Feminist psychology in an Interdisciplinary Context

Abstract

This paper describes, for an interdisciplinary audience, the impact of gender analyses within psychology as a discipline and the implications of this for interdisciplinary research on gender issues. The paper argues that, because psychological notions (personality, motive, desire etc.) are part of ordinary contemporary Western discourse, the unreflective incorporation of psychological ideas into other disciplinary frameworks is commonplace. While much feminist psychology also uncritically adopts such notions, critical feminist psychology exposes the socially constructed nature of this discourse, explores the way in which it infuses our ordinary everyday accounts of experience—and, indeed, how it comes to constitute that experience. Because psychological notions are so pervasive, and are implicit to (when not explicit in) many of the analyses carried out by other disciplines, critical psychology—especially feminist critical psychology—has a crucial role to play in the development of a tvansdisciplinary scholarship of gender.