphors shape scientific fields and
are a crucial part of the dynamics of knowledge production.2 More precisely, following
sociologists Maasen and Weingart (2000), metaphors function as both reinforcers and
“outstanding movers” of scientific and non-scientific discourses (p. 21).
In “Post-Genomic Futures”, sociologist Fujimura (2005) emphasizes what is “lost in
translation”, when metaphors circulate from one scientific field to another. Fujimura (2005)
writes: “By ‘lost’, I mean more than ‘loss’. Translations can distort, transform, delete, and
add” (p. 220). Further, she explains that although scientists (and in her case, engineers) know
that the technological metaphors they use to model biological systems are far too simple,
“their models still may excise whatever cannot be translated into the instrumental and
technical terms” of the theoretical field the metaphors come from (Fujimura, 2005, p. 220).
In other words, in scientific practice, models and metaphors affect the production of
meaning about the world they are used to describe: by translation implying productive
selections and excisions. Fujimura’s focus on the lost, the excised, the distorted, provides
a nice contrast to a common emphasis on the found, the positive transfer of meaning from one
world to another, effected by metaphors.
These lost and founds offer an analytical approach to the world produced by metaphors,
as lost and founds are both constitutive of translation work. Metaphors foreground aspects
(found) and background or excise others (lost), respectively. The reductions operated with
metaphors both invisibilize and generate worlds. The dynamics of what is invisibilized or
generated, backgrounded or foregrounded, lost or found, are the result of sociocultural work,
for instance, of scientists’ framing of problems to investigate, and a hierarchization of what
they deem worthy of scientific inquiry (on the topic of neuromarketing, see Schneider and
Woolgar, 2012).
In the present article, I make use of Fujimura’s account and I follow the work accomplished
by metaphors in the making of neuroscientific accounts of the human in scientific publica-
tions. I will argue that metaphors mediate the lost and founds in exchanges of meaning
between the different scientific fields that study sexuality, economic behavior and more.
To begin with, I explore below the accounts of desire, which neuroscientific reductions of
sexuality are productive of.

2 This point has been made, among others, and in more specific terms, by historians of biology and feminist
science scholars, for instance Fox Keller (1995, 2000, 2002) and Haraway (1989) (cf. also Fujimura, 2005,
p. 208).

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Sex
Caught: Capturing sexual arousal with neuroimaging
Functional neuroimaging studies of human sexuality cover about 60 experimentally based
articles published mainly in the 2000s. The main theme of these studies is sexual arousal
(sexual function), which about half of them deal with, most of them in men. Other themes are
orgasm, love, sexual orientation and attraction.
Many of the experiments sexually arouse participants while they are in the scanner. This is
often done by showing them films or pictures with erotic content, but also, sometimes, by
direct sexual stimulation by a partner or a sexual device (for an overview, see Dussauge,
2013).
The publications often attempt to identify a ‘neural network’ of sexual arousal or of orgasm.
Neural networks are the slippery “working object” (Daston and Galison, 1992) of recent
neuroscience. Neural networks are maps of ‘statistically significant’ patterns of correlates of
brain activity related to a given psychological state, such as sexual arousal. Further, the neural
networks function as hypothetical models of sexual arousal: distinct psychological functions
are attributed to the different brain areas involved. For instance, based on patterns of brain
activation, the authors of a well-cited study “propose a model of the brain processes mediating
the cognitive, emotional, motivational, and autonomic components of human male sexual
arousal” (Redouté et al, 2000, p. 162). Thus neural networks work as a brain geography of
desire, which defines both relevant brain areas and relevant psychological functions for sexual
arousal.
Sexual arousal is produced experimentally for short durations of a few minutes at the most.
However, it is also interpreted and modeled in a more essentializing manner as a phenomenon
whose ‘neural substrate’ precedes and outlives the experiment. Terms such as sexual arousal
or desire have hazy contours in the medical publications. Sexual arousal is usually not defined,
but functions as people’s response to sexually exciting situations in the experiment.
In many neuroscientific studies of sexuality, ‘arousal’ also refers to a psychological response
and a general brain response that happens, for example, in joy, excitement and so on. For the
neuroscientists, an epistemological problem is therefore to isolate the specifically sexual
response from the more ‘general arousal level’ in the brain. In order to separate the sexual
from the non-sexual in the brain response to sexually arousing situations, neuroscientists often
use control situations meant to induce a general positive but non-sexual arousal, while data
about correlates of brain activity is generated. For instance, research participants may be
shown humor videos (Stoléru et al, 1999; Redouté et al, 2000) or pictures of sports (Arnow
et al, 2002). The specifically sexual in sexual arousal is then produced by subtraction, that is,
the statistical removal of control data from the brain activation data produced upon the
viewing of sexual stimuli (cf. also Cohn, 2011).
Thereby, the neural networks of sexual arousal encompass only what neuroscientists define
as the specifically sexual character of the brain response. This has bearing on what counts as
sexuality.

Lost: The social and the towardness of sexual desires

In the neuroimaging studies of sexuality, subtraction is often used to remove unwanted
social components in the brain response to sexual situations. The working object of the

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neuroimaging experiments on sex, desire/pleasure, is constructed as unmarked by social

interactions, and it is experimentally freed from them (Dussauge, 2013).
The emotional situations that count as sexual arousal in the neuroscientific experiments are
diverse: what people feel when watching specific kinds of erotica, receiving manual sex, being
stimulated with a vibrator, listening to stories retelling erotic episodes of one’s life … There is
nothing strange about interpreting all these events as sexual – indeed, they are designed so (for
instance, pictures and videos are tested and graded before the experiment so that only
materials that provoke a given intensity of desire in a test group are used in the experiment).
But are these situations not sexual in different ways?
What is lost through sexual arousal is, first, the specificity of our relations to the objects of
sexual desires. In the neural model, these simply function as anonymous triggers of desire –
a desire that does not bear any qualitative relation to its object.
What is also lost through sexual arousal is the towardness of sexual emotions and desires,
as well as the specific subject positions we occupy, and get moved from, in desire for an other/
ness outside ourselves (cf. Ahmed, 2004). I argue more thoroughly elsewhere that not only the
social contexts but also the objects of desire are irrelevant to the neural models of sexual desire
as the social/cultural falls out of desire (Dussauge, 2013).

Stuck: Social categories of desire

While crucial dimensions of the social are lost, others get reproduced. The explicit logic of
neuroimaging experiments is to uncover unknown truths of human sexuality, but in many
ways the production of neuroscientific facts simply proposes new descriptions of taken-for-
granted assumptions about difference.
Concretely, this reproduction of social categories takes place on at least two levels. First,
social categories of sexual desire are reproduced in the explicit definition, characterization
and selection of research participants: men and women (for example, Karama et al, 2002);
hetero- and homosexual (for example, Savic et al, 2005; Safron et al, 2007); young, healthy
and very sexual heterosexual men (Stoléru et al, 1999); more ‘representative’ normal hetero-
sexual men (for example, Redouté et al, 2000); men or women with or without sexual
dysfunction (for example, Stoléru et al, 1999; Montorsi et al, 2003; Yang et al, 2008). In this
definition/selection of participants, categories of desire are collapsed with social categories of
the person. For instance, the selected participants are made representative of homosexuality
and heterosexuality (see also Jordan-Young, 2010; Dussauge, 2013).
Second, the choice of stimuli in experiment design obviously builds upon and reproduces
sociocultural categories of desire. Here, it is the sociocultural categorizations of what falls
within the realm of the sexual or not, as well as which sex counts as sex, which are reproduced
in the experiments. For instance, pictures of attractive women in erotic poses count as sexual
stimuli. Diverse non-BDSM sexual practices from mainstream pornography are used as visual
stimuli and stand for sex: penetrative and oral sex, most often between a woman and a man
but sometimes in other constellations. Social interactions and, more generally, most non-
genital human practices (including ‘courtship’, that is, romantic love, see Fisher et al, 2005)
are not treated as sexual. The dominant linear account in sex research, the human sexual
response cycle, is also reproduced (cf. Dussauge, 2013).
Neither challenged nor explained, sociocultural categories of desire seem to just get stuck
and reinforced through the process of knowledge production.

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 Sex, cash and neuromodels of desire

Translations
However, this neural framing of desire does not simply conserve the notions it builds on. In
particular, what sexual arousal means to neuroscience depends on how the neural world of
sexuality comes to be described in terms other than sex, through translations of metaphors
from other disciplines.

Food, sex, cash and everything we need

One central way through which experimental neural networks are established in the scientific
publications is through reference to the neuroscientific facts established in earlier publications.
In particular, the respective functions of the selected brain areas in the neural network are
usually identified by comparison to available neuroscientific literature.3
Let us consider an example. With a special interest in brain areas of the “premotor ventral
cortex” (PMv), Ponseti et al (2006) investigated the sexual response of participants viewing
pictures of genitalia. On the basis of previous literature in monkeys and humans, the authors
considered that the PMv was involved “in the observation and imitation of other’s actions …
or action-related objects” (p. 825). They write: “The PMv is also activated when action-
related objects (i.e., tools) are observed … Both mirror neurons and canonical neurons [in the
PMv] compute visuo-motor transformations in order to guide potential actions” (p. 831). The
previous theories of the PMv endow it with the capacity to anticipate action and “guide
potential actions”, especially when the subject sees tools and anticipates their use.
The authors continue: “Sexually aroused genitals of the preferred sex are targets of mani-
pulative actions during mating. Thus, in analogy to tools, these stimuli can be conceptualized
as action-related objects which may activate canonical neurons in the PMv” (p. 831). The
authors’ import of these theories of the PMv creates an explicit “analogy to tools”: the genitals
showed to the participants of the experiment become tools for anticipated action – an
anticipated sexual act. In the reduction deployed in that publication, the world of the PMv is
one of action-related objects and tools, and when translated into that world, sexual desire
becomes an anticipation of the use of sexual tools.
This illustrates the more general point that the attribution of function to brain areas by
reference to other studies is a process of translation (Fujimura, 2005) of knowledge metaphors
(theories, models) from one scientific field to another.

Rewards
When defining and interpreting neural networks of sexuality, the authors of the publications
refer largely to neuroscientific studies of aspects of human life other than sex. For instance, in
their study of male sexual arousal, Safron et al (2007) based their selection of areas of the
brain for investigation on a series of previous neuroscientific results on the expectation of
monetary gains, the craving of drugs and the neural pleasures of eating chocolate.
Similarly, the neurobiology of addiction, evolutionary psychology and neuroeconomics
are disciplines recurrently referred to in the neuroscience of sexuality. They all deploy a
vocabulary of rewards that effect, I argue, an economization of sexuality and more generally,

3 The caveat is that most brain regions are involved in many different kinds of reactions and behaviors, and
therefore they cannot be attributed with an unambiguously defined function. Psychologist Fine (2010)
explains that the practice of “reverse inference”, that is, making claims about pscyhological processes on the
basis of attributing functions to brain areas is a no-no of neuroscience (pp. 151–153).

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a ‘rewardization’ of desire. Moreover, these notions of rewards constitute not only a

vocabulary but also a ‘grammar of pleasure’: they define the possible directions of desire.
In sex neuro-research, the neurobiology of addiction is invoked either to identify brain areas of
interest for pleasure and desire (for example, Holstege et al, 2003; Safron et al, 2007), or to make
the point that sexual feelings and love share neural networks with drugs and are therefore
a “euphoric state” (Bartels and Zeki, 2000) or an addictive “rush” (Holstege et al, 2003). The
vocabulary of reward is central to the huge and expanding neuroscience of behavioral addictions
(Elam, 2010; Vrecko, 2010). There the ‘grammar of reward’ focuses on the distinction of liking
from wanting, and on processes of learning from experience (Berridge and Kringelbach, 2008;
Elam, 2010). This grammar of reward also works on the premise that these emotional systems are
inherently good unless they become ‘hijacked’ by addictive behaviors (Elam, 2010; Vrecko, 2010).
A second frame of reference in which the vocabulary of reward is most present is
sociobiology and its successor, evolutionary psychology. Such references are not used to
identify brain functions as sociobiology and evolutionary psychology are, to a high extent,
non-empirical speculative sciences (cf. Rose and Rose, 2000). Instead, in the neuroscience of
sex, evolutionary psychology is used to group and hierarchize desires in categories of behavior
and in areas of the brain. For instance (for example, in Sescousse et al, 2010), sex and food are
characterized as evolutionarily older and more fundamental needs than money, drugs and
‘social rewards’ such as status, in turn labeled as more recent and secondary to survival.
Evolutionary interpretations are also brought in to justify the existence of sexual desire (for
example, Redouté et al, 2000) or pleasure at all (for example, Georgiadis et al, 2006).
In that framework, brain structures and behavioral functions are the result of evolutionary
processes (see Martin, 2000). A central trope in evolutionary-inspired neuropsychology is that
evolution has selected brain systems of reward and punishment when those have been
contributing to increase individuals’ ‘fitness’. Here is an example of a reference to such
theories in a neuroscientific study of sexuality: “Evolutionary pressure has … selected the
neurophysiological implementation of brain reward systems associated … with SA [sexual
arousal] and with sexual attraction to characteristics indicating a potential partner’s fitness”
(Redouté et al, 2000, p. 162). In general, the evolutionarily inflected neuropsychology of
emotions (for example, Rolls, 1999) proposes that human beings function on the basis of
evolutionarily selected emotional systems of reward and punishment. Life, and more
specifically emotional life, is then described as a long series of situations demanding a
weighing of alternatives, decisions and actions. As a result of the evolutionary pressure, when
confronted with a situation of choice, brains compute a “cost-benefit analysis” of the values
and costs of different potential rewards (Rolls, 1999, pp. 266–287).
Third, the vocabulary of rewards permeates neuroeconomic research, a growing field,
described as a “marriage of giants” (Maasen, 2010) between economics and the neurosciences.
In the following, I address the place of neuroeconomics in the rewardization of sex.

Cash
According to an important figure in the field, Paul Glimcher (2008), neuroeconomics is a
research program with the ambition to experimentally and theoretically integrate the three
different explanatory/modeling levels of economics, psychology and neurobiology.

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Neuroeconomics emerged from behavioral economics in the 1990s before it got widely
institutionalized in the 2000s. According to sociologists Schüll and Zaloom (2011), beha-
vioral economics and neuroeconomics have aimed to address, experimentally, the paradoxes
that cannot be accounted for through the figure of the rational ‘homo economicus’. Instead of
the rational and egoistic ‘homo economicus’, who is aware of what is good for them and
maximizes his/her self-interest, behavioral economics works with a figure of the human as
rational and emotional, capable of empathy and not always aware of their own best.
Another central neuroeconomist, Kevin McCabe (2008) writes: “Neuroeconomics experi-
ments use a combination of brain imaging/stimulation experiments developed in the cognitive
neurosciences and microeconomic systems/game theory experiments developed in the eco-
nomic sciences” (p. 349). Three broad orientations in neuroeconomics have been mainly
studies of “wants and economic choices”, and of social relations and social norms (strategic
interactions and personal exchange), whereas very little research has been devoted to markets
(McCabe, 2008, p. 365).
Neuroeconomists such as Camerer et al (2005) have made strong claims that insights from
neuroscientific research would “revolutionize” economics, its theories and assumptions. Such
views have, in turn, been criticized within the field, for instance by Harrison (2008) for being
inflated promissory rhetorics, and by Gul and Pesendorfer (2008)who argued that neuro-
scientific information cannot contribute at all to economic theory (cf. Vromen, 2012).
The vocabulary of rewards, and of human dynamics in relation to those, permeates
neuroeconomics. Recurrent figures are: the identification, appraisal (valuation), weighing of
rewards; risk and decision making in relation to those. Schüll and Zaloom (2011) write:

Like economists, neuroeconomists characterize decision making as a process in which

“a system must assign value to each of its available choices” (Montague et al, 2006,
p. 417). Instead of an abstract calculation, however, value assignment is understood to
unfold along the neural circuitry of the brain … After the neural system has computed
the difference between the expected and actual value of a particular reward, this value
gets registered in the orbitofrontal/striatal system (OFS) … For living creatures, the first
step in any decision … is to query the OFS’s database … and formulate a representation
of likely reward associated with that decision. Choice making thus proceeds “through
a probabilistic policy”.
(p. 520)

What counts as a reward, however, varies drastically from one experiment to another.
Reward is a generic term, which, in neuroeconomics, can refer to money (in turn metaphori-
cally used as stand-in for any kind of gratification) or to satisfactions of a rather interactional
or emotional order.
Examples of the former are studies of the anticipation of monetary gains and studies of
‘intertemporal choice’.
The anticipation of monetary gains is an early recurrent theme in neuroeconomics, with
experimental designs, which explore the difference, in neural terms, between pleasure and the
anticipation of pleasure (for example, Knutson et al, 2000; Breiter et al, 2001). For instance,
one of the early seminal articles in neuroeconomics (Breiter et al, 2001) was based
on an experiment in which correlates of brain activation were measured while the participants
expected bigger and smaller gains and losses depending on a seemingly random outcome

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on a spinning wheel. The model produced in this experiment proposed that two distinct
processes were taking place, although in two overlapping brain networks: first, the
anticipation of a reward, for example monetary gains; second, the consumption of that
reward. Just like in the neuroscience of sex, the anticipation and consumption of reward are
both modeled here as brain networks involved in other pleasurable experiences:

[A]n incentive unique to humans, money, produced hemodynamic activations over-

lapping those seen previously in response to tactile stimuli, gustatory stimuli, and
euphoria-inducing drugs. This overlap is consistent with the involvement of common,
generalized circuitry in the processing of different categories of rewards.
(Breiter et al, 2001, p. 627)

Studies of intertemporal choice such as by McClure et al (2004) or Kable and Glimcher

(2007) explore the paradox of “ ‘future discounting’, or the tendency to forego future well-
being for immediate gratification. This particular puzzle, a longstanding concern of liberal
governance, has become a flash point for the young field [of neuroeconomics]” (Schüll and
Zaloom, 2011, p. 2). Such experiments set up situations in which participants have to choose
between a smaller amount of money sooner or a higher amount of money later, and
neuroeconomists attempt to identify the neural systems underlying these choices. Schüll and
Zaloom explain that the controversy in neuroeconomics stands between the neuroscientists’
notion of a contradictory but unified brain and economists’ model of two competing brain
systems of satisfaction: one for short-term ‘passions’ versus one for long-term reason
(McClure et al, 2004). An illustration of the latter is how McCabe (2008) writes that “the
Preuschoff et al and Kable and Glimcher studies provide some evidence that subjective
decision variables found in standard economic models … are encoded in the goal-formulation
and goal-directed regions of the brain” (p. 359).
These examples of neuroeconomic research about the anticipation/consumption of
rewards and intertemporal choice are particularly interesting because they rehash familiar
ethical notions of pleasure and desire (passion versus reason and so on), and because they
often insist that different areas of the brain may affect the emotional evaluation, expectation
and consumption of rewards.4
In turn, neuroeconomic studies of interactional, social or emotional phenomena address
another broad range of situations. Studies of risk-taking in decision making are common (cf.
Camerer et al, 2005), and they usually have participants take economic risks under varied
conditions. For instance Knutson et al (2008) conducted experiments in which men were
proved to make risky financial decisions after having been shown pornographic pictures.
The model at work in that experiment is that erotic and financial ‘reward cues’ are processed
by the same brain area, which explains that erotic pictures interfere with financial decision
making.
Another wide range of neuroeconomics study ‘strategic social interactions’ and game
theory, through ultimatum bargaining games, dictator games and so on (for an early over-
view, see Camerer et al, 2005). Such games usually attempt to find out how people behave
in interactions with other persons when involving the possibility to earn or lose money.

4 This latter view has also been subjected to critique within neuroeconomics (see, for example, Ainslie and
Monterosso, 2004; Schüll and Zaloom, 2011).

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The participants are therefore placed in social situations defined as needing strategic decisions
involving potential monetary rewards and costs.
Yet another kind of neuroeconomics studies social norms, social preferences and social
behavior such as trust. In this type of experiments, money is often engaged as a measure of
trust, fairness or altruism by sharing the money, which is in the possession of the participant.
In more intricate designs, however, money functions as a way to reward or punish another
participant, or as a measure of how much participants value the outcome of the experimental
situations. For instance, de Quervain et al (2004) set up a complex experiment to demonstrate
the existence of a neural basis for people’s taste for the enforcement of social norms. There the
participants were placed in situations where another person broke a social agreement of trust
(in an economic exchange). Many participants seized the possibility to ‘punish’ that person by
making them lose money, even when they had to pay for the punishment themselves. de
Quervain thus studied a “taste for punishment of unfair behavior” and neurally modeled the
satisfaction of enforcing a social norm as an expected reward.
This quick overview suggests that neuroeconomics’ grammar of rewards is diverse, just as it
is in economics. Rewards come to signify, quite directly, the expected subjective value (utility)
of a consumption choice. But rewards may also signify, more abstractly, the satisfaction of
enforcing social norms. These uses of rewards have three aspects in common:
First, the notion of reward is a floating placeholder: it can be filled with virtually any
content and therefore it is used to relate different scenarios, needs or things to each
other, which otherwise do not have a straightforward relation (see critical overview by
Harrison, 2008). Neuroeconomics taps into – and feed backs to – such general notions of
rewards, which talk both to a tradition in economics to use money as a quantifier for how
much people value an outcome, and to the vein in neuropsychology concerned with a generic
brain center of pleasure. Medical anthropologist Cohn (2008) makes a similar observation
and writes:

… an abstract systems model, which preceded imaging technology, now provides the
framework for contemporary neuroscience to populate through the identification of
tangible regions of the brain … The beginnings of this biological-psychological model of
pleasure-as-reward began in the 1950s (Olds and Milner, 1954) … Together, these
understandings conceive of pleasure as an internal process, a means of self-congratula-
tion if you will, ensuring that functional behaviour is repeated, just as pain ensures that
harmful behaviour is avoided.
(p. 158)
Second, the consumption of rewards is universalized as the general figure of pleasure, and
decision is made the general figure for action. To neuroeconomics, human behavior in the
world consists of a cognitive identification of alternatives and valuation of what they are
worth, a weighing of those against each other, and a choice of one alternative – a course of
action. In other words, neuroeconomics models the world as made of rewards and life as a
series of consumption choices. This economization of behavior is possible as the neuroeco-
nomic description of the human is stripped of the plethora of economic-psychological theories
that underpin these models.
Third, desire, which is never defined, becomes a self-evident construct. Desire operates
as that which drives us toward these rewards and is part of our choices among them.

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 Dussauge

So desire is itself economized in a general life landscape of choices, rewards and costs. The
incentive value of potential rewards is the salient currency in the subjective hierarchy of this
landscape.
As a whole, this neuroeconomic view entails not only a description of how people make
decisions; it provides a description of the world as made up of such decisions. It also assumes
a direction for our actions, and instrumentalizes our relation to the things now called rewards:
what we want from rewards is to consume them. In other words, the reward-centered
descriptions of behavior all produce a figure of the human as a reward hunter and cost/
punishment avoider. And it privileges goal-directedness over open-endedness.
To parallel our observations about the neuroscience of sex: stuck are the economic and
psychological assumptions about human behavior, and lost are the origins of these models
and economization of behavior, as well as the objects, social practices and contexts of desire.
Found, in turn, are the ‘rewards’ and their associated dynamics.

Found
Let us go back to sex. Sex and cash meet in the neuroscientific literature on sexuality when
neuroeconomic results are used to make sense of the brain structures involved in their own
results (that is, in order to link brain structure to function). This, in turn, shapes the modeling
of sexuality.

Rewards and incentives

References to the notion of rewards are recurrent in the neuroscience of sex (more specifically,
“rewards” appears in about 40 per cent of these publications until 2008). In their study
of orgasm, Komisaruk et al (2004) refer to results on the activation of the amygdala in
“reward expectation” in rats. In their study of romantic love, Fisher et al (2005) relate their
results to literature on the expectation of monetary gains to confirm their hypothesis that
“romantic love is primarily a motivation system, which leads to various emotions, rather than
a specific emotion”. The reward system here stands for the anticipation and processing of
emotions.
From previous neuroscientific work about pleasant taste and touch, which identified that
the right orbitofrontal cortex is involved in “the representation of rewards”, Redouté et al
(2000) interpret its role in sexual arousal as representing the “pleasant bodily sensations
induced by penile tumescence” (p. 172). Through reference to a study of hunger in monkeys,
they further interpret the role of the same brain area as to “reflect the incentive value” (p. 172)
of the depictions of objects of desire – for instance, an attractive body. ‘Incentive value’ is
a salient term in the neuroimaging studies of sex. It is generic, and it is used to differentiate
between several things people want without needing to acknowledge our specific
qualitative relations to specific objects of desire. Incentive value relates to how much we want
something – not what that something does with us.
For instance, Hamann et al (2004) write about the “appetitive incentive value of visual
sexual stimuli”, and Walter et al (2008) write:

Considering the rewarding nature of sexual incentives, our findings, especially in the
ventral parts of striatum, may be interpreted as mirroring implicit reward processing.

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 Sex, cash and neuromodels of desire

The nucleus accumbens has been found to be essential during reward processing
(Knutson and Wimmer, 2007; Wrase et al, 2007; Yacubian et al, 2007). Erotic stimuli
could therefore present a highly salient incentive in their own right.
(p. 1490)

By reference to neuroeconomic literature, the attractiveness of pornographic imagery or

sexual stimulation is translated as to “present a highly salient incentive”, the pleasure of sex as
the “rewarding nature of sexual incentives” and the consumption and expectation of that
pleasure as “reward processing”.
In turn such descriptions of what sex is worth come to shape the very definition of sexual
arousal. They also define the gesture, or dynamics, of sexual arousal, as we shall now see.

Goal-directed scripts
As dealt with in the previous section, neuroeconomic theories model the processing of rewards
by means of a given script: appraisal–anticipation–consumption of rewards. Consequently,
not only does sex become a reward, but sexual arousal also becomes described through this
chain of events stretched toward the consumption of sexual pleasure and orgasm (which fits
nicely with the implicit yet dominant model of sexual arousal deployed in the experiments, the
human sexual response cycle).
For instance, Ponseti et al (2006) describe how the rewards circuits of the brain
“automatically process” the potential value (incentive aspects) of the visual sexual cues
offered to the subject:

Recent neuroimaging studies have implicated the ventral striatum in modality-indepen-

dent representation of predicted reward (for review see Knutson and Cooper, 2005).
Since our participants only shortly viewed the sex stimuli but this was not followed by
an outcome (e.g., mating), we propose that the preference-specific activation of the
ventral striatum and the centromedian thalamus reflect neuronal activity that subserves
the prediction of the potential reward associated with sexual core stimuli. Preferred sex
stimuli are always more arousing and have a higher incentive value than non-preferred
sex stimuli.
(p. 830, emphasis added)

Here, explicitly economic models of behavior come into the description of sexuality.
Through reference to a neuroeconomics paper by Knutson and Cooper (2005) about the
anticipation and consumption of rewards, Ponseti et al bring in general neuroscientific
literature about “predicted reward”. Subsequently, in their model, the brain area under
interpretation (the ventral striatum) comes to effect “the prediction of the potential reward”
announced by the presented genitalia. Sexual desire becomes the brain’s anticipation of an
upcoming pleasurable outcome and this process is not specific to sexuality but rather one
instance of a more general system of reward.
This illustrates that through the mobilization of a more general theory from neuroeco-
nomics, sexual arousal becomes characterized by the “incentive value” of its triggers,
processed by the brain reward system, through a chain of appraisal, anticipation and
consumption of pleasure.

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In the description of sexuality as a scripted chain of economic events, arousal is not an open-
ended relation to an object. The script implies that desire is the seeking of rewards.
For instance:

[The ventral putamen] was found to respond more to actions with reward expectations
… Thus, the ventral putamen may govern sexual arousal with penile erection in the
seeking of hedonic rewards such as ejaculation and orgasmic sensation.
(Miyagawa et al, 2007, p. 837, emphasis added)

This chain of description of desire imprints a direction to sexual desire: it makes desire a
gesture toward a goal.
In psychological terms, this is what is referred to as the ‘motivational’ component of desire.
For instance, Stoléru et al (2003) write: “In our model of SA [sexual arousal], the motivational
component comprises the processes that direct behavior to a sexual goal” (p. 81). Then by
means of reference to literature about the involvement of the brain region ACG in “goal-
directed behaviors”, “reward-based decision-making” and “reward expectancy”, they
conclude that the “activation of the ACG” may reflect the “conflict” between “sexual urges”
and refraining from seeking these goals (Stoléru et al, 2003, p. 81).
This goal-directedness also comprises a notion of what we want from the things we desire:
we want to consume them.
What the above illustrates is that theories of a general brain system of reward are used to
conceptualize the sexual response as well. In particular, through references to neuroeconomic
literature, sexual desire becomes literally instrumentalized as the pursuit of rewards, directing
sexual emotions toward a partly non-sexual goal: brain satisfaction.

Willing brains
This section aimed to expose the translational logic at work in the floating use of reward
metaphors from neuroeconomics in sexuality studies. A specific definition of economic
behavior, reified in neuroeconomics as a universal model of behavior, yields dynamics of life
in terms of rewards and incentives, which are used in the neuroscience of sex and love. In these
publications, sex and cash appear to be processed in part by the same brain areas, that is, by
the same psychological functions. There is circularity to that logic: models in neuroeconomics
and animal studies of food are translated to studies of sex. Therefore, sex is described in terms
of goal-directed dynamics of rewards. Experiments are set up, and their results interpreted, in
these terms. Hence, as everything important seems to function in a dynamics of rewards, we
must be reward machines. (And as this mechanism is so general and adaptive in these diverse
economies of consumption, risk-taking, social norms and reproduction, this reward machin-
ery must be the fruit of evolution.)
I thus argue that the reference to neuroeconomics, through the notion of reward and a
general center of pleasure, leads to the description of desire in specific economic, consump-
tion-centered terms.5 However, we should not misread neuroeconomics as the origin of the
notion of reward, even less as the historical source of economic metaphors in the

5 This consumption-centered description of human behavior is, of course, only one specific economic account
of human life. There are many alternative – and consumption-critical – definitions and descriptions of what
economic behaviors consist of, for instance emphasizing instead production and exchange. Thanks to
Alexandra Waluszewski for pointing this out.

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 Sex, cash and neuromodels of desire

psychobiology of emotions. The notion of ‘rewards’ precedes neuroeconomics and it also

belongs to other scientific fields mentioned above, sociobiology/evolutionary psychology
(especially in some neuropsychology of emotions) and the neurobiology of addiction. It also
has a conceptual history in behaviorism, and in non-scientific contexts.6
Rather, what the present case illustrates is that the neuroeconomic notions of reward and
behavior become instrumentalized when being used in other neuroscientific publications, and
that this instrumentalization has important consequences.
I hope to have shown in my textual analysis how the making of neuroscientific knowledge
about sexuality naturalizes consumption as the core feature of pleasure, as the natural drive
for our behavior. What this analysis also suggests, is that the larger and more established
fields, such as neuroeconomics and the neurobiology of addiction, provide frames of inter-
pretation for smaller areas of neuroscientific inquiry such as neuroimaging studies of
sexuality, and that this matters for the re-framing of sexuality in neural terms.
Therefore – although this is not spelled out in these publications – consumption stands both
for our natural behavior and the outcome of it. It keeps the human navigating in a world of
rewards.
Metaphors are always culturally embedded, resonating with discourses and social order-
ings, feeding back to them, reinforcing – and sometimes displacing – them (cf. for example,
Gergen, 1990; Haraway, 1991; Maasen and Weingart, 2000).
The metaphors of conduct in neuromodels examined here are reminiscent of the neoliberal
regimes of governance reviewed by Maasen and Sutter (2007) in their introduction of
On Willing Selves. There, Maasen and Sutter point out that neoliberal subjectivation demands
and produces sociable “willing selves”, subjects who know and manage themselves, driven by
individual volition and choices in all spheres of life.
It is difficult not to read the reward-centered neuromodels of desire, in which specific parts
of the individual brain integrate afforded pseudosocial cues and are responsible of the
emotional–rational valuations, decisions, risks and investments, as a recapitulation of these
expectations of a neoliberal mode of governance. These models echo the neoliberal demands
on the “functionality [of subjects] as sociable selves” (Maasen and Sutter, 2007, p. 17). The
interesting feature of most neuromodels treated in the present article is that they no longer
take the social to be an inherent property of the world outside the individual; instead they

6 To appreciate the contemporary intellectual history of the notion of rewards in the scientific description of
human behavior would demand the unpacking of a deep multidisciplinary history of key concepts in
psychology, sexology, economics and the neurobiology of addiction. There we would have to pay special
attention to the interactions and translations between these fields, and between them and non-scientific
contexts, in the twentieth century. We would probably want to follow the linkings and unlinkings between
concepts such as need, drive, desire, motivation, but also want, will, like, pleasure, satiety and satisfaction.
This is, of course, a project of a whole other focus and scope than the inquiry undertaken in this article.
To the best of my knowledge, the history of the notion of rewards in psychology is yet unwritten. The
‘reward circuitry’ of the brain was first written about in the 1950s by biological psychologists Olds and
Milner (1954), and became important to the then nascent psychobiology of motivation (cf. Thompson and
Zola, 2003). But as a concept, rewards was also playing a role in, among others, behaviorism and theories of
learning (Leahey, 2003), and behaviorist and psychoanalytical theories of emotion in turn resonating with
different cultural and ethical-religious contexts (Mandler, 2003).
About metaphors in the history of psychology, see Leary (1990b) and especially Leary (1990a). About
economic metaphors in biology, see, for example, Worster (1987).

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 Dussauge

re-create social relations as the result of agentic properties of the neural networks of desire, in
ways that conform to neoliberal notions of the subject (cf. also Ehrenberg, 2008).
In a social order based on and producing willing selves, the neurosciences of desire
investigated here seem to be taking a turn toward taking for granted, and producing, willing
brains. These brains are no longer only rational; following trends in economics, among others,
they are now imbued with emotional subjectivity and strive to make conflicted decisions.
In that scientific landscape, neuromodeled desire is constitutive of willing brains, and brain
pleasure functions as the promised reward of a managerial order made neural. Just like
Maasen and Sutter’s willing selves are in charge of always having to make the best choices for
themselves, the willing brains of the neurosciences of cash and sex operate as a cacophony of
partial neural agencies in which the voices of reason, passion, reward, goals and incentives
compete in effecting a desire with no clear source but with a direction: the self-chosen
satisfaction of the individual brain.

Lost and Founds: An Emotional Economy

The framing of sexual arousal as a reward-pursuing brain machine creates not only a scientific
frame of interpretation of brain activity: it creates a hierarchy between psychological processes
worthy to investigate, and processes less worthy of investigation. The ‘rewardization’ of desire
foregrounds processes of appraisal of potential objects of desire of which only the incentive
value is relevant to the brain. The reward system of the brain effects an evaluation of the
potential rewards in a ‘common currency’ independent of the objects of desire. As a
counterpart, aspects of sexuality that cannot be described in such terms – are not
commensurable – such as, for instance, practices of gender, identity, power relations and their
eroticization, are backgrounded.
The introduction to Rolls’ (1999) The Brain and Emotion captures it well:

What are emotions? Why do we have emotions? … Computing the reward and
punishment value of sensory stimuli, and then using selection between different rewards
and avoidance of punishments in a common reward-based currency appears to be the
fundamental solution that brains use in order to produce appropriate behaviour.
(p. v)

The towardness of emotions as we live them may have fallen out of cerebralized desire, but
neuroscience, instead, imposes on sexual desire another direction in its models. Philosopher
Sara Ahmed (2006, 2010) explains how the world we live in is oriented and how it orients our
subjectivity: how certain ways of living our lives are culturally valued as more worth living
than others. What we see is that in neurosciences of sexuality, brain matter and sexual desire
get re-oriented, along a metaphorical social order, which privileges goal-directedness, decision
making, emotional valuation of alternatives, consumption and the pursuit of rewards – and
which treats the world outside the individual as a series of potential incentives for the
fulfillment of one’s satiety.
Metaphors re-orient desire, and thereby, the cerebral subject made a desiring subject,
toward certain goals: they effect a part of neuroscience’s re-invention and re-orientation of the
social.

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 Sex, cash and neuromodels of desire

Beyond what social gets stuck or “lost in translation” (Fujimura, 2005), I argue here that
commensuration (Espeland and Stevens, 1998) in neuroscientific modeling of desire is a
crucial aspect of its reinvention of the social. The commensurable model of reward frames the
sociality of emotions as an emotional economy of human relations to the world.7

Resonances
Scientific and other cultural notions of desire are built upon and reproduced in neuroscience
(cf. Oudshoorn, 1994, for a general version of this argument). However, notions of desire are
profoundly affected by their becoming neural. The language of the neuro is not a neutral one;
it is a language that describes certain things before others. We have seen that the neuro
emphasizes activity over rest, and goal-directedness over open-endedness. The neuro’s implicit
notion of the cerebral subject functions as a mold in which notions of behavior and emotions
are processed. Through experiments and publications this neural mold frames behavior,
emotions and the terms of their description.
Setting neuroeconomics’ and sex neuroresearch’s neuroframing (Dussauge, 2013) of desire
next to each other enables us to see, first, the role (and direction) of the transfer of metaphors
from one neuro-field to another, and second, the resonances between notions of desire in the
fields of sex research and neuroscience, which effect a mutual reinforcement. We also perceive,
third, the resonances between cultural understandings of sex and other desires in late capitalist
society; and fourth, the impact of commensuration on what stories of life, sex and cash can
be told.
What we witness here is an essentialization, and an economization in specific terms, of
human desire in general, and sexual desire/pleasure in particular.
The economization of desire demands and effects a leveling of the objects of desire: At the
end of the day, they are all, well, rewards. Within that frame, what makes things in life
different from each other is not our relation to them, or relations between them beyond
the reach of our actions; what makes them different from each other is the measure of our
desire for them. Desire is therefore essentialized as the incontestable nexus of our behavior.
Within that frame, desire is the unquestionable core of our subjectivities.
There is also a resonance between the terms of the neuro and the terms of desire. The
cultural desire for the brain is a cultural desire for a biology now psychological, working as an
enclosed material world, reaching out to the world in an inside-to-the-outside movement.
The cultural desire for the brain echoes the story of desire told in neural terms. It is the story
of an essential desire, initiator of human actions, where the actions that count are centered
around and toward consumption. It is not a story of desire as production, flaneurism,
voyeurism, waste, relation, political or creative force. Although neural desires are commen-
surable to a large extent, they are not a story of how sexual desire and other desires emerge,
come together, get disentangled and fuse again in practices of pleasure, which would be both
erotic and gustatory, or erotic and addictive, or erotic and monetary. The neural story enables
these but casts them as a result of the individual consumption behavior.
And instead, centrally, neural desires tell the story of a direction, often attributed to
evolution: We act for goals. Even unknowingly of our own best, driven by imperfect, not

7 This echoes, although with a different argument, the “libidinal economies” explored by Vrecko (2011).

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 Dussauge

rational motives, we walk paths, which were at least once upon a time good for us – or so the
story goes.
Historian Joan Scott (2012), as Michel Foucault (1976) before her, points out the centrality
of sexuality in the twentieth- and twenty-first-century Western societies. Scott argues that
sexual desire and its emancipation are absolutely central to late capitalist society because they
sustain a consumer subjectivity, through the ideal that we human beings are free not until we
may live our life following our unrestrained desires. The discourses and institutions sustaining
the production and regulation of sexual desire produce, paradoxically, an unmarked desire
experienced as essential and revealing of truth about ourselves and the human. Just like an
fMRI scanner.

Acknowledgements
I want to thank my colleagues for their response on earlier versions of this article presented at
the following meetings: “Neurosociety … What is it with the brain these days?” (Oxford,
2010), the workshops “Broar och brott mellan det biologiska och det sociala” (Ystad, 2011),
“The Moral Economy of Life Science” (Vadstena, 2011), and “Bio-Objects for Europe?”
(Vienna, 2011), the Queer Seminar at Stockholm University, and the seminar “Visualizing the
Brain: Re-conceptualizing Selfhood, Desire and Sexuality through Neuroimaging” (Lund,
2012). Special thanks to the editors and anonymous referees, as well as Janne Bromseth, C.-F.
Helgesson, Anelis Kaiser, Cynthia Kraus, Tora Holmberg, Petra Jonvallen, Francis Lee, Anna
Morvall, Shai Mulinari, Kerstin Sandell, Steve Woolgar, my colleagues from the neuroGen-
derings network and from Tema T, Linköping University for helpful discussions and
comments. This article is based on research funded by the Swedish Research Council,
Vetenskapsrådet, for a project originally developed together with Ingeborg Svensson at the
Centre for Gender Research, Uppsala University, with support from the Vetenskapsrådet
Excellence Program GenNa and the Body/Embodiment working group.

About the Author

Isabelle Dussauge is a researcher at the Centre for Gender Research, Uppsala University. Her
work and research interests deal with neuroscience, medicine’s visual culture, historical
relations between feminism and biology, as well as the early computerization of health care.
She is currently completing a project about the neurosciences of sexuality.

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