Feminism & Psychology

Conventional heteronormative beliefs about the nature of gender roles, gender identity, and sexual orientation are fundamentally challenged by the experiences of many transgender individuals. Eleven self-identified transgender individuals were interviewed about their definitions of, understanding of the relationships between, and perceptions of their own gender roles, gender identity, and sexual orientation. The questions focused on how transgender individuals define gender roles vs gender identity, how they defined themselves on these dimensions, and how they perceived the relationships among gender roles, gender identity, and sexual orientation. All of the participants understood gender roles to be social constructs and viewed gender identity as being more fluid, compared to essentialist, binary, heteronormative ideas about gender. Most viewed sexual orientation as being dynamically related to gender identity. These findings are discussed in terms of an emerging transgender theory of the nature of gender that transcends essentialist, traditional ideas, as well as social constructionist views of feminist and queer theories.

This study examined how men accounted for their violent behaviours against their intimate female partners. In-depth qualitative interviews were conducted with 12 men from three men’s groups in Johannesburg, South Africa. All the men self-reported that they had committed acts of intimate partner violence previously, and the majority were from low-income, township settings. Dissociations, justifications and confessions featured as the predominant accounting forms that worked to transform participants’ subject positions from the ‘violent abuser’ to the ‘legitimately violent partner’ and even to the ‘changed man’. Attention is accorded to how gender ideologies and heteropatriarchal discourses legitimating male violence against women were reinforced, yet were at times challenged within their talk and through rhetorical devices. In line with a poststructuralist reading, the study highlights the complexities underpinning men’s varied meanings of violence. On the one hand, it reveals the agentic shifting of identities. On the other, it highlights the social discourses that are embedded in men’s talk and therefore inscribed into male subjectivities.

This project explored young women’s identity constructions in the context of competing and changing cultural ideals of womanhood, such as feminist discourses and neoliberal discourses of choice and individualism. Specifically, we were interested in how young women attending university in the new millennium envisioned their futures. Thirty women, aged 18–26, who were university students taking courses in Psychology, participated in 15 research conversations with two participants and an interviewer. Using discourse analysis, we show how the young women routinely privileged the ideal of women as wives and mothers, yet positioned themselves as autonomous individuals making free choices and, thereby, personally responsible for managing the problems in their lives. They also ignored gender politics by avoiding or glossing over talk about women’s inequality and criticisms of traditional family and workplace arrangements.

This article explores how lesbian identity construction is facilitated and constrained by the raced, classed, gendered, familial, and geographical spaces that women occupy. We present a narrative-discursive analysis of eight lesbians’ stories of sexuality, told within a historically white university in South Africa. Three interpretative repertoires that emerged in the narratives are discussed. The ‘disallowance of lesbian identity in particular racialised and class-based spaces’ repertoire, deployed by black lesbians only, was used to account for their de-emphasis of a lesbian identity through the invocation of a threat of danger and stereotyping. The ‘disjuncture of the (heterosexual) family and lesbian identity’ repertoire emphasised how the expectation of support and care within a family does not necessarily extend to acceptance of a lesbian identity. This repertoire was used to justify emphasis on familial rather than lesbian identity and how participants managed their emotions in relation to the family and timing their disclosure to relatives. The ‘expectation of routinisation of homosexuality within a liberal university’ repertoire emphasised the support and acceptance of lesbian identity within the university in which the study was conducted, while simultaneously rendering heteronormative policies and heterosexism visible.

Courses in women’s studies and gender studies within US contexts have long prioritized content that critically examines the social construction of bodies and sexualities, consciousness-raising about how social identities interface with disciplinary and institutional practices, and the notion that ‘the personal is political.’ This article examines the social and pedagogical implications of an extra-credit assignment where I asked women to grow out their body hair and men to remove their body hair for 10 weeks in several upper-division women’s studies courses. Students’ response papers and weekly logs from 87 students over four semesters highlighted the social policing of gender and sexual identity, pervasive disgust and misinformation about body hair, raced and classed dimensions of students’ experiences, configurations of masculinity as agentic and powerful, and postexperiential reflections on challenging social norms. This assignment showed how temporary excursions into rebelling against body norms can generate sociopolitical awareness, particularly for living as Other (e.g. queerness, fatness, disability). I also consider implications for ‘ripple effect pedagogy’ and ‘peer generated pedagogy,’ along with pedagogical reflections about using the assignment as a consciousness-raising tool in feminist classrooms.

The researchers utilized quantitative and qualitative methods to examine college women’s disclosure of dating violence. Quantitative analyses showed that disclosure of dating violence was related to stress associated with abuse, partner blame, and thoughts about ending the relationship. Qualitative content analyses demonstrated that women’s minimization of the abuse was the most commonly given reason for nondisclosure. Women who disclosed dating violence reported that the following responses to their disclosures were most helpful: receiving ‘good advice’, the opportunity to vent/talk about it, receiving comfort and other emotional support, rationalizing the partners’ behavior, and providing a neutral perspective. Conversely, the following responses were reported as least helpful: being told to end the relationship, not understanding, joking about the experiences, and ‘bad advice’. Implications for intervention and future research are discussed.

Previous western studies have shown the division of domestic childcare work between fathers and mothers to be unequal but not always constructed as unfair. Following Dixon and Wetherell’s (2004) suggestion of applying a critical discursive psychology approach to the topic, I aimed to discover some of the discourses available to professional English women when constructing the contributions of the father at home. These included the ‘selfless mother’, the ‘shirking father’, ‘the father restores the “gender order”’ and the ‘high-status mother’. Findings suggest a possible application for discursive research, in raising women’s awareness of the potential for their discourses to perpetuate inequality.