Feminist Psychology Research Articles

The Westernization of social and personality psychology in Turkey and the ongoing struggle for indigenous perspectives: A historical review and an agenda for liberating psychology.

Liberation is a multifaceted concept, often intertwined with psychological processes such as freedom from oppression and the ability to think and act freely. Historically, Western social psychologists have favored the individualistic notion of freedom over the collective effort of liberation. This divergence has led to the separation of the histories of liberation struggles and psychology, including feminism. This article explores distinct historical trajectories in Turkey and highlights the divisive dynamics within feminist movements, particularly the erasure of ethnic minority women by state feminists in postdynastic Turkey. Furthermore, the Westernization and the Americanization of psychology have positioned the field as a neutral, value-free science, effectively silencing indigenous feminist perspectives and encouraging overreliance on adapting gender-based scales to Turkish. Despite this, a nascent history of feminist psychology in Turkey exists, which challenges homogenization and standardization, advocating for a conceptualization of freedom beyond individualism. Finally, an agenda for liberating social psychology is proposed through challenging tattered binaries of "East" and "West" or "secular" or "conservative" and promoting a collective and intersectional approach to psychological research and practice. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Women in Their 80s and 90s: Positively Vital

In the following we introduce a special issue of the journal Woman & Therapy, titled Women in Their 80s and 90s: Positively Vital. Our intent has been to provide a balance to the prevailing literature on older women which tends to present a negative view of the trials and tribulations of old age. We believe that this information is vital not just for old women but also for feminist psychologists who work with this population and for the world at large.

Envisioning the Future of Intersectional Anti-Racist Feminism in Psychology

Although there has been a focus on intersectionality theory in feminist studies broadly and within the field of psychology specifically, there have been increased calls for an explicitly anti-racist focus within intersectional feminist psychology. The purpose of this article is to articulate what an intersectional anti-racist feminism in psychology looks like in terms of research, clinical practice, and advocacy. First, we provide some context for our focus on articulating an intersectional anti-racist feminism and our hope for this special issue, particularly in the current sociopolitical moment. Next, we share our positionalities as feminist leaders during the impetus of this special issue and share a brief herstory of intersectionality and the Society for the Psychology of Women (SPW). Then, we envision the future of intersectional anti-racist feminism with a focus on coalition-building and use the Combahee River Collective as a foundational example for the way forward in both theory and praxis. We end by briefly highlighting the series of articles that encompass this special issue which showcase scholarship, clinical practice, and advocacy.

Addressing Child Maltreatment by Infusing Multicultural, Feminist Tenets to Standard Clinical Approaches: The Cases of “Bashiir” and “Jaquann”

Multicultural psychology emphasizes the role of social, cultural, and gender forces in creating an individual’s identity; the social and cultural world in which they live; and the psychological strengths that different cultures have to offer. In a complementary way, feminist psychology highlights the importance of collectivist alternatives to mainstream, individualistic thinking in the U.S.; and the identification and dismantling of patriarchal power structures that oppress women. Combining these two in a multicultural, feminist approach to psychotherapy highlights the importance of relating to clients with an understanding of, sensitivity to, respect for, and responsiveness to their cultural identities and life situations. This also involves the therapist building on strengths that come from some cultures bringing a collectivist rather than an individualist orientation to life’s challenges, such as combating child maltreatment. To illustrate the potential of a multicultural, feminist approach to psychotherapy in cases of child maltreatment among minority individuals, the present article offers two highly successful case studies. The first involves “Bashiir,” a 16-year-old African, first-generation immigrant young man from Somalia; and the second involves “Jaquaan,” a 15-year-old African American young man. Both clients were referred to therapy because of poor school attendance and academic difficulties, and associated symptoms consistent with a Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) diagnosis. These symptoms derived from the clients having lived in poor, dangerous, high crime communities. A crucial component in both cases was the process by which the therapist employed the multicultural feminist approach to cross age, racial, gender, and socioeconomic-class lines to establish a very strong, trusting relationship between the therapist and the client; and between the therapist and the clients’ families.

“Friends? Supported. Partner? Not so much …”: Women's experiences of friendships, family, and relationships during perimenopause and menopause

In recent years, there has been increased cultural interest in perimenopause and menopause. The importance of peri/menopause in many women's lives makes this topic particularly pertinent for feminist psychologists. Some feminist scholars have acknowledged both physical and psychological factors as important aspects of women's experiences within their wider social and cultural contexts. However, consideration of relational aspects during peri/menopause remains sparse. We report our research exploring peri/menopausal women's experiences of friendships, family, and relationships. Thematic analysis was used to analyse responses to an online qualitative survey in which 71 mainly British women participated. In our analysis, we discuss the Menopause Sisterhood and how these women described social support as grounded in embodied experiences shared with other women. However, there were tensions concerning partners, whose understanding varied, which we report in the second theme: Accounting for (lack of) partner support: Men as heroes (or as absolved of any blame). We discuss the importance and implications of our findings for feminist scholars and psychologists more widely.

Feminist Community Psychology and the Advancement of Women in South Africa

In this presentation, I offer a brief personal reflection of my entry and introduction to psychology. I start from positionsing myself to highlight how we do not come into institutions of higher learning and our disciplines as empty vessels but with histories that shape how we view the world. Drawing from social justice scholars and my earlier work, I point to how psychology needs to shift from locating ‘problems’ within individuals but instead acknowledge the structural imbalances that contribute to individual and collective dis-eases facing society. I go on to call for a decolonial feminist psychology that acknowledges the multiple oppressions faced by people in many formely colonised nations such as South Africa, with a particular focus on women. I further show how visual methodologies such as embroideries offer the potential for epistemic justice and decolonial possibilities by centering community members as co-constrctors of knowledge. I conclude by highlighting how hope carries the potential for psychological healing.

Teaching feminist psychology epistemology, ontology, and methodology through conceptual replication research proposals.

Teaching feminist psychology epistemology, ontology, and methodology through conceptual replication research proposals.

African-Centered Psychological Perspective on Happiness

Happiness scholarship has gained prominence in a number of disciplines over the last few decades, including economics and psychology. In South Africa, we have observed an uptick in happiness studies, but also that these studies are mostly using quantitative methodologies. What is missing in nearly all these studies are conceptualizations of happiness from African-centered decolonial psychological perspectives. The main objective in this article is to approach happiness from an African-centered decolonial psychological perspective. The article draws on data from a qualitative study which investigated happiness and gender equality amongst South African women. Convenience sampling was employed to recruit participants. Eleven qualitative individual interviews were conducted with key informants and three focus groups with women who shared their everyday lived experiences of happiness. We draw only from the individual interviews. The interviews were subjected to an adapted, theoretically driven thematic analysis informed by African-centered decolonial psychological interpretations. Whilst we identified four key themes, we report and discuss only two of these, namely: happiness as inter-connectedness and happiness as maintaining a balanced life. The perspective we adopt in this article offers an opportunity to unpack how happiness is inter-connectedness and how happiness is a balanced life. In enmeshing decolonial African-centered perspectives and African feminist psychology, it was possible to not only produce a more situated analysis of women’s happiness but also to center issues of gender and gender inequality within African-centered psychological thought. Potential directions for further contextual and transnational qualitative studies on happiness that incorporate African-centered decolonial perspectives are offered.

Anti-Racist Pedagogy as Activism: Cultivating Radical Healing and Liberation among Asian American Counseling and Psychology Students

The links between experiences of discrimination and mental health consequences have been well established among Asian Americans. Since the pandemic, anti-Asian racism and xenophobia surged, and the negative outcomes can be severe and long-lasting. Asian American mental health professionals can play an important role in addressing the mental health needs in the Asian American community. Feminist psychologists have long criticized the oppressive nature of traditional Western mental health practices. Strategies to promote liberation and radical healing among Asian American students are especially needed, given the challenges exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic and the fact that their needs are often overlooked due to the model-minority stereotype. This article offers critical consciousness–informed pedagogy as a form of anti-racist feminist practice to cultivate radical healing and liberation for Asian American students. Anti-racist teaching strategies include: modeling by counseling and psychology educators, challenging internalized oppression and teaching accurate history, building community and collectivism, cultivating solidarity with other communities, and supporting student activism.

The art of resilience: a psychobiography of Frida Kahlo

This psychobiography of Frida Kahlo explores the psychology of the famous Mexican artist. Drawing upon Kahlo’s paintings and diary entries, a rich psychological analysis of the feminist icon is juxtaposed with the zeitgeist of 20th century Mexico. Framed through the theoretical model of feminist psychology, Kahlo’s role in promoting gender equality and dismantling patriarchal society is discussed. Physical pain resulting from illness and impalement by a metal pole in a trolley accident was matched, if not exceeded, by the psychological pain the artist felt due to resulting issues with fertility and the long-sought but never-realized role of motherhood, infidelity within her marriage, and the eventual loss of her ability to paint. Nevertheless, Kahlo’s perseverance and strength led to worldwide recognition of her bold and vibrant paintings, vulnerably depicting her rich inner world. The present study utilises perspectives from art therapy and attachment theory to elucidate the factors contributing to Frida Kahlo’s resilience in the face of lifelong trauma and chronic pain. Ultimately, Kahlo’s life and work offer valuable insight into the psychological experiences of women in patriarchal societies, emphasising the importance of feminist perspectives in psychological research and highlighting the healing and resilience-promoting role of art.

Doing feminisms on the ground: Challenges and opportunities for critical feminist psychologies

Participant Authors (listed alphabetically): Simran Bassra, Celine Castellino, Danielle Christie, Katherine Hubbard, Xintong Jia, Gabby Keating, Rosemary Lobban, Taoyuan Luo, Ankita Mishra, Nikki Moore, Becky Smith.Feminist psychological perspectives remain peripheral in mainstream psychological spaces and broader applied settings. This can make it difficult to do feminist psychological work. In this article, we discuss key challenges facing a group of feminist psychologists working in various specialist areas of theory and practice. The discussion was generated from a roundtable session facilitated by the authors at the Psychology of Women and Equalities Section Annual Conference in July, 2022 in response to the conference theme of ‘Doing feminism on the ground’. The roundtable aimed to create space for participants to discuss the challenges of doing feminist work. The roundtable also aimed to generate shared strategies for resisting these challenges. Here, we were guided by Sara Ahmed’s call to ‘stay with the difficulty’ of feminist work in order to learn from this. Challenges included professional exclusion, isolation, epistemic erasure, and self-censorship. Strategies included ‘rewriting the questions’, refusing to engage with over-simplistic requests, and (re)centering power and its implications. Roundtable participants are listed as participant authors, and their words co-construct and flow through this account. This article therefore presents a collaborative account of the challenges and opportunities facing this group in their efforts to do feminisms on the ground.

‘How the other half lives’?: Taking a critical approach to the social psychology of economic inequality and extreme wealth

AbstractThe negative impact of economic inequality on social issues and wellbeing is of importance to social psychology that historically has an interest in social justice. Social Identity Theory is explored as an approach that acknowledges the wider context of social issues. The use of experiments encounters challenges in categorizing wealth and how individuals account for extreme wealth. Mainstream research agendas in psychology are not neutral and draw upon current ideology (such as neoliberalism) that can often maintain inequality. These difficulties are addressed by Critical Social Psychology driven by a social justice agenda that challenges the acceptance of neoliberal values. The application of Critical Social Psychology to wealth inequality is demonstrated with research using UK media data. Critical feminist psychology is discussed to explore the role of class and how to challenge the stigmatization of working‐class people. Finally, this paper outlines how Discursive Psychology addresses how extreme wealth and the practices of the super‐rich are warranted. A discursive approach questions the acceptance of wealth inequality as an everyday assumption and demonstrates how dominant discourse draws upon individualism. Furthermore, Discursive Psychology has examined how accountability for problematic practices, such as tax avoidance that maintain inequality, are managed in media broadcasts.

Supporting students to reimagine social psychology through a critical feminist lens

‘A feminist perspective is not only compatible with the history, objectives, and emphases of social psychology, but necessary for its continued vitality.’ (Lott, 1991, p.505)Social psychology is a core component of the British Psychological Society accreditation of psychology programmes. Typically, the teaching of social psychology relies upon well-established, dominant approaches.However, in recent years, critical, community, and feminist psychologists have provided alternative ways of thinking about the methods, research questions, and epistemological approaches of mainstream social psychology.Feminist social psychology is ultimately concerned with three core aims: (1) the inclusion of women and girls, (2) advocating for diverse, critical perspectives, and (3) promoting equality.I encourage students to think critically about their core social psychology teaching, to promote psychological literacy (i.e. application of content to solving societal problems; Pownall et al., 2021, 2022).

The Whole Show

abstract: This first-person account tells the story of one woman's adoptive family history in the context of 1950s US adoption policies and her search for and discovery of her birthmother in the 1970s. The essay refracts the author's journey through the lenses of feminist psychology, Jewish identity, and culture. It raises questions about identity, secrets and their discovery, and belonging, and asks how children construct a sense of self from the materials within their families and communities and the stories they've been told.

Listening as Methodological Resistance: Hearing Voices at the Margins of Educational Leadership

The Listening Guide method was founded in opposition to other forms of interview coding which either put data into predetermined and/or binary categories. Feminist psychologists believed that other methods of qualitative research disappeared the undertheorized portions of subjects’ narratives. This method does not seek to only hear voices of queer or gender non-conforming educational leaders, but also to hear the contradictions, complexities and multiple voices of cisgendered men and women and enable researchers to hear that a binary construction of gender is not the place where most school leaders live. The Listening Guide is an act of resistance, forcing research away from calcifying experience into static categories. The Listening Guide also acknowledges that multiplicity of self is authentic. Individuals tend to speak in more than one voice at a given time, depending on their context and the culture in which they exist. One can think of this as being like a borderland where different pieces of our identity converge, some taking on greater importance based on context. Gender, race, and sexual identities exist in relationship to one another within everyone, and the contextual nature of how these identities cause us to behave or influence how we are perceived can be heard using this method. The messiness of identity is allowed to come to the surface, resisting binaries and hierarchy in categorization. Listening meets at the intersection of method and praxis, and voice enables researchers to hear the stories at the margins of educational leadership.

Sexual Politics in the Short Stories of M.A Susheela from Feminist View

This article is about the troublesome women and how they are enslaved everywhere and in every way. The women are subjected to many kinds of problems, emotional distress and sufferings. It is necessary to examine psychologically what is the reason behind these sufferings. Feminist psychology is the field that examines the everyday practices that are followed in a women’s day-to-day life, their family, education, work and their emotional strength. The struggle for women’s rights and the recognition of women’s individuality in India is equal to freedom struggle. Women must be given equal freedom to men, their feelings should be respected, their education shouldn’t be hindered, property rights should be given and their emotions should be understood. Today feminist psychology integrates research on human development, sports, health, industry, media, law, social sciences, art, literature and humanities.

Curating the history of POWES and Feminist Psychology in the UK: In conversation with Rose Capdevila

Rose Capdevila is a Professor at the Open University whose research interest focuses on gender in digital spaces, taking a critical feminist and poststructuralist approach to her research. Rose is currently working on a longer-term project with colleagues Katherine Hubbard (Surrey) and Lois Donnelly (Worchester) exploring the History of Feminist Psychology in the U.K. At the 2022 POWES Conference, Rose presented her keynote speech entitled ‘If I could turn back time’ which curated and reflected on the history of POWES and Feminist Psychology within the U.K., in which she discusses some of the work she has been doing with Katherine and Lois. As someone who missed the POWES 2022 conference, Rose and I organised an email interview to (digitally) discuss her keynote and covered areas beginning with Rose’s history with POWES, the evolution of her keynote research and some of the interesting findings from the work, concluding by considering the important work that can be done in feminist spaces and importance of memorialising feminist knowledge and contribution.

Book Review: Female Psychology: An Annotated Psychoanalytic Bibliography; Schuker, E., Levinson, N.A., Eds.; Routledge: England, UK, 2017; ISBN 978-1-138-87226-4

Rarely is a book published with a specific focus on ‘Female Psychology’—one of the three branches of the ‘Psychology of Women’ field of study. It is more common to see texts that focus on ‘Feminine Psychology’, and arguably the greatest number of texts in this area are in fact dedicated to ‘Feminist Psychology’. This makes the annotated psychoanalytic bibliography, edited by Eleanor Schuker and Nadine A. Levinson a rare, but important resource. This book review assesses the re-printed text for its content and novel contribution to the field, but does so framing it in the wider context of studies into the Psychology of Women, the changing times, and the current landscape of similar research. Furthermore, this review frames the text in a wider psycho-socio-cultural academic debate about the similarities, differences, and conceptual meanings of the three (distinct) branches of: Feminist, Feminine, and Female Psychology; concluding the difference in origin of these schools of thought has allowed for their individualization and continued utility as separate areas of study into the Psychology of Women.

Understanding Sexual Assault Survivors’ Perspectives on Archiving Qualitative Data: Implications for Feminist Approaches to Open Science

The open science movement has framed data sharing as necessary and achievable best practices for high-quality science. Feminist psychologists have complicated that narrative by questioning the purpose of data sharing across different paradigms, methodologies, and research populations. In these debates, the academic community has centered the needs and voices of researchers, and participants’ perspectives are largely missing from this literature. In this study, we sought to understand how research participants feel about sharing qualitative data on a sensitive subject—sexual victimization. As part of a participatory action research project, we conducted qualitative interviews with sexual assault survivors about their post-assault help-seeking experiences. The federal funding agency that supported this project requires researchers to archive de-identified data in a national data repository (the National Archive of Criminal Justice Data [NACJD]). All participants consented to archiving data, and the vast majority expressed positive views about data sharing because they wanted to help other survivors. Participants emphasized that our participatory action research approach and our stated goal of helping survivors were important considerations in their decisions regarding data sharing. Researchers should obtain informed consent from their participants for data sharing/archiving, and discuss their dissemination plans during the informed consent process.

Pathfinding to Social Justice: Interweaving our Personal Journeys as Indigenous Feminist Psychologists

We share our personal journeys as Indigenous feminist psychologists in this article. We recognize and honor relationship with others, including each other. This is why we collaborated on our narrative based on our lived experience working definition of Indigenous feminism. We share the origins of our traditions and practices and their interconnections. We discuss identification and identity, guiding principles and values, and how our values and experiences interweave with our lives of service toward social justice.