Feminism & Psychology

This paper argues that reading science fiction can help us understand contemporary debates in feminist psychology and envisage its future. It examines how science fiction, by extrapolating from accepted scientific realities, generates conceptual uncertainties which resemble those existing in feminist psychology around objectivity. The paper then explores how science fiction's stylistic uncertainties are paralleled in feminist psychology. Science fiction's suspensions between science and non-science, literature and non-literature, suggest that interdisciplinarity may be less about dissolving or negotiating disciplinary boundaries, as feminist psychology assumes, and more about contesting or transgressing them. Science fiction also offers feminist psychology valuable models for stylistic rule-breaking, for writing more speculatively and pleasurably, and for operating with two `ends' simultaneously-one extending dominant concepts of gendered subjectivities, the other breaking with them.

This paper presents cross-cultural data gathered in extensive interviews with black women in the US and in the Netherlands. The main issue concerns relations between knowledge and resistance. More specifically, attention is paid to the contents and structure of black women's knowledge of racism and modes of knowledge acquisition. It is argued that different modes and political contexts of acquisition have an impact on everyday `theories' of racism. For that purpose perceptions of racism based upon a `paternalistic' model of race relations (Netherlands) are compared to perceptions based upon a `conflict' model of race relations (US). These different models imply different perceptions of resistance.

The early months of motherhood represent an acute transitional period in which mothers are thrown back upon their intimate relationships with their spouse or sexual partner. The research reported here looks at the experience of mothering for a group of mothers from both stable and disrupted backgrounds using a time-use diary and in-depth interviews. It examines the relationship between the structural and environmental factors in these women's lives, and their experience of support and stress in the early months of first-time motherhood. The focus is upon gender-based inequality in the division of labour in early parenting and the way in which mothers come to terms with this. Mothers' accounts of the relative allocation of power and distribution of resources within the household are indicative of their struggle to come to terms with structural gender imbalances within the context of a close, and notionally reciprocal, relationship. Gender relationships are seen as a competition for scarce resources in which mothers are hampered by current sex-role ideology which characterizes motherhood as intrinsically rewarding and the fathers' contribution as an optional extra.

The empirical literature on Self-Defeating Personality Disorder (SDPD) that has appeared since the American Psychiatric Association's DSM-III-R was published is reviewed from several standpoints, including the dangers it poses to women by pathologizing them. It is concluded that there is a paucity of research; that some of what exists is seriously flawed methodologically; that some shows that SDPD criteria lack face validity; that the category has poor diagnostic power and overlaps substantially with other categories; and that SDPD continues to be dangerous for people of both sexes but especially for women. It is concluded, therefore, that SDPD should be excluded from the DSM-IV.

In Britain, services for people with all forms of disabilities have been undergoing major structural change. However, despite the stake that women have in community care services, as users, carers and workers, a feminist viewpoint has not featured at all in the debate. The stakes are high for women, and feminists need to understand the import of these changes when seen within a gender-aware political context. This article outlines the changes that are occurring in our community care services and draws out the implications for women from a feminist perspective.