Defending the Lenses of Gender

Abstract

Three cheers for Stephanie Shields, whose provocative analysis of mainstream psychology's blindsight perfectly captures what I find so frustrating about essays of my two most mainstream reviewers in this issue, Kay Deaux and Alice Eagly. The problem, in other words, is not so much what they say; it is what they fail to see. The first thing Deaux and Eagly fail to see has little to do with or feminism but much to do with how social, personality, and developmental psychology might begin to re-embed individual into his or her culture. Shields may imply too much explicitness when she writes that The Lenses of Gender sets what is needed for major reworking of how psychology construes person's development as culturally situated, because setting out is done more by example than by metatheoretical analysis and critique of psychology as discipline. But there is clear model here of how one might theorize the link between psychological and macrosocial (Shields), and it is link forged by concept of cultural lens.1 There are lot of things I like about using concept of cultural lens as tool of analysis. It can directlyand meaningfully-be applied both to psyche of individual and to discourses and social institutions of culture. It takes for granted that there is way of construing reality embedded in culture's discourses and social institutions and, furthermore, that developing child somehow picks up this way of construing reality by virtue of being enmeshed in cultural context. It highlights that, rather than being derived from nature, not only person's perception of social reality but social reality itself is socially constructed. And last, it opens door to an explicitly feminist psychology by providing language of culture and psyche that can readily be integrated with language of power and inequality. The only additional leap required is to conceptualize culture's discourses and institutions as not just socially constructed but socially constructed by those in power-which, in feminist analysis of U.S. culture, means rich, White, heterosexual men. This brings me to second thing that Deaux and Eagly fail to see, which is that The Lenses of Gender constitutes theoretical attempt to explain institutional, ideological, and psychological mechanisms that together keep economic and political power of society primarily in hands of men. It is thus not theory of some neutral-sounding construct like or sexual difference or even sexual difference in situational context. It is theory of how male power reproduces itself in society through an insidious-and relatively invisible-interaction of systemic and psychological. Consistent with this historically and culturally situated project, well more than half of The Lenses of Gender consists of feminist analysis of cultural context in which individual is situated from birth to death-a cultural context in which discourses and social institutions are said to be permeated with androcentrism, polarization, and biological essentialism. And rest of book presents model in which individual enmeshed in that context internalizes these lenses, struggles to construct an identity consistent with their definition of real woman or man, and thereby unwittingly participates in reproduction of male power. Although model surely makes too sharp distinction between this gender conformist and theoretical counterpart, gender subversive, book also briefly theorizes how those who seriously violate culture's definitions of maleness and femaleness have managed-in different ways at different historical moments-to construct viable identity in society that insistently denies them any legitimacy. The Lenses of Gender is surely inadequate. What theory isn't? And there are surely serious questions and criticisms that could be raised about omissions, oversimplifications, blind spots, misplaced emphases, and all rest. But not only do my mainstream critics not 1In describing this cultural-psychology aspect of my book, Shields writes that I make a sustained effort to examine notion of culture from psychological perspective. I never before thought of my book as defining culture psychologically, but it is language I find very congenial.