Toward a Neuroepidemiology of Women’s Embodiment

Why I’m Writing This Update

This site has been quiet for a long time, but my work has not stalled. It has been evolving in ways that required time, study, and more precise language. The direction and focus of the work remain the same. What is changing is the articulation: the structure that has been present for years is now being situated more explicitly within known scientific and theoretical lineages.

My earlier writing focused on women’s experience within male dominion, with a primary emphasis on finding ways for women to become free within it, individually and collectively. That focus has not changed. What has changed is my commitment to articulate the mechanisms, pathways, and population‑level patterns that underlie what I have described so far. This update is an effort to make visible the transition of my longstanding tenets as I incorporate the scientific tools I am now bringing to the work. These new tools are not replacing those I previously developed. They arise from the earlier work itself, which demanded a clearer path forward. In time, the studious application of science can reveal what is accurate and what is useful, and I am as eager to carve away what is not as I am to find certainty in what is.

Clarity matters. My intellectual trajectory is intact, and the work has been developing from its foundation. In the interest of continuity, and to make the next steps legible, I am laying out my intentions and understanding here. These include what is foundational, what is intended, what is inspiring, what is newly discovered, what is known, what is emerging, what is being investigated, what is informing, what is descriptive, what is planned, what is structural, and how it is all being held. Thank you for your interest in the work. I invite you to comment on it and discuss it.

 What My Work Has Always Been About

My work examines and emphasizes women’s embodied knowledge and the ways women adapt themselves under, and in response to, the violence of male dominion. I do not describe these conditions in abstract terms, even now as I seek to find a home in scientific academia. The forces shaping women’s lives are not neutral or impersonal pressures; they are the cumulative result of individual acts of male aggression and force that, taken together, produce systemic, global female oppression. This causal clarity is foundational to my work and to the lineages I stand in and adjacent to.

The thinkers who shaped my approach to this work such as Sonia Johnson (Going Out of Our Minds: The Metaphysics of Liberation), Andrea Dworkin (Intercourse), Mary Daly (Pure Lust), Barbara Morr, and Monica Sjöö (The Great Cosmic Mother) — wrote with a meticulousness that refused to obscure male violence behind sociological platitudes. Their work insisted on naming the male aggressor and rejecting ways of speaking that naturalize or diffuse male domination into something atmospheric or inevitable. From them, I learned that accurate naming is both prudent and pertinent. We protect our stories and hold our embodied wisdom with clear language. Clarity is the precondition for understanding women’s adaptive responses as intelligent and oriented not only toward survival, but toward actively enacting recovery even as harm accumulates.

This throughline has remained constant. My work has always been about helping women step out of conditions created by male aggression, conditions that are systemic because they are repeated, deliberate, and culturally reinforced, including through our own learned patterns, behaviorally and biologically. Even as my scientific toolkit expands, the commitments that shaped my earlier writing remain intact. The aim is the same: to trace how women’s bodies register and adapt to male violence, and how recovery becomes possible when the cause is understood for what it is. Naming the agent of harm accurately is the first step to allow physiological, emotional, and social reorganization to occur.

Why I’m Naming Neuroepidemiology Now

I have been thinking on a population level for years, long before I had the vocabulary to name it or the comprehension to recognize it for what it was. My earlier work traced how individual acts of male violence accumulate into cultural patterns, and how those patterns become embodied in women’s physiology, alter perception, and shape behavior. What I lacked then was a scientific language capable of describing these processes without allowing the essential cultural clarity to become the focus of the work itself. Neuroepidemiology provides those bounds.

Neuroepidemiology grants me the language to articulate what I have already been studying: how male violence becomes encoded in nervous systems, determines immune signaling, affects endocrine rhythms, and defines the perceptual infrastructure through which women navigate the world. It offers a way to describe the literal mechanisms by which trauma exposure produces noticeable changes in health, relates to ongoing risk, and holds predictable stake in long‑term health outcomes. This is not a new direction. It is the more technical restating of the shape that has been present from the beginning.

This shift is not a pivot away from feminist analysis. It is a long‑envisioned bridge between feminist analysis and mechanistic science. Neuroepidemiology gives me the tools to examine, with precision, how social conditions created by male dominion become biological conditions carried in women’s bodies. It allows me to hold causal clarity and scientific rigor at the same time, without sacrificing either or being drowned in the desperation of global female oppression. In naming neuroepidemiology now, I am landing in the scientific home for the work I have been doing all along.

Definition of Epidemiology

Epidemiology is, at its core, the study of how conditions, especially those created by human action, shape populations, and how those conditions become embodied and shape disease distribution.

Like radical feminism, epidemiology is a discipline concerned with systems and groups. By exploring patterns, distributions, and the pathways through which lived realities translate into measurable health outcomes, causal relationships that were previously obscured can be elucidated.

This definition placed here provides the conceptual ground for understanding neuroepidemiology as the natural next phase of my work. It’s the field that examines how social and interpersonal conditions, cultural exposures, and lived experiences co-create the human nervous system and therefore express themselves across populations.

My Lineage of Embodiment

Naturally, my foundational understanding of embodiment came from my mother, who rejected disembodied religious thinking and taught her children to trust the tangible, the material, and the lived. My understanding that the body is not separate from the self, and that what happens to a woman happens in her comes from her consistent repeating of this truth. This orientation toward the body as the site of truth was directional to all my work.

Years later, during a profound paralysis episode that happened a few hard years after I was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, I was provoked by my utter loss of control into a ruthless inquiry about the cause of my incapacity. What I learned at that moment was that my body  carried the truth of my life, and that the conditions of my world had become conditions of my physiology. This inveterate shock remains the deepest origin of my framework. My lifelong practice of personal ceremony suddenly crystallized into a practical method for understanding how harm becomes embodied and how transformation occurs. That awakening vastly changed me. My life became a meticulous dedication to recovery, as I had seen how it was possible to escape my frightening state of manifest degradation. This was the moment my trajectory was set. A trajectory that carries me forward through this current iteration.

In 2016, I joined the first Free Birth Society Facebook group, where Emily Saldaya regularly engaged with members, including me. This was not passive exposure; it was an active, generative intellectual community. I contributed ideas, shared early versions of my framework, and saw those ideas reflected back to me in ways that validated their importance and clarified my goals. In 2019, I joined the third cohort of the Radical Birthkeeper School, a high‑touch, months‑long coaching and skills training that allowed me to work closely with Emily and Yolande Norris Clarke, as well as with powerful thinkers within my cohort. This experience sharpened my own thinking, expanded my understanding of embodiment and gave me the vocabulary to name it, and connected me to the radical feminist lineage, including Andrea Dworkin, that would later anchor my work. The women in that space helped me recognize the value of my emerging framework and provided the intellectual community that shaped its early development.

After completing the program, I began leading women’s circles centered on embodiment healing, sexual assault recovery, and women’s community. This eventually led to the creation of my own course, Braiding Changes, where I began formalizing the tools I had been developing for both acute sexual assault recovery and the chronic harms of male dominion.

When I eventually encountered Krieger’s ecosocial theory, I recognized the structure immediately. Her work had been published long before I reached adulthood. I was born in the early 1980’s and I did not develop my thinking alongside hers in any literal historical sense. My own framework emerged independently, shaped by radical feminist analysis, by observing how women adapt under male dominion, and by the intellectual communities I participated in. It is possible that I absorbed elements of the broader intellectual atmosphere her work helped create, but the core insights arose from my own analysis. Naming this alignment is not a claim of co‑creation; it is an acknowledgment of convergent clarity.

This is the lineage that shaped my framework. It also taught me my limits. My earlier work of holding women’s stories, creating recovery spaces, and engaging in public activism, left me troubled and depleted, not because the work was unworthy, but because I was allowing the very harm I sought to address to work its destructive effect on me. I saw that the lane I was in could not sustain my body or my goals; as it demanded constant exposure to trauma and required a public posture that involved itself with meeting aggression rather than fostering clarity. Following my body’s guidance, as I always have, I stepped back and chose a path where my ideas could grow in a supportive environment and where I could thrive. The next phase of my work is integration: transforming these lived and intellectual foundations into a coherent scientific approach that can be articulated clearly, examined rigorously, and developed over time.

Integrating My Voice with the Science

I am not abandoning my earlier voice. I am integrating it. The work I did before stepping into academic study was not a separate chapter or a discarded identity; it was the beginning of the same trajectory I am on now. The feminist analysis that shaped my understanding of male violence, the embodied knowledge that came from my own physiology, and the community‑based frameworks I developed through ceremony and women’s circles are not being replaced. They are being woven together with physiology, neuroscience, and population‑level science.

My understanding of integrity was shaped long before I encountered feminist embodiment theory. In 2013, during my 200‑hour yoga teacher training with Renee Sills and Sara Trelease, I learned that integrity meant honoring the body’s structural truth in order to care for its wellness. Renee’s comprehensive anatomical expertise, paired with the contemplative philosophy she shared with Sara, described in Sara’s teaching bio as “integrating Vinyasa with Ayurveda, neuroscience, and trauma‑informed practices,” shaped the pedagogy I received and taught me that as we practice asana, we must observe and honor the body’s structural integrity as we shift weight and negotiate postural forces.

This training showed me how to fuse physical form with philosophical understanding and values, how to let the body teach the mind. It grounded my activist zeal in care, shaped the way I created health‑focused spaces and group experiences, and revealed that teaching people how to move well is radical work. Renee also modeled the ceremonial application of these practices; through her leadership, I learned how integrity in movement becomes integrity in presence, and how to carry myself as I undertake my work.

This is why I chose not to aim for code-switching but rather coherence as I navigate my intellectual trajectory. Integrity, as I learned it in my body and clarified in my comprehension, requires alignment, not fragmentation. It requires that my feminist analysis, my embodied knowledge, and my scientific training remain connected rather than compartmentalized.

As I step into academic work, I am not adopting a new voice; I am integrating the integrity I learned in my body with the scientific methods I am now studying. My academic direction is an expansion of my work, not a departure from it. The scientific tools I am learning allow me to articulate, model, and test the same causal structures I have been describing for years. The next phase of my work is integration: transforming these lived and intellectual foundations into a coherent approach that can be articulated clearly, examined rigorously, and developed over time.

This is not code switching. It is coherence, the integration of my earlier feminist and embodied work with the scientific training I am now undertaking. Integration is not a compromise. It is the continuation of my trajectory: transforming lived experience, feminist analysis, and embodied knowledge into a coherent scientific approach that can advance, be scrutinized, and contribute to a growing body of knowledge that gives attention to key areas that can lead to a more accurate understanding of women’s health.

My Emerging Framework

As my work becomes more coherent and grounded in science, the underlying structure of my framework is beginning to reveal itself. It is not finished, but it is no longer amorphous. Certain mechanisms are already clear to me, some well-known patterns I can name with confidence because they are grounded in lived experience, feminist analysis, and the scientific foundations I am now studying. Other parts remain open questions, areas where I am actively building translational literacy and preparing for future research. What follows is the shape of the system as I currently understand it.

One of the clearest through‑lines is the recognition of male violence as exposure that can lead to risk, not as circumstantial clamor nor as isolated incidents, but as a condition that shapes women’s physiology, awareness, and life outcomes in measurable ways. This exposure interacts with what I understand as adaptive physiology under the strain of global female oppression. Women’s responses to threat are functional, intelligent adaptations, not a form of pathology in and of themselves. These adaptations however, become embodied through nervous system patterning, endocrine rhythms, and immune signaling through a process that aligns with what ecosocial theorists describe as embodiment as mechanism, where social conditions become literally incorporated into biological systems, and this can beget pathology.

I have also seen, both in myself and in the women I’ve engaged with in the course of my work, that recovery is a form of reorganization. When the cause is accurately named, when women are no longer blamed for the conditions male dominion imposes on them, physiological and perceptual systems can begin to reorganize toward coherence. This is not a personality shift; it is biological and cognitive recalibration. And within this, emotional self‑mastery emerges not as a trait some women possess and others lack, but as a learnable mechanism, a way of regulating state, perception, and meaning in the presence of threat or contextualizing it after it has passed.

Alongside these mechanisms are the questions I am actively investigating. I am studying the bodily pathways through which trauma exposure increases disease risk, building on work like Andrea Roberts’ research linking childhood trauma to adult health outcomes. I am learning how chronic threat alters neural circuitry, immune signaling, and endocrine rhythms, and how misidentifying the cause, such as blaming women for the effects of male violence, disrupts the natural reorganization processes. I am also beginning to understand how these mechanisms can be shown to operate across scales, from individual physiology to population‑level patterns. I have begun to see possibilities for quantifying what has previously been seen as metaphorical or as real but intangible.

To conceptualize this system and build translational literacy I draw on metaphors and models that help me think across levels of organization. Mary Daly’s Pure Lust offers a way to understand how individual acts of male violence connect to global patterns of female oppression. The Jaguar and the Quark helps me imagine how systems biology can quantify relationships across scales. Lewis Thomas’ essays illuminate how relational interactions shape ecosystems and biological meaning. And Nancy Krieger’s ecosocial theory provides a scientific framework for understanding embodiment as the mechanism linking social conditions to biological outcomes. These models do not replace scientific methods; they help me see the architecture I am working to quantify.

Taken together, these elements form the structure of my emerging framework: male violence as exposure; adaptive physiology as pathway; embodiment as mechanism; recovery as reorganization; community as context; integration as method; and population‑level patterns rather than isolated individual experiences. This is not a finished theory. It is the scaffolding of a framework I am building, one that will integrate feminist analysis, embodied knowledge, and scientific methods to contribute to a growing body of knowledge that gives attention to key areas that can lead to a more accurate understanding of women’s health

Why Neuroepidemiology Fits My Direction

My work consistently circles back to two areas that have shaped me for years. The first is physiology, most interestingly, that of how female bodies respond to the threats present in male dominion. The second is the population‑level patterns that expose how those threats accumulate across groups to influence behavioral and bodily norms. This influence, in turn, shapes expectations, which creates a positive feedback loop of influence on women, changing gene expression and overall health over time.

I am drawn to closely examine the mechanisms, neural, endocrine, and immune that are the fundamental machinery of life, to find out how they are played havoc with by exposure to these threats and harms. I am equally drawn to the large‑scale structures that shape exposure, embodiment, and risk, and I am driven to employ the patterns that may be suggested in the literature, as emerging evidence shows that violence and trauma are part of the lived environment for many women with chronic illness, including multiple sclerosis. In a population‑based study of pregnant women in Norway, women with MS were considerably more likely to report adult abuse, including rape, and had more than twice the odds of revictimization after childhood abuse compared to women without MS. As the authors note, “Women with MS more often reported to have been raped as an adult… aOR 2.37” and “Women with MS had a higher risk of experiencing revictimization… aOR 2.23” (Eid et al., 2022). Analogous public‑health research demonstrates that sexual assault is statistically associated with chronic health conditions and health‑risk behaviors.

In a large state‑level survey, women who had ever experienced sexual assault showed “significantly higher prevalence of… chronic health conditions (disability, and current asthma)” as well as markedly elevated rates of depression, anxiety, suicidal ideation, smoking, and heavy drinking, even after adjusting for socioeconomic factors (Santaularia et al., 2014). These studies do not establish that sexual violence causes MS or any specific chronic disease, and they identify health‑risk behaviors as associated factors in addition to showing the relationship to sexual assault. However, taken together, they show that sexual violence is linked to substantial, measurable health burdens and that women with MS are disproportionately exposed to abuse and revictimization (Eid et al). This convergence of evidence merits focused inquiry into how trauma and sex‑based violence may shape the health trajectories and lived experiences of women.

While various types of trauma may have different biological consequences, childhood sexual abuse is associated with long‑term alterations in inflammatory response, as shown in recent studies that have indicated evidence of long‑term alterations in the inflammatory response due to childhood maltreatment. (D’Elia et al., 2018; Baumeister et al., as summarized in D’Elia et al., 2018; Carr et al., as summarized in D’Elia et al., 2018) More and more, these findings support the broader interpretation that oppression warrants examination as more than a metaphorical or circumstantial harm. The questions I want to study are those that create an opportunity for global female oppression to be considered as biologically embodied in measurable, disease‑relevant ways, and adjusted for in treatment standards accordingly.

I have found that neuroepidemiology is the field where these two ways of thinking meet. Scientists have been doing the work of uncovering the associated links between disease and oppression, and the next steps are to elucidate them further and to map out potential treatments by uncovering their central mechanisms.

For many women, hopelessness outlines the state of global female oppression, but with the study of neuroepidemiology, I see ways to forge a path toward collective recovery from the impacts of the imbalance of power that is male dominion. Law and morality have been employed to considerable benefit, but science has yet to be adequately directed to this area of need. I want to contribute to changing that.

By assigning a scientific home for the questions I already find myself asking; How does chronic threat alter neural circuitry? How do patterns of male violence, as a population‑level exposure, become biologically embedded? What are the pathways through which social conditions reorganize physiology, and how do those changes show up in measurable health outcomes? Neuroepidemiology offers the conceptual and methodological tools to study these mechanisms while keeping sight of the broader structures that produce them.

This field also aligns with the kind of translational work I want to do. Mechanisms in isolation are fascinating choreographies that inspire awe through expressed certainty, and population patterns are intriguing with their ability to make clear what dictates human experiences. Both are valuable windows to view possible levers that may affect change in their respective fields of influence. By understanding what is happening inside the body and to groups of people as a body at the same time, broader truths that may hold keys to solutions previously untried may be seen. Neuroepidemiology allows me to connect both: to study embodiment as a biological process and as a social one, and to understand how individual physiology reflects collective conditions.

This is the intellectual foundation for my MD/PhD trajectory. The medical training will give me the clinical and physiological grounding I need to understand the systems I am studying, while the PhD will give me the quantitative and methodological tools to investigate them rigorously and form useful models. Neuroepidemiology is a deeper dive into the work I have been doing. It is the field that can make sense of a working hypothesis such as those I’ve previously offered here and provide the space for them to be tested. It gives me a supportive location to develop the questions I already carry and the training to pursue them with scientific clarity.

Where My Academic Path Is Heading

My closest mentor and chemistry teacher was the first to inform me that my research goals would require that I acquire an MD/PhD. Ever since, I have been preparing for an MD/PhD because the questions I am carrying require both clinical grounding and scientific rigor. I am not pursuing the dual degree for prestige or even for academic breadth; I am pursuing it because the work I want to do sits directly at the intersection of physiology, trauma, embodiment, and population health. To study these questions responsibly, I need clinical literacy to understand the patient care side of the systems I am examining and the research training to investigate them with precision and with appropriate academic collaboration.

I am already beginning to reach out to faculty whose work intersects with neuroepidemiology, embodiment, trauma physiology, and population health. These conversations are not about institutions or locales; they are about intellectual fit. I am looking for a program with mentors who understand the questions I am asking and who can help me develop the tools to pursue them. I am not naming programs here because the emphasis at this stage is not on location but on research direction and finding scientific homes where my work can grow.

The path ahead is long, but it is finally coherent. I am building the foundation now by strengthening my scientific literacy, deepening my understanding of mechanisms, and clarifying the research questions that have been forming in me for years. I am enjoying the time this process takes. I am preparing for my future work deliberately, because the work I want to do requires depth, stability, and makes excellent use of my clear sense of purpose. I am sincerely thrilled to have found my way to such an engaging, engrossing path. Rosalind Franklin’s line “Improvement of the lot of [wo]mankind, present and future, is worth attaining” encourages me to pursue science as she did, with earned competence and disciplined dedication. Her work revealed the structure of DNA; mine aims to reveal the structure of the causal links between male dominion and disease.

What Readers Can Expect Going Forward

This site will continue to evolve as my thinking evolves. My focus now is on education, and so I won’t promise anything about frequency, output, or future posts. I am not offering performative transparency about what may or may not come next; I’m working hard to accomplish the goals I’ve laid out. My work is unfolding at the pace it requires, and this space will reflect that.

Readers are welcome to comment, respond, or engage with the ideas as they develop. The emphasis here is on conversation rather than production, on clarity rather than volume, and on allowing the work to take shape without forcing it into a schedule. This site is simply a place where I present my thoughts in public when it feels right to do so, and where the questions I am carrying can continue to find their form as my path develops.