1. VII. Meanings of Sex and Gender for a New Generation of Feminist Psychologists
- Author
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Joan M. Ostrove and Alyssa N. Zucker
- Subjects
Notice ,media_common.quotation_subject ,Gender studies ,Context (language use) ,Postmodernism ,Feminism ,Gender Studies ,Scholarship ,Arts and Humanities (miscellaneous) ,Feminist psychology ,Reading (process) ,Mainstream ,Psychology ,General Psychology ,media_common - Abstract
When Rhoda Unger’s landmark essay ‘Toward a Redefinition of Sex and Gender’ was published in 1979, we were 10 and 14 years old respectively. But by the time we met in graduate school in 1992, we were feminists, we were becoming feminist psychologists and, perhaps most importantly, there was such a thing as feminist psychology. We didn’t have to do the intellectual work to create the subfield, we didn’t have to fight for it, we didn’t have to hide it or do it on the side while pursuing ‘mainstream research’ in public. We weren’t told by our advisors that studying gender was a waste of our time; indeed, we had the opportunity to be advised by a prominent feminist psychologist, Abby Stewart. We ‘grew up’, then, in the context of a psychology already influenced by the women’s movement and by groundbreaking scholars such as Unger. Yet, the subfield we entered was young enough that we learned of these struggles from the women who fought them, and so we take none of these opportunities we’ve had for granted. We are acutely aware and appreciative of the legacy we have inherited, and of the specific ways Rhoda Unger was – and continues to be – influential in creating that legacy. To us as young scholars, the distinctions between ‘sex’ and ‘gender’ seemed clear and not in need of specification, an, in that way, Unger’s (1979) distinctions had already had a positive and important effect on the field and on us. Our experiences of feminist psychology were much like what Baumgardner and Richards (2000) described as the experience of feminism for third-wavers: ‘For our generation, feminism is like fluoride. We scarcely notice that we have it – it’s simply in the water’ (p. 17). By the time we entered the field, the contemporary scholarship on sex and gender was heavily influenced by postmodern feminist thinking. We each have distinctive memories of reading Hare-Mustin and Marecek’s (1990) now classic, then hot-off-the-press, book Making a Difference
- Published
- 2007