Identifying a range of key concerns related to representation and difference, Representing the Other offers a provocative agenda for the future development of feminist theory and practice. The book's contributors, including many key international researchers in women's studies, draw on personal experiences of speaking "for" and "about" others in their research, professional practice, academic writing, or political activism. They highlight problems of representing the Other with an ethnic or cultural background different from one's own and extend discussions of "Othering" to (...) representations of children, prostitutes, infertile women, fat women, gay men with HIV/AIDS, and people with disabilities. The reader, which includes articles and discussions from four issues of the journal Feminism & Psychology, also features new pieces and an extensive editorial introduction. Representing the Other will be integral reading for students and academics in women's studies, gender studies, and feminist theory across a range of social science disciplines, including social psychology, sociology, anthropology, sociolinguistics, social policy, and political science. (shrink)

This book provides a showcase for a wide range of discourse analytical work in psychology from a feminist perspective. It constitutes a thorough critical evaluation of this approach for the feminist project of intellectual, social and political change. Leading researchers explore the benefits and contradictions of discourse analysis and consider its value for feminist psychology. The first part of the book illustrates the application of discourse analysis to four key topics of feminist concern: adolescent knowledge about menstruation; sexual harassment; gendered (...) representations of childhood; and anorexia nervosa. The second part contains five assessments of the usefulness of discourse analysis - both as theory and as method. (shrink)

Radical feminism has critiqued heterosexuality both as a primary means through which people are constituted as women and as men, and as inherently oppressive for women. Two recent developments challenge this critique: the concept of “virgin” heterosexuality, a form of heterosexuality in which the performance of heterosexual sex, with or without sexual intercourse, is voluntarily chosen, and “queer” heterosexuality, a concept derived from postmodernist and queer theory, which does not only reinscribe, but also actively subverts and disrupts, oppressive categories of (...) gender and sexual orientation. This article analyzes the attempts made in “virgin” and “queer” theory to rehabilitate heterosexuality, and finds both fundamentally flawed from a radical feminist perspective. It ends by considering why such rehabilitatory attempts are currently being made, and what they reveal about heterosexuality. (shrink)

This paper examines issues of legitimacy surrounding feminist research in psychology, in relation to its current and future impact on the mainstream of the discipline. It argues that its relatively limited impact to date is due, in part, to the nature of feminist psychology, and, in part, to its interaction with the social institutions of psychology as a discipline. Further, the paper contends that the influence of the field may well remain relatively minor, however convincingly its potential benefits are argued, (...) if it fails both to analyse and to utilize the social processes by which legitimacy is conferred. (shrink)

First Published in 1994. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.