Limits of deconstruction, deconstructing limits

Abstract

I am honored by Feminism & Psychology (F&P) devoting this Issue to a reassessment of Deconstructing Developmental Psychology (hereafter DDP) 20 years on. The nine articles in this issue thrill me not only by virtue of the unexpected narcissistic gratification of serious and appreciative scholarly engagement with this text, but in particular because they apply and extend its arguments to domains of theory and practice I could not have envisaged. Significantly, the commentaries elaborate critiques in a number of different directions, which speak to importantly distinct possibilities of and for intervention. These include the question of the status of (its) critique, its location inside or outside psychology, policy applications, cultural critiques, and pedagogical interventions and challenges.

Mother blaming and anorexia: How ideological state apparatuses have informed my perception of my mother's role in the formation of my eating disorder

“…Previous autoethnographic papers on women's health, EBs, and mother-daughter relationships have not tended to view the formation of the authors’ attitudes toward their mothers as a multifaceted, structurally determined phenomenon (Axelsen, 2009; Chatham-Carpenter, 2010; Frey, 2020; Holmes, 2016a; Johnson & Eaves, 2013; Lee & Pause, 2016; Mukai, 1989; Pausé, 2019; Spry, 2001; Tillmann, 2009). Taking inspiration from Burman (2015) and other feminist scholars, who made explicit the political and social forces underpinning traditional concepts and attitudes toward mothers in psychology and social sciences, I analyze the socio-political structures to deconstruct the social forces that led me to believe that my mother was primarily to blame for my disordered eating. Additionally, this paper describes the daughter's internalization of the mother-blaming narrative on the micro level, which helps fill the gap in the scientific body of knowledge that has resulted from previous papers’ macro-level treatment of mother-blaming (Elliott & Bowen, 2018; Harrison, 2012; Wright et al, 2015).…”