Feminist Psychology Research Articles

Reflecting on qualitative research, feminist methodologies and feminist psychology: In conversation with Virginia Braun and Victoria Clarke

Virginia Braun and Victoria Clarke met as PhD students at Loughborough University where their research was supervised by pioneering feminist psychologists Professors Sue Wilkinson and Celia Kitzinger. They began writing collaboratively about qualitative methods in 2006. Their first output was a paper on thematic analysis that has proved rather popular (25,000 citations and counting on Google Scholar), and they have subsequently written numerous chapters on thematic analysis and qualitative methods, a prize-winning textbook Successful Qualitative Research (Sage, 2013), they have edited (with Debra Gray) Collecting Qualitative Data (Cambridge University Press, 2017), and have books on thematic analysis and story completion (the latter with Naomi Moller) in progress (both for Sage). They were invited to give a joint keynote address at the 2016 POWS Conference and speak to the conference theme of feminist methodologies. Their talk was entitled ‘We can do it!’ Feminist qualitative research and methodological innovation and ended with everyone in the room flexing their biceps Rosie the Riveter style (you may have seen the pictures on Twitter)! Glen Jankowski met Virginia and Victoria at Victoria’s home in Gloucestershire in early November 2016 to discuss and reflect on their POWS keynote and feminist methodologies, qualitative research and feminist psychology more broadly. Glen audio recorded and transcribed the conversation, and all three have edited the transcript for clarity, including adding references where relevant for interested readers.

Sovereignty as a State of Craziness: Empowering Female Indigenous Psychologies in Australian “Reconciliatory Literature”

Reading and writing must be more than passive processes of mimetic display; rather, they should offer a platform for psychological transformations across race and gender. Thus literary sovereignty vis‐à‐vis ownership of creative expression and representations of self can be reclaimed. This essay offers close analysis of contemporary Australian Indigenous literature to explore the sovereignty of feminist psychologies. Does creative writing reflect a strengthening of female Indigenous psychologies, and how might this implicate race relations and the decolonization of textual worlds? These questions are inspired by Alexis Wright's most recent novel The Swan Book where she writes about “the quest to regain sovereignty over [her] own brain.” This article will explore the term craziness in a metaphorical sense: looking at whether rejecting dominant white culture equates to psychological sovereignty, improved mental well‐being, and better race relations in imaginary realms. Indigenous characters in Wright's The Swan Book and Marie Munkara's Every Secret Thing may appear “crazy” for living in a state of indifference, but paradoxically, it is this state of “craziness” or indifference that empowers them to find psychological peace and resist assimilation. Seeking psychological sovereignty means assuming a position so averse to patriarchy and colonization that it renders transformation in imaginary worlds, and urges transformation in the psyches of white readers too.

On Becoming a Feminist Psychologist

Feminists have seen profound changes in psychology both in the amount of research on women and gender and in the inclusion of women and others who have been underrepresented in psychology faculties. But beyond promoting those changes, what does it mean to be a feminist psychologist? Here, I discuss ways in which grounding my work in feminism has led to emotional reactions that have fueled my research but also, at times, been depleting. Researchers’ emotions have typically been thought of as contaminants to their work, but I suggest that they may be a critical part of our practice and should be acknowledged and explored. Reflecting on my own emotional reactions to doing research on violence against women has led me to recommend two ways to work for social justice: by changing the narrative about social problems and by working with advocates to do research that is useful to bring about change.

Living at the Crossroads: Centralizing Feminist Psychologies of Women of ColorLiving at the Crossroads: Centralizing Feminist Psychologies of Women of Color

Living at the Crossroads: Centralizing Feminist Psychologies of Women of ColorLiving at the Crossroads: Centralizing Feminist Psychologies of Women of Color

Adapting to Injustice

In this study, we link together moments of discrimination described by young bisexual women. We do so in order to theorize about associations between negative stereotypes heard early in one’s life and later minimization of personal discrimination. Using interviews with 13 young women, we sought to understand the types of negative messages participants heard about “bi/sexuality” as well as the ways that they perceived or did not perceive themselves as having experienced discrimination related to their sexuality. We found that family members and friends often described participants’ bisexuality as “disgusting,” “difficult to understand,” or “hot,” and participants described their own experiences with discrimination as “no big deal.” We use this analysis to build on previous research concerning microaggressions, sexual stigma, and denial of discrimination to discuss how familial, social, and political environments create a set of conditions in which later injustices are imagined as normative and inevitable. Finally, we discuss the methodological dilemmas facing feminist psychologists who aim to analyze discrimination and the challenges in documenting individuals’ experiences of stigma, which may be imagined as no big deal to individuals, but are in fact unjust. It is imperative to develop strategies to recognize, document, and critically assess how injustice becomes all too normal for some and the role that feminist psychology can play in changing this. A podcast conversation with the author of this article is available on PWQ 's website at http://pwq.sagepub.com/site/misc/Index/Podcasts.xhtml

Functionalism, Darwinism, and advances in the psychology of women and gender: From the 19th century to the 21st

Response to commentaries on “Functionalism, Darwinism, and the Psychology of Women: A Study in Social Myth” is organized around three themes and a question. The first theme is the importance of knowing the history of the study of women, gender, and sexuality. Second is the importance of what might be called “positive gatekeepers,” those in our field who have some degree of power or who may be better positioned to support our endeavors or be in a position to open doors to professional advancement. Third is a core feature of feminist psychology: The importance of acknowledging the ways in which social values are inherent in the research process. Taken together, these themes raise for me an important question to reflect upon: Where do we, as feminist psychologists, wish to have influence?

The Personal, Political, and Professional Life of Sandra Bem

The contributions of Sandra Bem, a pioneer in feminist psychology, are reviewed in the context of her life. From childhood and her early years as a second wave feminist activist in Pittsburgh, Bem challenged established gender conventions including dress codes, segregated employment ads, workplace discrimination, and marital roles. We follow the trajectory of Bem’s education and academic career, highlighting her three main contributions to feminist psychology: (a) psychological androgyny and the BSRI, (b) gender schema theory, and (c) the reproduction of sexual inequality via the lenses of gender. We also review her late life developments, such as her retraining in clinical psychology and her decision to end her own life after a diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease. Placing Bem’s activist and academic work in the context of her personal struggle against gender expectations, we include her own voice to illustrate how she integrated the personal, political, and professional from the beginning of her life until her last days. We show that over the last four decades, Sandra Bem’s contributions to theory and research transformed the study of the psychology of women in the United States and had an international reach—adding immensely to our understanding of gender roles, stereotypes, nonconscious gender ideologies, psychological androgyny, gender schemas, and gender-aschematic parenting, as well as how androcentrism, gender polarization, and biological essentialism work systemically and psychologically to reproduce gender inequality.

III. Historical significance of Shields’ 1975 essay: A brief commentary on four major contributions

This article argues that Shields’ work demonstrated that it is impossible to practice value-free science. And, despite the efforts of many feminist psychologists who have argued that the question of sex differences is someone else’s question, biological theories about the differences between women and men are still popular and influential today. This paper will call attention to four areas of scholarship produced by second-wave feminist psychologists who were inspired by Shields’ work: (1) rediscovery of the work of first-wave feminist psychologists, (2) discussion of the impossibility of value-free research on sex differences, (3) introduction of new categories of analysis such as “gender” and reframing research based on these new categories, and (4) addition of more value-laden categories to sex such as race, social class, and sexuality and using intersectionality theory to design new avenues of research.

VI. Feminist psychology – poststructuralism, class and maternal subjectivities: Where are we and where should we go next?

VI. Feminist psychology – poststructuralism, class and maternal subjectivities: Where are we and where should we go next?

VII. Moving toward integrative feminist evolutionary behavioral sciences

There is a long history of mostly antagonist interactions between feminist and evolutionary scholarship in the behavioral sciences. However, recent theoretical and empirical advances have highlighted that “nature” and “nurture” are not mutually exclusive, or even divorceable, levels of explanation. New developments in evolutionary theory, articulated under the name of “the extended synthesis,” show significant promise for integrating feminist and evolutionary approaches to the study of human behavior. The extended synthesis provides feminist inquiry and research an expanded ground on which to enter the conversation, such as with the inclusion of “fast” evolution – the idea that genetic and epigenetic (environmentally influenced gene expression) traits can change within a generation – which demonstrates that there has in fact been evolutionary time to (adaptively) alter behavior and physiology. This integration has the potential to lead to new research paradigms that bridge the old divide between “nature” and “nurture”, resulting in transdisciplinary frameworks that show the interaction effects between each. Feminism and feminist psychology will be more complete descriptors and analyzers of human behavior in this model, and crucial interaction effects historically ignored by both the sciences and humanities may now receive due consideration.

X. Functionalism, Darwinism, and intersectionality: Using an intersectional perspective to reveal the appropriation of science to support the status quo

Why should anyone care about long-dead 19th-century scientists’ thoughts about the differences between women and men? And what does such a paper have to say to our contemporary concerns? I believe that knowledge of this history is invaluable to the health and progress of feminist psychology. This history, when viewed through an intersectional lens, can give us insight into the complex way in which values can constrict research questions and methods, can narrow and oversimplify what counts as “data,” and can be used as a regressive instrument to shore up the sociocultural status quo. In this paper I first briefly review the context in which “Functionalism, Darwinism, and the Psychology of Women” (hereinafter Functionalism/Darwinism) was written. Then I examine what the addition of an intersectionality perspective to that work adds to our understanding of the history of the psychology of women and gender. I focus on the intersection of gender and race (and briefly touch on social class) because these were critical to 19th-century scientific justifications for existing status and power relations.

Book Review: Gendered journeys: Women, migration, and feminist psychology

Book Review: Gendered journeys: Women, migration, and feminist psychology

Intersectionality in Quantitative Psychological Research

Intersectional approaches, which consider how simultaneous membership in multiple social categories characterize our experiences and are linked to power and privilege, have deep roots in feminist psychology. While an intersectional approach is well suited to a variety of research questions and topics, its application to date has chiefly been found with qualitative methods; when quantitative methods are used, components of the approach are used but not clearly framed as intersectional. Building upon our previous discussion and analysis of the theoretical and epistemological issues that arise when combining intersectionality and quantitative methods, this article articulates how quantitative researchers might incorporate an intersectional approach into their work. The techniques we describe are frequently used within quantitative methods, but they are infrequently used within an intersectional approach. Techniques include framing social categories (e.g., gender and ethnicity) as person variables or as stimulus variables, using a between-groups design to examine multiple locations at an intersection, stratified random sampling and purposive sampling, and examining how measures demonstrate conceptual equivalence and measurement invariance across groups. We also focus on data-analytic methods, which include examination of multiple main effects and interactions, moderators in meta-analysis, multilevel modeling, moderated mediation, and person-centered methods. These methods are insufficient without also including intersectional interpretations and framing with attention to inequalities and power relations. Online slides for instructors who want to use this article (and the related response articles) for teaching are available on PWQ's website at http://pwq.sagepub.com/supplemental

Decolonizing Empowerment: Implications for Sustainable Well‐Being

Dutt, Grabe, and Castro's (2015) research on implications of market participation for Maasai women's empowerment provides an important basis for rethinking liberatory standards of psychological science and international gender development. Drawing upon their research, we apply a decolonial feminist psychology analysis to the topic of empowerment. This perspective suggests that neoliberal interventions to promote empowerment and well‐being in Majority‐World spaces (i) may cause harm by depriving people of environmentally afforded connection and (ii) reproduce historical and ongoing forms of (neo)colonial domination in ways that are inconsistent with the broader empowerment of humanity in general.

Feminism, psychology and becoming a mother

The period of becoming a mother is a fundamental issue for feminism and a challenging one for psychology, involving a specific set of psychological processes and psychic changes that are hard to access through available language and discourses. How we understand, theorise and represent the perinatal period of mothering reaches into questions of gender equality and gender difference, parenting and how feminist psychology has tended to treat women’s reproductive bodies and the biological. To explore these themes, the article draws on a piece of empirical research about becoming a mother for the first time, using matrixial theory to point beyond the binaries in feminist psychological accounts of women’s reproductive capacities, parental care and gender equality.

Decolonizing Liberation: Toward a Transnational Feminist Psychology

This paper engages the theme of “decolonizing psychological science” in the context of a perspective on psychological theory and research—namely, feminist psychology—that shares an emphasis on broad liberation. Although conceived as a universal theory and practice of liberation, scholars across diverse sites have suggested that feminism—perhaps especially as it manifests in psychological science—is not always compatible with and at times is even contradictory to global struggles for decolonization. The liberatory impulse of feminist psychology falls short of its potential not only because of its grounding in neocolonial legacies of hegemonic feminisms, but also because of its complicity with neocolonial tendencies of hegemonic psychological science. In response to these concerns, we draw upon on perspectives of transnational feminisms and cultural psychology as tools to decolonize (feminist) psychology. We then propose the possibility of a (transnational) feminist psychology that takes the epistemological position of people in various marginalized majority-world settings as a resource to rethink conventional scientific wisdom and liberate “liberation”. Rather than freeing some women to better participate in global domination, a transnational feminist psychology illuminates sustainable ways of being that are consistent with broader liberation of humanity in general.

The Correlation Between Feminist Identity Development and Psychological Maltreatment in Intimate Relationships Among College Students

The purpose of this study was to determine if a relationship exists between feminist identity and psychological maltreatment in intimate relationships among college students. Existing research and theories have raised questions about the relationship between these constructs, but no studies have yet explored the relationship between them. The intent of the following article is to present findings and implications that can inform student affairs practice and contribute to a better understanding of intimate partner violence.

What makes feminist knowledge legitimate for therapists? A study of Swedish child psychotherapists

This study investigated what it is like to be a feminist clinical psychologist in a country with a long commitment to gender equality. We studied how two Swedish clinical child psychologists committed to promoting gender equality talked about issues of gender and inequality in their clinical work. We identified three interpretative repertoires that formed the basis of these clinicians' talk about gender and gender equality: a repertoire built on ideas about basic inherent differences between boys and girls, but nonetheless valuing boys and girls equally; a repertoire emphasizing similar treatment, built on the assumption that gender is of no importance, and that everybody has equal value; and a repertoire built on views of girls and boys as unequally valued by society at large. Both clinicians drew upon all three repertoires. However, they used the repertoires in starkly different ways depending on whether they assumed that knowledge that presupposes gendered power structures can be considered legitimate professional knowledge.

Fat Studies 101: Learning to Have Your Cake and Eat It Too

Fat Studies 101: Learning to Have Your Cake and Eat It Too

The Legacy of Transformational Moments in Feminist Psychology

Important turning points in the history of feminist psychology can sometimes be traced to particular moments—specific publications or situations in which an individual or group sparked advancement of the field. Just as there are national milestones (e.g., formation of the American Psychological Association’s Division 35, the Society for the Psychology of Women and formation of the Association for Women in Psychology), there are also transformational moments with a local flavor, that is, events specific to a city, college/university, or specialization within psychology that play a role in the development of our field. In this article, I report the initial findings of a project aimed at collecting feminist psychologists’ first-person accounts of local events or activities (late 1960s to the present) that contributors believe have influenced, or are influencing, the development of feminist psychology, especially the scholarship of feminist psychology. Thus, this ongoing project focuses on the experiences of psychologists who organized, participated in, or benefited from the development of feminist psychology. Feminist psychologists in all phases of their careers in the United States and internationally are invited to participate by visiting the Division 35 website. The archive comprising these accounts complements existing archives of the history of psychology and individual biographies and autobiographies.