Critical discursive psychology and visual displays of gender

Abstract

ABSTRACT The growing presence of everyday visual materials, such as social media images and videos, raises new questions around the ways in which identities are made visible in contemporary contexts. ‘Visually informed’ critical discursive psychology can be productively leveraged to analyze the diverse intersections of visuality and gender in daily life. To guide future inquiries in this domain, a brief overview of discourse analysis, discursive psychology, and (visually informed) critical discursive psychology is provided. Applying this methodology to the study of gender, an explicit conceptualization of visual gender displays is detailed alongside complementary analytic objectives suitable for future inquiries. Lastly, three categories of visual features are outlined that could be attended to during close examinations of visual data, using extracts from a previous study to illustrate key points. To that end, scholars can visually investigate ‘micro’ level gender displays as they relate to ‘macro’ systems of inequality- grounded in a critical discursive psychology framework.