“Other” psychologists: An autoethnographic conversation about difference,deviance and defiance

Prologue

Compulsory heterosexuality and compulsory able-bodiedness are two ways in which the socio-political world is ordered. The “ideal able-bodied identity” and the failure to conform to this notion is an experience of othering with which many disabled people are confronted (Slater & Embla, 2018, p. 416). The ideal of ability – without disability – is normalised and institutionalised to the extent of going unnoticed in society, as is compulsory heterosexuality, or the heterosexual ideal (Chappell, 2015; McRuer, 2006). Both aspects of subjectivity come into being through a constant repetition of actions and narratives that construct the world as the sole reserve of heterosexual and able-bodied people. Anyone failing to adhere to the standards of heterosexuality and able-bodiedness is considered “other”, even deviant; society's assumption is that those who deviate ultimately aspire to the “normalcy” of a straight, unhindered life (Ahmed, 2006). In this paper, we explore some of our own experiences of “otherness” in the context of the discipline of psychology – specifically in South Africa – to understand some of the ways in which we collude with, and challenge, the compulsory aspects of identity we fail to inhabit.

Despite seemingly progressive socio-political, juridico-legal and labour developments aimed at protecting minority rights – both in South Africa and globally – queer ¹ and disabled individuals are constantly interpellated as deviant subjects (Milani, 2014). It is with this in mind that Elliott approached Clare, a colleague, to ask if she would be interested in joining him in an exploration of their experiences of difference (and deviance) in their profession – psychology. We decided to engage in a virtual conversation, reflecting on our experiences as “deviant” South African psychologists – Elliott is queer; Clare is noticeably disabled. As we began to analyse our texts, we were met with – perhaps expected – themes of difference and deviance; moreover, we were struck by the pervasiveness of various technologies of power in our individual and collective experiences of difference. It became apparent how we manage these political attempts of othering – through acts of defiance. Here, we present fragments of our conversation and use aspects of critical diversity studies literature – including queer and disability theory, as well as biopolitics – to make some sense of our experiences. The data are analysed with an intersectional frame of reference in mind, although two identities, that of disability and queerness, predominate. Our aim is to start rendering discernible those identities that exist on the margins of psychology. We hope this will provide the discipline with the impetus to continue to challenge its own “invisible” assumptions and compulsory forms of identity – not only about sexual orientation, gender diversity, and disability, but also other axes of inequality that remain overlooked by the therapeutic and academic gaze (see also Pillay, 2017).

The state of psychology in South Africa

Several scholars (e.g., Carolissen et al., 2017; Ratele et al., 2018) have conducted reviews of the state of psychology in South Africa. Current transformation efforts focus on race (e.g., Bantjes et al., 2016; Canham, 2018; Carolissen et al., 2015; Dlamini, 2020; Khunou, 2019). Some scholars have begun to focus on gender, particularly from a feminist perspective (e.g., Kessi & Boonzaier, 2018; Kiguwa & Segalo, 2019; Macleod et al., 2020). Sexual orientation and gender diversity in the practice of psychology have been explored by South African psychologists (e.g., McLachlan et al., 2019; Pillay et al., 2019). On the disability front, Lourens (2020), a psychologist, addressed her disabled experience of visual impairment within academia. In general, however, explorations of diversity in South African psychology are largely limited to transformation in terms of race and (binaried) gender, with a lack of systemic focus on other aspects of identity, such as disability, sexual orientation, and gender diversity.

The Psychological Society of South Africa (PsySSA) has made pertinent attempts to address broader diversity within the profession, including the establishment of sub-divisions such as the Gender and Sexualities Division and African Psychology Forum to amplify the voices of marginalised groups in the profession (Dlamini, 2020), as well as the development of guidelines for the provision of psychology services for sexually and gender-diverse people (McLachlan et al., 2019). While these shifts indicate a commitment toward a more inclusive practice of psychology, its effects on diversity in the profession have yet to be explored. In terms of disability representation, Lourens’ (2020) words, “in the midst of these conversations of making academic spaces better for everyone, the voices of disabled academics in South Africa have been silent” (p. 4), leave a haunting impression. Through adding our voices to this conversation, this paper hopes to contribute to the continued interrogation of the state of (South African) psychology (Long, 2013).

Gathering and understanding the data

This paper utilises an autoethnographic conversation between the authors to uncover the ways in which we have experienced relegation to otherness in the context of psychology in South Africa. Autoethnography is a research method that serves to explore, challenge and undo common-sense understandings of the world, and of relationships between people: “go[ing] beyond ‘the proper’ to trouble the ethical relations of self and other in order to break through the dominant representations of professional practice” (Denshire, 2014, p. 838). Foucault’s (1988) notion of confession comes to mind – writing of and about the self, as an act of re-membering the discursive contours of our lived experiences. Autoethnography has been successfully used in allowing minority voices, as well as experiences of difference, to be heard, something we set out to achieve here (Spieldenner, 2014). As a self-reflexive research method, autoethnography allows the personal life experiences of the researchers to be understood within the broader socio-political context in which they are located, “creating new knowledges” (Denshire, 2014, p. 838). In applying this method, researchers are required to reflect on their own narratives and positionality within the broader contexts of their research to allow critical understandings of the subject at focus (Spry, 2001). Through this undoing, it attempts to surface the largely invisible hegemonic practices that regulate a particular practice.

Our autoethnography technique took the form of organised, ongoing email conversations over a period of three months. Elliott began his reflection and then emailed this to Clare, who responded with her thoughts and associated experiences. We gave ourselves a week to respond to each email. Autoethnography encourages researchers to be as transparent as possible in an attempt to address othering (Richards, 2013). Thus, we first wrote our narratives while simultaneously attempting to suspend our analysis – something akin to free association. ² As Richards (2013) is quoted: “to achieve a type of narrative authenticity by dashing down my story without analysing it … if I analysed it, it would become data in a more analytical narrative” (p. 112).

Once we felt we had “saturated” this documentation (Levitt et al., 2018), we began to reflect on these conversations, familiarising ourselves with the essence of our shared experiences. This paper focuses on three intricately intertwined themes that emerged from the data – difference, deviance, and defiance – all of which are over-arched by a meta-theme of various technologies of power and biopolitics – in the Foucauldian ³ sense – that pervade each theme. Each theme contains extracts from our email conversations and discussion of these in relation to theory so that our personal experiences can be contextualised and understood (Richards, 2019). We have attempted to uphold a balance between raw experience and academic discourse, so neither is privileged over the other (Fine, 1998). Thus, rigorous analysis is promoted.

We draw on a comprehensive theoretical framework of disability studies, queer theory and biopolitics to make sense of our experiences and embedded identities in the profession. This paper is aimed at turning psychology's gaze on itself, exposing some of its unexamined assumptions and speaking back to its power. We hope to stimulate a process of “queering” and “cripping” ⁴ (McRuer, 2006; Milani, 2014) the discipline, specifically as it exists in South Africa.

Our affective responses to the types of interactions described in this paper are submitted to intense scrutiny around their validity. In the development of this paper, we asked each other at various points whether our reactions to these scenarios were “our own stuff” ⁵ or whether they were linked to broader discourses of normality in the discipline: Elliott:

I also wonder about my sensitivity to [our conversation] … I was struck by how you speculate … whether you are being oversensitive. My immediate response is no, it's our identities, that are integrally close to us, which we are constantly needing to engage with and navigate, even when we are not prepared to do so. However, because of the visibility of our “otherness”, as well as others’ perceptions of us, we are forced to confront our identities and tolerate others’ projections onto our difference. So of course, others’ emotions are transferred in the situation and our own countertransference ⁶ is ignited.

As Ahmed (2014) and Oliver (1990) point out, such discourses do not only exist to shape the social and political dimensions of the discipline but also shape bodies and lives. Compulsory able-bodiedness, as with compulsory heterosexuality, shapes what bodies can and cannot do, how bodies can (or are allowed to) move through space – drawing a hard line through what is considered impossible for disabled bodies. As an affectual consequence, we are left to evaluate the validity of our responses – asking ourselves whether our responses are contextually appropriate or, alternatively, whether we are “overreacting”. Hence, in working through the question of validity, we took a two-fold layered approach – analysing data that describes a particular incident and data in which we respond to each other's stories. We consciously worked together to distance ourselves from the data in order to conduct the analysis, thus adding another layer of validity checking.

Dramatis personæ: Introducing the autoethnographic “we”

Given the autoethnographic lens of this paper, it is vital that we introduce ourselves and describe some aspects of our identities to locate ourselves.

Clare: I have Achondroplasia, a form of dwarfism that results in a visible physical disability. My limbs are disproportionately short for my body. I am also white, female, middle class and South African. I am married, and my husband and I have two children. I am a practising clinical psychologist, as well as an academic, lecturing and researching at a university in South Africa. My research is predominantly in the field of disability, gender and motherhood.

Elliott: I am a registered counselling psychologist and researcher. I am white, educated and middle class. I am queer and transgender and have identified with various markers of non-normative sexual orientation and gender identity at various points in time. At the time of writing these reflections I identified as a genderqueer womxn; I have since come out as transgender ⁷ and I am currently undergoing hormone replacement therapy. Gender and sexuality play an important role in my academic and professional life, with much of my research and therapy time devoted to these constructs and the ways they interact and intersect with other aspects of everyday existence.

Both authors exist at the intersections of various axes of identity – most notably, we are both white, educated, middle class and, at the time of data collection, women/womxn. However, we are also vastly different in our ability/disability, gender orientations as well as sexuality. We acknowledge that all these play an important role in our experiences; however, for the purposes of this paper we are primarily focusing on the parts of ourselves that are linked to our sexuality and dis/ability. In doing so, we are not suggesting that these minoritised subjectivities are any more or less important than others. Importantly, race has, and continues to play, a central role in many South African identities and experiences, as does class. Uniquely, we are juxtaposed between difference and privilege – we both occupy marginalised identities as disabled and queer, yet we are also privileged in our whiteness and middle-class psychologist status. The resulting internal and external tensions from this juxtaposition will be highlighted in the discussion below.

As we began analysing our data, critical nodes of induction into the profession and development as professionals for both of us emerged. These points are largely overshadowed by technologies of biopolitical power, specifically those of the politics of performance, affect, visibility and inclusion/exclusion. The mechanism of power hangs over the life of those who are “different”, as a function of normalisation, serving to establish dominant rationalities, creating the parameters through which human and social life are understood (Campbell & Sitze, 2013; Mills, 2015). Thus, human life is subjected to political expressions of power, and the biological features of the human body are organised into a political existence (Mills, 2015). This process, through which a dominant knowledge is embedded in the fabric of existence, concurrently institutionalises the practices of domination and subordination – both in life, and more specifically, in the profession of psychology. These points of induction will be discussed next.

Act 1: The politics of difference

While we were already living our differences, a prominent event leading into both of our professional trainings was that of becoming “other” psychologists.

Compulsory heterosexuality in relation to the “psychologist” construct is put into sharp relief in this extract. Elliott's comment, that he did not “look like a psychologist”, gives an indication of what he considered to be a “normal” psychologist: someone with a body mass and shape within the normative medical ranges, who looks straight (or at least not queer). Going further, this comment introduces the politics of visibility. This form of power, as with all biopolitics, operates both in the individual body and at the level of subjective experiences of the population (Mills, 2015). Elliott's understanding of normative visibility and his existence within a dominant rationality (Cisney & Morar, 2015) is apparent in how he believes he needs to present himself.

Furthermore, Elliott presumes the other candidates are “straight”. Following Ahmed (2006), Elliott wishes to forego the comfort and protections offered by following the prescriptions of compulsory heterosexuality in an intentional queering of the scene: “I was determined to do this on my terms”. One side-effect of compulsory heterosexuality, as with compulsory able-bodiedness, is that the “other” is burdened with a need to confess their deviance and, where it cannot be “corrected”, to provide a sufficient explanation for its existence (Kotze & Bowman, 2018).

The excerpt demonstrates the powerful draw to confess, to make our otherness abundantly clear to our interlocutors – in this case the gatekeepers of the discipline. Yet, Elliott at the same time states he was on his “best behaviour”, alluding to the pressure to conform to heteronormativity – practices and policies that prescribe heterosexuality as “the normal, natural, taken-for-granted sexuality” (Kitzinger, 2005, p. 477). This behaviour can be likened to supercripping – attempts at passing as non-disabled/normative (Harvey, 2015). Furthermore, the behaviour suggests the politics of performance in “how I should present myself”. Power structures are institutionalised through the normalisation of dominant rationalities, providing a central axis through which Elliott and the profession's gatekeepers relate to each other (Mills, 2015).

More than the assumptions of the interviewer, though, the extract suggests how the feeling of inherent difference can also be linked to the episteme, or “knowledge fabric”, of the discipline – difference is traditionally positioned as deviance, abnormality, or pathology in psychology texts (e.g., Fitch, 2002; Herek, 2010), something which, if not the direct result of, is the direct predictor of emotional instability. The politics of affect are also in play, specifically in the statement, “I was also battling my inner demons”. Ahmed’s (2014) affective economies solidify power relations between the dominant and minority groups by supporting superior and inferior forms of bodies. Elliott's continued emotional response – mostly that of embarrassment, and then anger – to trying to enter the profession highlights his experience of difference and the interrelated biopower of affect.

The excerpt ends with an emphasis on intersectionality – something Elliott felt was ignored by the interviewers. “What about the other axes around which I build my identity…”. He was seen, and interacted with, only through one lens, his sexuality – what about his whiteness and class, and how these may be managed in the interviewers’ hypothetical community? This gaze through a singular axis of political expression (Crenshaw, 1989) serves to privilege and promote one part – the heteronormative – of the population, while marginalising and eradicating the experiences of the minority – in this case, queers, maintaining hegemonic biopolitics.

The similarities between our experiences are noteworthy: our otherness was made prominent by our interviewers, in Clare's case by invoking a popular reference to dwarfism and potentially laying claim to insider-knowledge-by-proxy (Harvey, 2020). Later, perhaps in a bid to strengthen his self-perception of an empathic psychologist, the interviewer lays claim to the position of comrade, performing an act of solidarity, or allyship. Yet, this attempt felt cruel, as he struggled to acknowledge Clare's difference, without implying her deviance.

Clare's comments on the familiar discomfort of being othered provide an indication of the emotional labour that accompanies difference (Harvey, 2017). The politics of affect and performance are evident – “I … kept my defences at bay … and joined the conversation” – performing what she understands the profession to perceive a psychologist-in-training to be. In this manner, emotions function in “concrete and particular ways, to mediate the relationship between the psychic and the social, and between the individual and the collective” (Ahmed, 2004, p. 119).

Difference, whether perceived as a positive contributor to “diversity” or hailed as deviant, invokes a perpetual interrogation of self in relation to the politically dominant ideal in society which continues to subjugate the other. Consequently, a power relationship is set up where the alienated other is dominated and the norm maintained (Carter & Grobbe, 1999). Our experiences of the politics of difference highlight the paradoxes of occupying the position of the other – wanting to hold a position of difference so to be congruent with this aspect of our identities, yet not wanting to be made to feel different, or singled out, for this. More specifically, this first act centres the political performance of the other in a professional space and shows how entry into a profession with existing power differentials can elicit experiences of anxiety, scrutiny, and evaluation based on difference.

Act 2: Deviance as political

Experiences of being judged on our suitability to enter the profession continued, and these are understood within the context of particular political paradigms. Following Butler (2011), we understand gender identity, sexual orientation, and disability as constructed and performed identities that exist as the result of their demarcation (Ahmed, 2006; Oliver, 1990) – the politics of performance, which is closely tied up with the politics of affect. We are often called upon to perform certain expected aspects of our “other” identities – our bodies and their abilities are put to work in ways that sometimes feel like a form of atonement. “… [T]he neoliberal performance standards and discourse around disability automatically position them [the disabled] as misfits … and create disabling conditions within which they must perform and measure up” (Waterfield et al., 2018, p. 344). Indeed, this quote rings true for queers’ experiences too.

Here, the assumptions and expectations resting on those entering the psychology profession are clear. The hierarchies of identity, and the resulting battlegrounds of professional power relations are apparent – where sexuality elides femininity; disability elides competence. We are expected to “perform the identity category of ‘psychologist’”. The performance of a normative type of femininity is expected by Elliott's classmate, and when he fails to uphold those standards, he is silenced by the classmate, who acts as a gatekeeper to the realm of femininity in psychology. Elliott is silenced in a way that disciplines him, regulating the interaction between his gender and professional identities. In this way, normative expectations work to exclude, and the discomfort of other sexuality is managed.

Clare's statement, that if she “allowed” herself to think deeper she would be able to relate more events where her difference informed others’ expectations of her, is revealing in terms of the emotional labour done by the “other”. Reflecting on these occurrences, and trying to remember the ones we have forgotten, is extremely anxiety-provoking. ⁹ Expectations to perform specific invocations of marginalised identities produce the very surfaces of our bodies as different, and our failure to adhere to compulsory heterosexuality and able-bodiedness is what locates us as deviant. In some ways our bodies become overdetermined by the expectations on us to behave and respond in certain ways, producing in us an intense awareness of the cause of discomfort and tension we become to those who are not “other”. Elliott's words – “I should be a ‘good queer’” – are pertinent here. When we verbalise this tension, through expressing our affective responses, we acknowledge that our bodies are at its centre, and we are subsequently silenced to allow those with “normal” bodies to manage their discomfort (Ahmed, 2009; Gibson & Macleod, 2012). Thus, we battle the tensions between our internal, emotive experiences and our external, performative attempts, highlighting the difficulty we experience in resisting the dominant. Arguably, those who occupy powerful normative positions (the femininity-defending classmate above, for example) attempt to evoke deviant responses in others (Elliott's subsequent response, for example) to justify their irrational othering practices.

When the “other” is disciplined in this manner, the expectation is that they should in some ways be grateful for the correction. When Elliott is asked about hypothetical communities responding negatively to his gender presentation, for example, the interviewer's aim is not necessarily to discourage him from entering the discipline but rather to demonstrate some sort of awareness of the lived realities of queer people in South Africa. It is meant to demonstrate a kind of empathy, maybe some protective instinct. But the interviewer's question does not engage with the contours of misogyny, homophobia, and transphobia that shape queer lives – particularly in South Africa and in the discipline of psychology. Similarly, Clare's experience with her interviewers and their insistence that she sits on a child's chair seems to be a way of demonstrating understanding, solidarity, and an awareness of the challenges of living with dwarfism. Yet, the “problem” of her deviant body is seemingly “solved” through the introduction of a prop – a child's chair. The incident silences her as she is relegated to the position of a child – someone to be seen and not heard. ¹⁰ She is further silenced through a refusal to engage with the structurally embedded oppression of people living with disabilities (Oliver, 1990). An ableist environment can make it impossible to fight disabling stereotypes (Watermeyer, 2009); Clare is made to feel like a misfit (Garland-Thomson, 2011). Disability is individualised through the interviewers’ troubleshooting response, effectively dislocating her experience from the broad social structures that impose compulsory able-bodiedness onto her and turning any political response into a personal “oversensitivity”. Simultaneously, the panel's “solution” to Clare's disability assumes a universality in the way people with dwarfism (and disabilities in general) experience life. This, too, unmoors any response she might have from its larger political context and repositions disability as a problem that can (and should) be solved – as swiftly and efficiently as possible. This kind of essentialism undermines the ethos of the discipline of psychology since it precludes the practitioner from relating to the disabled or queer person in a way that considers their whole experience. Furthermore, these awkward attempts by those in the profession illustrate its inability to enact inclusiveness. Our responses demonstrate how power relations are used to invoke a behavioural response in the other and can be used to re-enact and resist normativity.

Returning to the politics of affect, positioning marginalised people as overly emotional has long been a silencing tactic used by those in power to keep the oppressed in their place, and significantly, to keep them from challenging hegemonic structures (Demetriou, 2001). An important aspect of this process of silencing lies in the implied expectation on the deviant other to police their own affective responses – we question the validity of our private responses to what are evidently insensitive and prejudicial statements and actions. This serves to silence both of us – in the moment, after the fact, and now in our analysis – when we are trying to untangle our “own stuff” from those that which are considered “appropriate” responses. ¹¹ Such a negation of our affective responses is a violent political act that functions to sever and discard those parts of ourselves that struggle to survive in a world meant for differently-constructed bodies. Our discomfort from being silenced because of our difference, yet also trying to centre our “otherness” in our conversations, is apparent: Elliott:

I am surprised at how vulnerable this exchange … is making me feel. My anxiety is about being self-indulgent, and I realise this is exactly why I asked you to join me on this project: two people make this self-exploration less self-indulgent, somehow. Maybe adding “visible” otherness to what could be “invisible” otherness legitimises this exploration even further.

Clare's response echoes that of Ahmed (2009) – as deviant “others” we are called upon to prove our worth. These exchanges recentre intersectionality – only Clare's whiteness and class are noted as important by her colleagues, politically dismissing her intersectionality. Bodies like ours are “sore points” (p. 51) – they produce tension and discomfort in others. However, Ahmed (2009) and hooks (2000) insist that it is in this tension, this soreness, where the potential for change is located. The following excerpts demonstrate this soreness – specifically others’ perceptions of us as arrogant and abrasive: Clare:

Another incident … an interview I endured for an academic job as a lecturer … The interview had gone smoothly until the very last question … “You often present as arrogant, could you tell us a bit about this?” I mumbled something about being unaware that others experience me as arrogant and the clichéd response that this is something I’d like to work on in therapy. I also responded that because of my height I am acutely aware of first impressions and thus I try to present as confident to put the other at ease. Perhaps this comes across as arrogant. I was thanked for my response and was never given the job. I was hurt for a long time after this encounter. Why did I link my perceived arrogance to my otherness? Did I play into the panel's … perceptions of me? … Did this result in my exclusion? I wasn't just othered, I was prescribed a “deviant” attribute…

Our struggles around legitimacy often take the form of an extreme vulnerability, belied by the perceived bravado and arrogance experienced by our peers. The vulnerability is mediated by careful regulation of how we present ourselves.

Our attempts to navigate the minefield that is normative psychology are relegated to the realm of “our stuff” – we are called upon to learn more “appropriate” ways of addressing the othering we constantly experience, demonstrating how power relations are used to invoke a behavioural response in the other, and can be used to re-enact and resist normativity. Being “experienced” as arrogant or abrasive implies that we who are “other” should make a greater attempt not to agitate, and to be less defensive – even under attack – which is the contradiction that emerges in this analysis, between our marginalised, yet privileged identities. Our political deviance is apparent through the far too familiar acts of “vigorous independence” (Watermeyer, 2009, p. 95) and “non-disclosure” (Gibson & Macleod, 2012, p. 467) to “hide” our vulnerabilities and difference.

It is difficult not to perceive the gatekeepers of psychology as oblivious to the need for them to understand and undo some of the ways in which they reserve psychology for those who perform “psychologist” appropriately. The awkward attempts by psychology professionals illustrate the inability of psychology to enact inclusiveness: the stratification of society is mimicked within the profession. Ultimately, the claim that “I don't think it's my imagination or my oversensitivity or my unresolved issues” is another instance where we validated our own and each other's responses to our experiences of difference and deviance.

Act 3: The power of defiance

While we often cave under the pressure to perform the “good” other, keeping our humiliation and rage to ourselves, there are moments where we allow our deviant bodies to extend into the spaces around us. Defiance, for us, takes the form of consciously and intentionally inhabiting our otherness, and allowing it to speak. In this final act of our conversation, we will allow the “autoethnographic we” at the time of our virtual conversation to do the talking. The reflexive pieces that follow contain reflections of the types of resistance and defiance available to us, and how we can leverage our otherness to stimulate change in the discipline of psychology. Building on what has been discussed, it is perhaps an appropriately defiant way to allow our different and deviant selves to speak, without our words being interpreted by our current selves. We hope that the importance and power of our defiance in these pieces are not skimmed over: Elliott:

…psychology is informed by a paradigm that privileges certain standards of ability, heterosexuality, and cisgender presentation … Considering disability's status as an employment equity category … I find it interesting that there has not been a more concerted effort to include people with disabilities in the profession. I wonder if some of it has to do with the profession's blank slate ¹² fixation – uninterrogated, blank slate means straight … “standard” set of abilities – anything outside of that set of ideals needs to be adjusted for. Self-disclosure (of sexual orientation, for example) jeopardises the blank slate. Visible disabilities constantly self-disclose.

Exclusion in the profession mirrors exclusion everywhere else. The world is not built for people with disabilities, and it would rather not know about non-normative sexuality. Yet it insists that it is accepting of both.

… I think the only way out of this is to explode the issues, to place them centre stage. Not the people, but the issues. To challenge it when people say, “I do not see you that way”, to problematise the lack of universal access and design … to verbalise the expectations and pressures we feel, and to try and theorise them … we need to question the lack of queer visibility in the profession, and the low numbers of professionals with disabilities … We need to organise and speak truth to power.

Epilogue

At a time when the call for transformation within psychology in South Africa has never been stronger, this paper raises critical points that need to be considered by gatekeepers to the discipline. Amidst present transformation efforts, the profession seems to be missing a vital opportunity to reshape itself in an intersectional way that includes, celebrates, and encourages diverse identities. The hierarches of identities within psychology – both in terms of professional spaces and theoretical development – need to be questioned. Diversity should be celebrated through engaging with tensions between, and within, marginalised and privileged identities, and psychology's inability to enact inclusiveness needs to be challenged, as does the profession's engagement with various ideologies of power, so that normativity is resisted.

When we started working on this project, our hope was that the work would contribute to a queering and cripping of the ways in which we do psychology. What surprised us was the cathartic nature of the process – we were able to write about moments that made us feel extremely uncomfortable and confused at the time of their occurrence. Our defiant, frank reflections invoke Foucault’s (1990, p. 56) notion of the confession – “as one of the main rituals we rely on for the production of truth”. Our narratives raise the tensions between hierarchies of legitimate exclusion – confessions are motivated by an internal need or forced from a person by violence or threat (Foucault, 1990). We engaged with this project because we felt an advocacy to do so, but also because we are trying to wrestle a sense of power back from the various technologies of biopolitics that we encounter in the profession of psychology – and in doing so, we are liberating otherness and ourselves.

The critical nodes of induction into the profession and development as professionals that emerged from our narratives have provided useful points of reflection. They symbolise moments of a sense of disjuncture, which simultaneously offer opportunities for learning (Jarvis, 2009). Future research on the topic of transforming the discipline of psychology – globally and locally – may be well served by those “others” in the profession who are willing to re-member the truth. This highlights the power of the autoethnographic method: we were able to reproduce our truths here, without fear that our experiences will be taken in as oversensitive responses to the norm.

Perhaps this is where the real transformative power of this project can be found. Smoothing things over will not change anything in favour of the “other”. Psychologists with deviant identities need to feel and express our hurt and anger to effect change. Psychology cannot remain oblivious to its own assumptions and, moreover, psychology cannot allow the pain and rage of deviant bodies to remain invisible and unspoken. We hope that this paper starts a conversation with “deviant” others about diversity and inclusion in the field.