01803 - 7 - Gender and Culture in Psychology : Theories and Practices

Gender, the equality of the sexes, and societal inequalities more generally have been intensely debated and studied by social scientists in the last several decades. In the wake of the debates, new fields of study and new ways of thinking about old issues have emerged. This is as true of psychology as of other social sciences. When psychologists take contemporary scholarship on gender, ethnic groups, sexuality, and other social categorizations into account, foundational assumptions and practices in psychology begin to shift. To begin with, new and different psychological questions emerge and new topics are brought forward. To answer such new questions and address new topics, new research methods have been devised. This, in turn, has caused gender researchers to become attentive to epistemological questions. In this book, we discuss these three innovations associated with gender scholarship: (1) in content, that is, new knowledge about gender and culture; (2) in method, that is, alternate ways of doing research and practice; and (3) in epistemology, that is, new ways of thinking about psychological knowledge. We approach these innovations from several different angles. We present theoretical tools for thinking about gender, culture, and psychology, as well as methodological tools for doing research about these issues. We present research projects that illustrate innovative method and theory. We also present overviews of issues that have been central to psychological theorizing about gender and culture. And we present debates among gender researchers about such issues. In our presentations we draw upon fields outside psychology, including anthropology, history, sociology, political science, feminist studies, and science studies. We also draw upon several fields within psychology, including critical psychology, feminist psychology, sociocultural psychology, discursive psychology, rhetorical psychology, post-structural psychology, and critical history of psychology. Psychologists in these fields have analyzed the influence of political processes, cultural patterns and forces, and national contexts, as well as social subordination and exclusion, on