Psychology's renewed interest in the body, even within feminist theory, has brought with it several philosophical and theoretical challenges. These challenges stem mainly from questions about how to celebrate a return to the body when conceptions of the meaning of `woman' have been tied historically to women's bodies. That is, for feminists, any return to the body requires a two-fold examination. It requires first an inquiry into the part of reigning epistemological assumptions in psychology's fastening of women's bodies to women's psyches, and its construction of women's psychological problems as rooted in their bodies. And, second, it necessitates attention to those ways in which women's bodies have confronted age-old mind-body splits. Only by this twinned appreciation of the body both as the site of oppression and as the possibility for emancipation can feminists move beyond repeating yet another variation of woman as body.
The trouble with culturally diverse theory in feminist psychology is that everything is trouble. We begin with a paradox: Feminist thinking in the social sciences (and of critical thought in general) has generated provocative and trenchant analyses that simultaneously render the most basic tools, language, and even the very institution of science problematic. Over the past 25 years, feminist and critical psychologists have uncovered the androcentric axes structuring what is taken to be "psychology" and what psychologists aspire to when we make "theory." They have uncovered unsettling components that comprised our traditional categories of "woman" and "gender." Such critical scrutiny has revealed troublesome implications that arise from studying cultural diversity, including problems with the From the outset, our task to approach the possibility of cultural diverse theory in psychology posed plentiful troubles, and we soon discovered that we could do nothing less than make trouble. Later, we encountered Judith Butler's mapping of gender trouble and are indebted to her extensive analyses. We also thank Melanie Killen, Hope Landrine, Roslyn Mendelson, Scott PIOUS, and Robert Steele for their critical readings and suggestions. Preparation of this chapter was supported in part by a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Postdoctoral Fellowship awarded to
The history of twentieth century American social psychology is often told as a story of developing laboratory procedures to more scientifically comprehend the psychological dynamics of the social. This chapter expands upon that story by exploring a more inclusive perspective on social psychology's maturation. Considered in this more compressive historical review are the field's immediate predecessors who generated an eclectic and intellectually stimulating theories of social‐psychological processes. Considered, too, is the play of politics, both how social psychologists took up concurrent political concerns or mirrored prevalent political attitudes in their research and also how some researchers deployed research to challenge or critically investigate those politics. Social psychological investigations contributed substantively to the twentieth century's shifting understanding of the relations of the individual to the social world. New technologies, notably cybernetics and computers, were not only utilized in social psychology experimentation but were integral to this rethinking of the individual and social. Most recently, these technologies have guided researchers to conceptualize social psychological processes as faulty information processors; the discipline, however, did not—and has not—become monolithic and some researchers have generated quite different theoretical visions. Whether through confirming accounts or critically interventions, through applications in business or explorations of new views of human kinds, social psychology has been actively engaged in the making of American social life.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
hi@scite.ai
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.