Feminist Perspectives In Psychology

Sumanai is a Japanese word that refers to a feeling in response to a favor; it includes gratitude, along with sorrow and sometimes guilt for having put the benefactor to so much trouble. The purpose of the current research was to explore sumanai, gratitude, and indebtedness, and their relations to interpersonal orientation and psychological well-being. Results from Study 1 with 115 female Japanese university students confirmed the distinct meanings of gratitude, sumanai, and indebtedness in terms of their dissimilar correlations with other feelings. The results also revealed that when the benefactor’s expectation for repayment was manipulated, gratitude and sumanai, but not indebtedness, decreased with increasing benefactor expectations. In Study 2 with a sample of 179 female Japanese university students, sumanai had a significant positive correlation with interpersonal orientation but did not have a significant positive correlation with psychological well-being. Interpersonal orien...

1 Editorial
Jane Callaghan
Article
3 How is this feminist again?
Q as a feminist methodology
Sandra Roper, Rose Capdevila,
Lisa Lazard & Anca Roberts
Article
13 Mothers and Children? Representations of
mothers in research on children’s outcomes
in domestic violence
Jane Callaghan
Article
21 Women who choose not to have children:
A preliminary study
Rose O’Driscoll & Jenny Mercer
Interview
31 Constructing (and resisting) the
'good parenting' mandate
Donna Peach & Dr Abigail Locke
Undergraduate POWS Prize Winner
33 ‘I want to make sure that I don’t let
physics stop me from being a woman’:
A critical discursive analysis of a group
discussion with female doctoral physics
students on issues of gender and identity
construction in a male-dominated field
Jen Tidman
Postgraduate POWS Prize Winner
39 What is breast cancer ‘survivorship’?
A discursive psychological analysis of a
blogger’s lived experiences of the media’s
representation of being a breast cancer
‘survivor’
Cathy Ure
Interview
48 Doing feminism
Amanda Perl interviews Reni Eddo-Lodge
Article
52 Cutting her nose to spite his face:
Violence against women in India
and the collusion of power
Sonia Soans
Agora
66 Swimming against the tide or a fish out of
water? A reflection on gender, sexism
and student life
Laura Mitchell
Agora
70 Emerging Feminists
Helen Owton
Conference Review
74 Psychology of Women Section’s
Annual Conference
Glen Jankowski
Conference Review
78 International Qualitative Research in
Sport Exercise, and Health Conference
Jenny McMahon
Event Review
81 QMiP event: Multiple Transformations
of Qualitative Data
Gemma Heath
Book Review
84 Alternative Femininities:
Body, Age and Identity
Samantha Holland
Reviewed by Charlotte Dann

Gender and sex diversity exist in humans, but are often seen as too complex for scientists to incorporate beyond a female/male binary or placement on single dimensions. Here, we demonstrate a novel method for assessing and visualizing diverse gender/sexes using diagrams adapted from sexual configurations theory (SCT; van Anders, 2015). We asked participants (N ϭ 242) with diverse gender/sex identities to locate their genders, sexes, and gender/sexes (i.e., "gender/sex configurations") by marking and writing on SCT's diagrams via an online platform. Results showed that visualizing gender/sex (a) demonstrated the complexity underlying seemingly simple gender/sexes such as "woman" and "man," and (b) provided a way to systematically describe seemingly complex gender/sexes. These findings suggest that SCT visualizations provide a way for people of diverse gender/sex identities and experiences to represent the fullness and complexity of their gender/sexes in ways that can help create a more inclusive psychological science. This article is Part 1 of a 2-part report, and Part 2 explores the ways participants reacted to and perceived SCT and this novel survey (Beischel, Schudson, & van Anders, 2021). Public Significance Statement We demonstrate a new way of visualizing gender, sex, and gender/sex via sexual configurations theory (SCT) that reveals insights into the complex nature of gender/sex categories. Our findings indicate that SCT may be a useful tool for researchers, educators, and clinicians who study and work with gender/sex diversity.

Nietzsche is known for his penetrating critique of Mitleid (now commonly rendered as ‘compassion’).  He seems to be critical of all compassion but at times also seems to praise a different form of compassion, which he refers to as “our compassion” and contrasts it with “your compassion” (Beyond Good and Evil § 225). Some commentators have interpreted this to mean that Nietzsche’s criticism is not as unconditional as it may seem–that he does not condemn compassion entirely. I disagree and contend that even though Nietzsche appears to speak favorably of some forms of compassion, he regards the nature of all compassion to be fundamentally bad. Furthermore, I suggest that Nietzsche’s discussion on different forms of compassion have significant implications for achieving greatness and meaning in life. More specifically, I argue that, for Nietzsche, ‘our compassion’, however regrettable qua compassion it is, may give occasion for a rare and peculiar insight into ‘co-suffering’ with others, which in turn results in overcoming compassion entirely. I also argue that although Nietzsche objects to compassion, he approves of a form of what feminist theorists might now call ‘anticipatory empathy’. Even though a large body of literature has evolved over Nietzsche’s critical evaluation of compassion, his understanding of a non-compassionate response to suffering is, in my view, rather overlooked and should receive more attention.

The anima and animus archetypes are two of C. G. Jung’s most challenging contributions to the field of psychoanalytical thought—perhaps all the more so because the conceptual development of these archetypes has coincided with the gradual shift away from the rigidly patriarchal culture of Jung’s time and the simultaneous rise of the feminist movement. Fundamental elements of Jungian depth psychology, anima and animus—the unconscious compensatory, and therefore contrasexual, characteristics of man and woman respectively—have undergone considerable reconfiguration in the increasingly egalitarian sociocultural context of post-Jungian thought. Although they have proved tremendously valuable to the field of depth psychology, Jung’s gender-biased conceptions of these archetypes and their inevitable implications concerning the nature of masculinity and femininity do not work for many contemporary men and women. In order to retain the value of Jung’s visionary work while shedding its metaphorical corset, I have examined the conceptual development of the archetypes from the writings of Jung and Emma Jung through the post-Jungian work of Edward C. Whitmont, James Hillman, Claire Douglas, and Gareth Hill. These updated theories remain limiting, however, and I believe that further reconfiguration is still necessary.

This paper challenges post-feminist discourses and recuperative masculinity politics in education that have evoked mythical constructions of the successful ‘achieving’ girl in ways that flatten out social and cultural difference and render invisible
ongoing gendered and sexualised inequalities and violence in the social worlds of schools and beyond. We map how girls negotiate contradictory neo-liberal discourses of girlhood that dominate in popular culture; what McRobbie calls the new ‘post-feminist masquerade’, which portends that girls can be/come anything
they want, so long as they simultaneously perform ‘hyper-sexy’, the new aspirational feminine ideal. Drawing on individual case studies from four qualitative research projects with teen girls in urban and rural working class communities across England and Wales, we explore how specific ‘working-class’ girls struggle to
negotiate this contradictory terrain of girlhood through imaginary ‘lines of flight’ in their narratives. Specifically, we are interested in applying Deleuze and Guatarri’s writings on immanence and the productive, social status of desire and fantasy through an analysis of girls’ (violent, aggressive or utopian) fantasies in ways that move beyond the binary of ‘real/not real’, and thus reject a reading of fantasy as futile, ‘escapist’ or ‘pathological solutions to working class life’. We suggest fantasy might operate as a space of survivability, political subjectivity and resistance to girls’ subordination within Butler’s ‘heterosexual matrix’.

This paper draws on school-based ethnographic research in two elementary schools (South Wales, UK and Oulu, Finland) to explore the ‘ordinary affects’ (Stewart 2009) of gendered/sexual power in young children's (age 5-6) negotiation of their own and others’ bodies in playground and classroom spaces. We apply queer and feminist appropriations of Deleuze and Guattari’s key concepts of ‘assemblage’, ‘becomings’ and ‘territorialisations’, not to pin down what a kiss is, but to explore the kiss as always more than itself, and thus what (else) a kiss can do. To explore the affective journey of the kiss as an always-relational social-material event, we sketch a range of kissing assemblages across four vignettes – ‘the kiss chase’, ‘the classroom kiss’, ‘the kissing line’ and ‘the dinosaur kiss’ – mapping the enabling/restriction of a range of gendered and sexual becomings. Each vignette foregrounds the complex, contradictory nature of children’s gendered and sexual cultures which we argue are vital to map in a socio-political terrain where discourses of denial, silence and (over)protection dominate accounts of how young children are doing, being and becoming ‘sexual’.

This is the Introduction chapter, "Diagnosing Gender through Desire: How You Know You’re in Bed with a Woman," from my recently released book, Diagnosing Desire: Biopolitics and Femininity into the Twenty-First Century (OSUP, October 2020):

The complete book is available here: https://ohiostatepress.org/books/titles/9780814214510.html

Use code "DIAGNOSING" for 30% off the paperback + free shipping in the U.S.

This viewpoint begins by exploring whether the global phenomenon of the 2011 ‘SlutWalks’ constitutes a feminist politics of re-signification. We then look at some qualitative, focus group data with teen girls who participated in a UK
SlutWalk. We suggest girls are not only negotiating a schizoid double pull towards performing knowing sexy ‘slut’ in postfeminist media contexts, but also managing de-sexualising protectionist discourses in school, particularly in relation to the highly regulatory moral panic over child ‘sexualistion’. We consider whether the SlutWalks are adult-centric and if teen girls’ involvement in a SlutWalk offered any critical rupturings to sexual regulation in their everyday lives.

"Psychology defines people who take pleasure in the suffering of others as having a form of mental illness, while media representations frame such behaviour as ‘evil’. This is hotly contested territory, not least where sexual violence is concerned – violence which feminist voices argue is related to power rather than sex.

Perverse Psychology examines psychiatric constructions of sexual violence and transgenderism from the 19th century until the latest DSM-5 diagnoses. It uses discourse analysis to interrogate the discursive boundaries between 'normal' and 'abnormal' rape, as well as the pathologization of gender and sexual diversity. The book illuminates for the first time the parallels between psychiatry’s construction of gender diversity and sexual violence, and leads us to question whether it is violence that the profession finds so intriguing, or the gender nonconformity it represents.

Perverse Psychology is ideal reading for postgraduate students and researchers in the fields of critical psychology, discourse analysis, feminism, transgenderism, LGBT psychology, and the history of psychiatry.

REVIEWS:

‘This highly original, closely argued and ingenious analysis reverses the discourse of pathology to reveal psychology and psychiatry models as perverse, rather than those they diagnose. It unpacks conventional understandings of the relations between gender and sexuality to show how 'paraphilic rape' is constructed as a perversion of gender, rather than sexuality, so showing how assumptions of gender and (ir)rationality inhabit classifications of pathological sexual violence. Tosh generates an alternative analysis of psychiatric discourses around sexual coercion/violence, to link campaigns against rape with those against gender non-conformity, demonstrating how urgent methodological and political consequences follow from transfeminist perspectives.’ – Erica Burman, Professor of Education, Manchester Institute of Education, The University of Manchester, UK"

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.

This article is a theoretical treatment of feminist epistemology of crime, which advocates the centrality of gender as a theoretical starting point for the investigating of digital crimes. It does so by exploring the synergy between the feminist perspectives and the Tripartite Cybercrime Framework (TCF) (which argues that three possible factors motivate cybercrimes – socioeconomic, psychosocial, and geopolitical) to critique mainstream criminology and the meaning of the term “cybercrime”. Additionally, the article examines gender gaps in online harassment, cyber‐bullying, cyber‐fraud, revenge porn, and cyber‐stalking to demonstrate that who is victimised, why, and to what effect are the critical starting points for the analysis of the connections between gender and crimes. In turn, it uses the lens of intersectionality to acknowledge that, while conceptions of gender and crime interact, they intersect with other categories (e.g., sexuality) to provide additional layers of explanation. To nuance the utilitarian value of the synergy between the TCF and the feminist perspectives, the focus shifts to a recent case study (which compared socioeconomic and psychosocial cybercrimes). The article concludes that, while online and offline lives are inextricably intertwined, the victimisations in psychosocial cybercrimes may be more gendered than in socioeconomic cybercrimes. These contributions align the TCF to the feminist epistemology of crime in their attempt to move gender analysis of digital crimes “from margin to centre”.

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 ta...

Cultivation of compassion through meditation training is of increasing interest to scientists, healthcare providers, educators, and policy makers as an approach to help address challenging personal and social issues. Yet people encounter critical inner psychological barriers to compassion that limit the effectiveness of compassion training—including the lack of a secure base, aversion to suffering, feeling alone in suffering, and reductive impressions of others. These barriers emerge, in part, from a lack of relational support and are exacerbated by modernist conceptions that present meditation as an autonomous, self-help practice. This article proposes a solution centered on relationality, derived from the integration of diverse areas of psychology with contemplative traditions. Theories and findings from social, developmental, and health psychology can inform meditation programs and help recover important relational elements of compassion training from traditional cultures that ad...

Research tool for scholars. Comprehensive list of all publications related to Freud's case of Dora, including a comprehensive list of 113 journal articles, 68 book chapters, 6 books, 4 anthologies, 2 dedicated journal issues, 4 produced plays, a musical, 2 films, 3 novels, 12 book reviews, 4 theses/dissertations, and more that are directly related to Freud’s case of Dora.

Readers are recommended to the following two articles for a comprehensive historical/clinical/ cultural overview of the Dora case and its significance, which describes the content and context of many of these publications.

Jennings, J. (2022). Freud’s case of Dora: Wellspring of discovery and discourse. Open Journal of Social Sciences, 10(1), 290-314.

Jennings, J. (1986). The revival of “Dora”: Advances in psychoanalytic theory and technique. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 34(3), 607-635.

The Slavic term " maternal fright " is carved from chronic wars and violence towards women and is a form of transgenerational trauma. The forgotten conflict, the Balkan War of 1991-95 in the former Yugoslav region, resulted in South Slavic female survivors in the aftermath of war utilizing extensive cultural practices including- oral memory traditions to ameliorate their experiences of trauma with greater focus on eradicating maternal fright (Anderson, 2015, Christie & Pim, 2012, DeMause, 2006).  This review of interdisciplinary fields from biosemiotics, epigenetics, perinatal psychology, oral memory theories, and neuroscience is use to frame the survivors’ trauma as intensified learning and a space and place for healing. The tacit female knowledge embedded in South Slavic oral memory traditions connects to complex biologically aligned practices (Anderson, 2015, Wheeler, 2006).  For example, the body clock, or circadian rhythms, are regulated with oral memory practices to maintain and heal trauma (Anderson, 2012; Laber-Warren, 2015).

Eleanor Gibson and Richard Walk’s famous visual cliff experiment is one of psychology’s classic studies, included in most introductory textbooks. Yet the famous version which centers on babies is actually a simplification, the result of disciplinary myth-making. In fact the visual cliff’s first subjects were rats, and a wide range of animals were tested on the cliff including chicks, turtles, lambs, kid goats, pigs, kittens, dogs, and monkeys. The visual cliff experiment was more accurately a series of experiments, employing varying methods and a changing apparatus, modified to test different species. This paper focuses on the initial, non-human subjects of the visual cliff, re-situating the study in its original experimental logic, connecting it to the history of comparative psychology, Gibson’s interest in comparative psychology, as well as gender-based discrimination. Recovering the visual cliff’s forgotten menagerie helps to counter the romanticization of experimentation by focusing on the role of extra-scientific factors, chance, complexity, and uncertainty in the experimental process.

Cultivation of compassion through meditation training is of increasing interest to scientists, healthcare providers, educators, and policy makers as an approach to help address challenging personal and social issues. Yet people encounter critical inner psychological barriers to compassion that limit the effectiveness of compassion training—including the lack of a secure base, aversion to suffering, feeling alone in suffering, and reductive impressions of others. These barriers emerge, in part, from a lack of relational support and are exacerbated by modernist conceptions that present meditation as an autonomous, self-help practice. This article proposes a solution centered on relationality, derived from the integration of diverse areas of psychology with contemplative traditions. Theories and findings from social, developmental, and health psychology can inform meditation programs and help recover important relational elements of compassion training from traditional cultures that ad...

A thin Bosnian-Herzegovinian pregnant woman in her late twenties had big dark circles under her eyes; her hands shook even at rest. When she began sharing her maternal fright, she released expressions that were formerly deliberately hidden and avoided. The fear and trauma is acute and chronic since the South Slavic, former Yugoslavian peoples, have endured a century of wars, including World Wars I and II and the Balkan War.For sixteen years, I have been working extensively with the BosnianHerzegovinian women who are survivors of war and war crimes in the aftermath of the Balkan War (1991-1993). I will discuss my perspective on how maternal fright is the embodiment of transgenerational fear and trauma through female neurobiological processes (Anderson, 2014; Christie & Pim, 2012).I observed that the South Slavic women war survivors were focused on healing the effects of violence. Based on the numerous interviews and sessions with the survivors, I noted how their healing from violence...

Previous researchers have noted the domination of Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) samples in fields like psychology. In this study we asked: how WEIRD and androcentric is contemporary sex research? We focused on two historically underrepresented groups in research, namely non-WEIRD and women/gender non-conforming samples. We analyzed 2,223 articles drawn from five leading journals in scientific sexuality research (Archives of Sexual Behavior, Journal of Sex Research, Journal of Sex and Marital Therapy, Journal of Sexual Medicine, and International Journal of Sexual Health). We coded the national context and gender of sampled populations for articles published between 2015 and 2019 in these journals. Results indicated that WEIRD populations dominate the published findings in sex research (ranging from 68% to 88%). Two journals had a higher number of studies that only included men as participants, and one a higher number of samples that consisted of onl...

The Call for Submissions flyer and a General Poster for the International Society for Theoretical Psychology conference in Coventry from June 26th to 30th 2015. See http://www.coventry.ac.uk/events/ISTP2015/ and Twitter @istp2015 for more details. Please distribute to anyone who might be interested in coming to the UK to discuss all matters theoretical, critical and philosophical in relation to psychology and its allied disciplines.
Dr. Gavin B. Sullivan
Conference Chair

Sexual violence has featured in psychiatric theorizing of ‘perversion’ since the late 19th century and continues with ongoing research into the medical ‘treatment’ of rapists (e.g. Shaw, 2012). Whether it’s Krafft-Ebing’s (1892) ‘lust murderers’, Money’s (1986) ‘biastophilic rapists’ or the American Psychiatric Association’s recent proposal for ‘paraphilic coercive disorder’ (APA [DSM-5], 2010), sexual violence is of interest to psychiatry. Even the first edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual described ‘sexual sadism’ as ‘…including rape [and] sexual assault’ (APA [DSM-I], 1952: 39). This lecture will outline the development of psychiatric theorizing about sexual violence and interrogate its discursive boundary between ‘normal’ and ‘abnormal’ rape. It will also examine the criticisms regarding this construction of sexual violence from other disciplines, social movements, and those who self-identify as having a ‘paraphilia’.

This paper explores the tensions and dislocations linked to my doctoral fieldwork in El Salvador. I reflect upon my experiences as an emerging community psychologist, engaging with feminist theory to frame my praxis and draw out new directions for social justice research based in ethics, witnessing and inclusive knowledge practices.

My understanding of authority differs from that of the academy in that I have defined for myself a sense of ultimate purpose that those in power in the institution do not have authority to deny. It also differs because I believe my authority is conditioned in particular ways. Yet I think that ultimately my conception of authority fits the paradigm of mentorship that the academy establishes, even though I may be more guarded about my work and my choice of mentors. My “her-story” gives me the courage to proceed, even as I protect myself and my work.