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As we approach Feminism & Psychology 's 30th anniversary, we reflect on and explore what makes the journal distinctive – its emphasis on critical feminist psychology. In this article and the accompanying Virtual Special Issue, we outline five methodological considerations that we believe are at the heart of critical feminist scholarship: 1) the politics of asking questions; 2) attention to language/discourse; 3) reflexivity; 4) representation and intersectionality; and 5) mobilizing research for social change. We then draw across a set of 15 articles published in the archives of Feminism & Psychology that showcase one or more of these key features and demonstrate the 'doing' of critical feminist psychology. These articles are housed on the journal's website, as is an additional paper developed for students or those in a position of learning, which explores central ideas and debates that have culminated in critical feminist psychology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sexual harassment has received unprecedented attention in recent years. Within academia, it has a particularly reflexive relationship with the human sciences in which sexual harassment can be both an object of research and a problematic behavior amongst those engaged in that research. This paper offers a partial history in which these two are brought together as a common object of social psychology's culture of sexual harassment. Here we follow Haraway in using culture to capture the sense-making that psychologists do through and to the side of their formal knowledge production practices. Our history is multi-sited and draws together (1) the use of sexual harassment as an experimental technique, (2) feminist activism and research which made sexual harassment an object of knowledge in social psychology, and (3) oral history accounts of sexual harassment amongst social psychologists. By reading these contexts against each other, we provide a thick description of how sexual harassment initiates women and men into cultures of control in experimental social psychology and highlight the ethical-epistemological dilemma inherent in disciplinary practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I highlight key differences between a discourse analytic approach to women’s accounts of abortion and that taken by the growing body of research that seeks to explore and measure women’s experiences of abortion stigma. Drawing on critical analyses of the conceptualisation of stigma in other fields of healthcare, I suggest that research on abortion stigma often risks reifying it by failing to consider how identities are continually re-negotiated through language-use. In contrast, by attending to language as a form of social action, discursive psychology makes it possible to emphasise speakers’ capacity to construct “untroubled” (i.e. non-stigmatised) identities, while acknowledging that this process is constrained by the contexts in which talk takes place. My analysis applies these insights to interviews with women concerning their experiences of having an abortion in England. I highlight three forms of discursive work through which women navigate “trouble” in their accounts of abortion, and critically consider the resources available for meaning-making within this particular context of talk. In doing so, I aim to provoke reflection about the discursive frameworks through which women’s accounts of abortion are solicited and explored. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a feminist Foucauldian analysis of women’s interpretations of images of women in post-feminist advertising. Building on Ros Gill’s analysis of post-feminist advertising images of women, and more specifically the figure of ‘the midriff ’, the paper presents an analysis of focus group discussions with seven young women who were asked to discuss ‘midriff’ advertising images. Whilst participants sometimes construed these images positively as ‘sexy’ and independent, midriff figures were more frequently constituted negatively as ‘bimbos’ and/or ‘slutty’ ‘sex objects’ whose seeming independence was achieved through or limited only to attracting men. In interpreting midriff figures negatively, participants, we suggest, constituted the midriff as other; as different and distant from themselves and ‘normal’ women. Where occasionally participants interpreted images more favourably, the midriff figure was, in contrast, constituted as ‘normal’ and ‘natural’ and as being about ‘what she likes, not what he likes’. Participants did not identify themselves or their arguments as feminist. Nevertheless, they articulated critiques of these images which often converged significantly with critical feminist analyses. Our analysis suggests, therefore, that young women read these images in complex ways. These complexities of interpretation, we argue, should be central in understanding the relationships between women, bodies and post-feminist images of women’s bodies. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) offers a biomedical framing of people’s experiences of distress and impairment, and despite decades of criticism, it remains the dominant approach. This dominance is maintained not only by powerful corporate interests such as the pharmaceutical industry, but also through the everyday talk of people as they attempt to make meaning of themselves and their experiences. This paper explores how and why the DSM holds such cultural currency for individual speakers, and unpacks what is being accomplished in their taking up the language of psychiatric diagnosis. In particular, we argue that a biomedical construction of distress offers the lure, or promise, of validating persons’ pain and legitimizing their identities. However, we also argue that the very assumptions of biomedicine ensure that this promise can never entirely be fulfilled and, despite its lure, a biomedical construction of ‘mental illness’ all too frequently fails to protect individuals from delegitimation and stigma. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Debates about the relationship between culture and gender, and the potential contradictions involved in simultaneously respecting both multicultural and feminist principles and values, have occupied an important place in theoretical discussion in the social sciences and humanities. This paper examines the relationship between gender and culture from the perspective of the psychotherapeutic encounter in a multicultural society, in this case contemporary South Africa. With the help of illustrative case material involving traumatically bereaved women who became subject to cultural ascriptions of maliciousness or murderousness, and where cultural beliefs potentially jeopardized gender rights, mental health and therapeutic recovery, the article argues that the relationship between gender and culture, viewed from a therapeutic perspective, can be seen to present complex conceptual and ethical challenges for the therapist. In addition, the structural, psychological and discursive positioning of the therapist and client in respect of warrants to speak and to accept or contest cultural constructions is recognized as implicated in particular kinds of therapeutic impasses. Both clinical and political concerns are discussed in order to illustrate the intersections between the intrapsychic and the social, as well as between the personal and the political. Two related lines of theory, that of intersectionality (derived primarily from feminist theory) and of psychoanalytic theory, are proposed and juxtaposed as a productive way of thinking about instances in which the interface between gender and culture presents particular kinds of problems in the consulting room for both clients and therapists. The necessity for a particular kind of critical self, group and cultural awareness is proposed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]