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The UK National Health Service (NHS) is one of the largest employers in the world and relies heavily on Black migrant women. Nonetheless, reports of (gendered) racism persist. This phenomenologically inspired qualitative study shares findings from empirical interview data with female Nigerian doctors and nurses working in the NHS, with a specific focus on how these women cope with the racism and gendered racism they experience in their everyday working lives. The analysis shows the extent to which they perceive the coping strategies available to them to be limited, with problem-based solutions focused on relocating themselves into geographical, professional, or organisational spaces where acute staffing shortages may curb employers' tendency towards discrimination in recruitment and advancement. Emotion-based strategies employed were often faith-based, or relied on their national identity and understandings of what it means to be Nigerian/a Nigerian woman. The article critically considers the power differentials endemic in employment that limit these women to individualised coping strategies which ultimately result in their isolation, a known stressor itself, creating a self-perpetuating vicious circle of gendered racism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While in the last decade we made strides in the pursuit of gender equality, women's rights, dignity, and safety continue to be under threat around the world. There is a growing body of research documenting contemporary misogyny, mainly focused on extreme manifestations found in online environments. Conversely, we know less about how misogyny features in other spheres of our daily lives. The current study focuses on such an environment, namely segments from the British show This Morning in which guests are invited to take opposing stances on a variety of topics related to women's appearance, behaviour, competencies, and experiences with sexual harassment. Using discursive psychology, we identified two sets of argumentative discursive practices employed by guests who espoused misogynist views. First, when guests were prompted to present their controversial views, they constructed them as reasonable, strategically differentiating them from established misogynist tropes. By contrast, when guests' views were challenged, they doubled down on their positions by drawing on scientific explanations for human behaviour that ostensibly justified bigoted views. This study sheds light onto the discursive mechanisms through which misogyny escapes eradication, and through which it mutates into subtler forms that are increasingly difficult to identify and denounce. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hillary Clinton's nomination as the first female presidential candidate to represent a major party in the 2016 US presidential election represented a key moment in US history. The focus on her gender during the campaign was intensified following the accusation by Republican Party nominee, Donald Trump, that Clinton was "playing the woman card". The present article explores US media constructions of Clinton's orientation to the topic of gender during the presidential campaign. Data were identified by searching the Lexis Advance® database between 4 February 2016 and 8 November 2016. Using a qualitative methodology guided by a Critical Discursive Psychology approach, we identify two discursive repertoires that were repeatedly mobilised in these media accounts: 1) a repertoire in which the principle of merit was used to undermine arguments for gender equality, and 2) a repertoire in which Clinton's espoused version of feminism was undermined as 'old-fashioned'. These repertoires functioned to de-legitimise Clinton as a political candidate by positioning her as seeking special treatment as a woman, who played the victim of sexism and was out of touch with the interests and concerns of female voters. We demonstrate how attempts to counter such characterisations can be problematic for female leaders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Due to the focus in psychology on Euro-American centric ontologies and epistemologies, many non-European psychologists have been calling for the decolonization of the field. In joining this call, I propose an Islamic anti-patriarchal liberation psychology framework to guide psychological knowledge production and application within contexts in which some or most people identify as Muslim. Using Martín-Baró's proposal of three essential tasks of liberation psychology as a guide, my framework explains how and why it is necessary to decolonize psychological knowledge production and application in such contexts. The first task requires the privileging of Muslim voices, with Muslims being conceptualized as diverse, racialized peoples. The second task involves challenging the internalization of colonial ways of thinking among Muslims. The final task asks researchers and practitioners to recover Islamic histories of scholarship, Muslims' sense of community, and queer and feminine ways of being. Together, these tasks can provide an adaptable guide for psychological knowledge production and application for Muslims in a wide variety of contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Self-help promises the chance of being "better". Across multifarious platforms, including books, apps and television shows, it offers hope that we can be our own agents of change for a happier life. Critical research troubles this premise, arguing that the recurring trope of the individualistic ideal-self found in self-help literature is at the expense of seeking solutions in collective, feminist, or otherwise politicised activism. Self-help is also problematically gendered, since women are often positioned as particularly in need of improvement, an understanding further intensified by postfeminist sensibility. These issues are examined conceptually before introducing 10 articles on self-help published in Feminism & Psychology across three decades and brought together as a Virtual Special Issue to offer a significant body of work for scholars and students alike. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite advances in the representation of women in positions of leadership, gender-based inequalities persist. A particular dilemma for female leaders concerns whether to acknowledge, or avoid talking about, their experiences of gender and gender inequality in public life. Routinely, women who confront such discrimination experience social and personal repercussions; however, those who remain silent are often criticised for failing to support women. This article takes a discursive psychological approach to accounts from Australia's first female Prime Minister of the role of gender in her leadership. Following her controversial 'Sexism and Misogyny' speech in the Australian parliament (2012), Julia Gillard addressed this topic repeatedly in public interviews and speeches, and these materials constitute the data for analysis. We describe the complex and flexible nature of the discursive work required in navigating topics of gender and discrimination, looking in detail at how Gillard routinely accounted for gender as relevant – or not – to her political leadership, and how her identity was constructed as part of that process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over recent years, young feminist activism has assumed prominence in mainstream media where news headlines herald the efforts of schoolgirls in fighting sexism, sexual violence and inequity. Less visible in the public eye, girls’ activism plays out in social media where they can speak out about gender-based injustices experienced and witnessed. Yet we know relatively little about this significant social moment wherein an increasing visibility of young feminism cohabits a stubbornly persistent postfeminist culture. Acknowledging the hiatus, this paper draws on a qualitative project with teenage feminists to explore how girls are using and producing digital feminist media, what it means for them to do so and how their online practice connects with their offline feminism. Using a feminist poststructuralist approach, analyses identified three key constructions of digital media as a tool for feminist practice: online feminism as precarious and as knowledge sharing; and feminism as “doing something” on/offline. Discussing these findings, I argue that there is marked continuity between girls’ practices in “safe” digital spaces and feminisms practised in other historical and geographical locations. But crucially, and perhaps distinctly, digital media are a key tool to connect girls with feminism and with other feminists in local and global contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers information on the use of social networking sites (SNSs) for feminist activism. Topics discussed include the social media platform Twitter and the discussion on issues such as sexism and misogyny on it; the use of digital technology by feminist organisations for publicity and recognition; and the Everyday Sexism Project's #everydaysexism campaign launched by Laura Bates in 2012 in Great Britain.

It is a decade and a half since Nigel Edley and Margaret Wetherell's (2001) “Jekyll and Hyde: Men's constructions of feminism and feminists” called scholarly attention to men's discursive splitting of feminism and feminists into good and monstrous variants. In this article, we ask whether this double vision persists and how it operates in a cultural moment when feminism and feminist issues are (re)entering the mainstream. We draw from data collected in the course of a New Zealand study exploring how young people were making sense of sexism, feminism and gender (in)equality. Our analysis of participants' accounts suggests a binary discursive formulation of feminism is alive and well: “unreasonable feminism” damns and dismisses feminism, while “fair feminism” affirms it, aligning it with equality. Where previous research has shown how such pejorative and affirming accounts are worked together in ways that dilute or depoliticise feminism, we explore how teenagers who explicitly adopted a feminist identity drew on these discourses to justify a more politicised feminist position. Many participants adopted a practice of “reasonable feminism”, embodying and evidencing feminist reasonableness through their rhetorical and performative devices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a long history of mostly antagonist interactions between feminist and evolutionary scholarship in the behavioral sciences. However, recent theoretical and empirical advances have highlighted that “nature” and “nurture” are not mutually exclusive, or even divorceable, levels of explanation. New developments in evolutionary theory, articulated under the name of “the extended synthesis,” show significant promise for integrating feminist and evolutionary approaches to the study of human behavior. The extended synthesis provides feminist inquiry and research an expanded ground on which to enter the conversation, such as with the inclusion of “fast” evolution – the idea that genetic and epigenetic (environmentally influenced gene expression) traits can change within a generation – which demonstrates that there has in fact been evolutionary time to (adaptively) alter behavior and physiology. This integration has the potential to lead to new research paradigms that bridge the old divide between “nature” and “nurture”, resulting in transdisciplinary frameworks that show the interaction effects between each. Feminism and feminist psychology will be more complete descriptors and analyzers of human behavior in this model, and crucial interaction effects historically ignored by both the sciences and humanities may now receive due consideration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses various reports within the issue on topics including psychology of women, analysis of how social scientific claims supported prejudicial views of women; and under-representation of women in the field of cognitive psychology.

The article reflects on feminist thinking within psychology as discussed in the works of psychologist Stephanie Shield. It highlights studies related to history of sex difference psychological research, and the prototypic psychology of women. It also discusses role of the maternal instinct as a complex and ordered system of instincts characterized by different emotions.

Mainstream psychological research has been characterized as androcentric in its construction of males as the norm. Does an androcentric bias also characterize the professional visibility of psychologists? We examined this issue for cognitive psychology, where the gender distribution in doctoral degrees has been roughly equal for several decades. Our investigation revealed that, across all indicators surveyed, male cognitive psychologists are more visible than their female counterparts: they are over-represented in professional society governance, as editors-in-chief of leading journals in the field, as Fellows in professional societies, and as recipients of prestigious senior level awards. Taken together, our findings indicate that a gender parity in doctoral degrees in cognitive psychology does not translate into a parity in professional visibility. We discuss a variety of potential reasons for the observed gender gap and suggest that, without attention to gendered structures of status and power, as noted by Shields, existing gender hierarchies may persist and be reproduced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses an article related to functionalism and darwinism and psychology of women by psychologist Stephanie Shields. It mentions emergence of critical histories of psychology that are deployed in the history of science. It also highlights role of historians of psychology to replace women and their contributions in the history of psychology.

The period of becoming a mother is a fundamental issue for feminism and a challenging one for psychology, involving a specific set of psychological processes and psychic changes that are hard to access through available language and discourses. How we understand, theorise and represent the perinatal period of mothering reaches into questions of gender equality and gender difference, parenting and how feminist psychology has tended to treat women’s reproductive bodies and the biological. To explore these themes, the article draws on a piece of empirical research about becoming a mother for the first time, using matrixial theory to point beyond the binaries in feminist psychological accounts of women’s reproductive capacities, parental care and gender equality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What is at stake for women who challenge sexism? In October 2012, Australia’s first female Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, delivered a speech in Parliament in which she accused the Leader of the Opposition, Tony Abbott, of sexism and misogyny. The speech attracted local and international media coverage, and sparked widespread debate about precisely what constitutes sexism and misogyny, and whether the accusation was justified. This study adopts a discursive psychological approach to analyse a corpus of 216 articles published in the Australian print media in the week following the speech. The analysis identifies common discursive patterns and resources used to construct and represent sexism and examines the ways in which this accusation of sexism was dismissed, minimised and undermined. The analysis also demonstrates how Gillard’s identity was negatively constructed and problematized, and the implications this may have for other women who wish to confront sexism. Finally, the analysis suggests that silence is privileged over speaking up against sexism, and provides evidence for the existence of an ideological dilemma – in which speaking up against sexism is considered “dangerous”, but failing to do so is to tolerate an injustice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents information on recommendations for reducing cisgenderism in psychological research. Topics discussed include methodologies of misgendering, English language concepts of gender, and discriminatory gender ideology in English language publications. Also discussed is the significance of gender ideology for knowledge in the field of molecular biology.

This paper will suggest how a psychogeographical methodology can be developed as a new method for feminist psychologists, in the study of urban and rural environments. One of the limitations of situationist psychogeography is its grounding in the male gaze. In addition, men have had privileged access to and time to participate in such activities. Drawing on Feminist geography, Queer theory and Gay/Lesbian writing, core concepts such as embodied subjectivity and heteronormativity can be used to develop the theoretical base of a feminist psychogeographical methodology. In this paper, I will outline how feminist psychogeographical research might be conducted; the ‘situationist’ approach of using bodies as research ‘instruments’ means that innovative data may be gathered through the experience of walking and seeing the world through the situationist lens. Finally, the implications of this work for personal and political social transformation will be addressed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper contributes to debates on post-feminism and the constitution of contemporary femininity via an exploration of young women’s alcohol consumption and their involvement in normative drinking cultures. We view femininity as a profoundly contradictory and dilemmatic space which appears almost impossible for girls or young women to inhabit. The juxtaposition of hyper-sexual femininity and the culture of intoxication produces a particularly difficult set of dilemmas for young women. They are exhorted to be sassy and independent – but not feminist; to be ‘up for it’ and to drink and get drunk alongside young men – but not to ‘drink like men’. They are also called on to look and act as agentically sexy within a pornified night-time economy, but to distance themselves from the troubling figure of the ‘drunken slut’. Referring to recent research on young women’s alcohol consumption and our own study on young adults’ involvement in the culture of intoxication in the UK, we consider the ways in which young women manage to inhabit this terrain, and the implications for contemporary feminism and safer drinking initiatives. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article argues that there has been a significant shift in advertising representations of women in recent years, such that rather than being presented as passive objects of the male gaze, young women in adverts are now frequently depicted as active, independent and sexually powerful. This analysis examines contemporary constructions of female sexual agency in advertisements examining three recognizable ‘figures’: the young, heterosexually desiring ‘midriff’, the vengeful woman set on punishing her partner or ex-partner for his transgressions, and the ‘hot lesbian’, almost always entwined with her beautiful Other or double. Using recent examples of adverts, the article asks how this apparent ‘agency’ and ‘empowerment’ should be understood. Drawing on accounts of the incorporation or recuperation offeminist ideas in advertising, the article takes a critical approach to these representations, examining their exclusions, their constructions of gender relations and heteronormativisy, and the way power is figured within them. A feminist poststructuralist approach is used to interrogate the way in which ‘sexual agency’ becomes a form of regulation in these adverts that requires the re-moulding of feminine subjectivity to fit the current postfeminist, neoliberal moment in which young women should not only be beautiful but sexy, sexually knowledgeable/practised and always ‘up for it’. The article makes an original contribution to debates about representations of gender in advertising, to poststructuralist analyses about the contemporary operation of power, and to writing about female ‘sexual agency’ by suggesting that ‘voice’ or ‘agency’ may not be the solution to the ‘missing discourse of female desire’ but may in fact be a technology of discipline and regulation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the concept that the personal is political in relation to authoritarianism. The author suggests that an interaction of feminism and mainstream political psychology could benefit both. She summarizes her work on right-wing authoritarianism, which is an important variable in mainstream political psychology, to demonstrate that authoritarians are much more sexist than non-authoritarians. She also proposes on linking traditional psychological variables with feminist research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Examines how internalized heterosexism is related to feminist attitudes and coping resources in female participants in the United States. Lesbian internalized heterosexism; Self-identification as feminist; Attitude towards feminist.