Deconstructing Feminist Psychology

Lise Bird is a Senior Lecturer in Education at Victoria University of Wellington in Aotearoa New Zealand. She was trained as a cognitive psychologist in Australia, but moved countries and disciplines as she started to include feminist, cultural studies and post-structural perspectives in her work. She is interested in critical reworkings of ‘known’ ideas about intelligence, self-esteem and motivation within educational psychology.

Erica Burman teaches psychology and women's studies at the Manchester Metropolitan University, UK. Her work is in the areas of feminist critiques of developmental psychology, subjectivity and discourse. Her previous publications include Psychological Theory and Feminist Practice (edited, 1990), Discourse Analytic Research (with 1. Parker, 1993), Deconstructing Developmental Psychology (1994), Qualitative Methods in Psychology (with P. Banister, 1. Parker, M. Taylor and C. Tindall, 1994), Challenging Women: Psychology's Exclusions, Feminist Possibilities (with P. Alldred, C. Bewley, B. Goldberg, C. Heenan, D. Marks, J. Marshall, K. Taylor, R. Ullah and S. Warner, 1996) and Psychology Discourse Practice: From Regulation to Resistance (with G. Aitken, P. Alldred, R. Allwood, T. Billington, B. Goldberg, A. Gordó-López, C. Heenan, D. Marks and S. Warner, 1996).

Mary Crawford is Professor of Psychology and Women's Studies at West Chester University of Pennsylvania, USA. She is author, co-author or editor of five books. Women and Gender: A Feminist Psychology (with R. Unger, 1992; 2nd edition 1996) and In Our Own Words: Readings in Women and Gender (with R. Unger, 1997) are widely adopted texts for teaching the psychology of women and gender. Other works include Gender and Thought (with M. Gentry, 1989), Talking Difference:

Gender Differences in Human Cognition (with P. Caplan, J.S. Hyde and J.T. Richardson, 1997). She is currently serving on the editorial boards of the journals Psychology of Women Quarterly, Feminism and Psychology and Contemporary Psychology.

Mary Crawford received her PhD in experimental psychology from the University of Delaware. She is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association and the American Psychological Society.

Heidi J. Figueroa Sarriera is Associate Professor at the Department of Psychology, Faculty of Social Science, Río Piedras Campus, University of Puerto Rico. As a transdisciplinary social psychologist she is involved in research on cultural representations of high-tech designs. She is assistant editor with Steven Mentor and Chris Hables Gray (editor) of The Cyborg Handbook (1995). She also co-edited with Madeline Román and María M. Lopez, Más allá de la bella (in)diferencia: Revisión post-feminista y otras escrituras posibles (1994).

Lenora Fulani is a practising social therapist at the East Side Center for Social Therapy and is on the faculty of its training center, the East Side Institute for Short Term Psychotherapy, New York. She is a founder and co-executive producer of the All Stars Talent Show Network, the largest and most successful anti-violence program for inner-city youth in the USA. A pioneer of the third-party movement in the USA in 1988, running as an independent candidate for the US Presidency, she became the first woman in American history to be on the presidential ballot in all 50 states. She chairs the Committee for a Unified Independent Party, and in 1995, Fulani was elected to the 31-member General Council of the independent Transnational Radical Party. She is the editor of The Psychopathology of Everyday Racism and Sexism (1987), co-author of Independent Black Leadership in America (1991), and author of The Making of a Fringe Candidate, 1992 (1993). Lenora Fulani received her PhD in developmental psychology from the City University of New York.

Frigga Haug is Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University for Economy and Politics, Hamburg, Germany. She has been a visiting scholar at the following universities: Copenhagen, Innsbruck, Sydney, Klagenfurth, Toronto and Durham in North Carolina. Her main field of research is empirical methods in social psychology, work research and women's studies. Her previous posts were in psychology at the Free University of Berlin, and in women's studies at the University of Hamburg. While her editorial and collectively written work is well-known inside and outside Germany, translations of her work into English include Female Sexualization: A Collective Work of Memory (1987) and Beyond Female Masochism: Memory-work and Politics (1992). Having finished a project on women's fears and anxieties, she is currently researching about women and culture and gender-specific learning processes. She has recently written two mysteries.

Gordana Jovanović is Assistant Professor of General Psychology and Personality Theory at the Department of Psychology, and works as a [Page ix]researcher in Developmental Psychology at the Institute of Psychology, University of Belgrade, Yugoslavia. She earned her MA and PhD degrees at Belgrade University. She was Alexander-vonHumboldt research fellow at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt-on-Main (Germany) in 1984, 1985 and 1989. Her scientific publications are on the philosophical foundations of psychology, contemporary social theories, historical psychology, psychoanalytic theory, semiotics, modernity and postmodernity. She is author of Simbolizovanje i radonalnost (Symbolization and Rationality) (1984), and Frojd i moderna subjectivnost (Freud and Modern Subjectivity) (1997). She also translates from German. This is her first publication on feminist psychology.

Amanda Kottler is a clinical psychologist and a lecturer at the University of Cape Town. She is currently based at the Child Guidance Clinic, where she convenes and teaches in the first year of the MA (Clinical Psychology) training programme. She is also a psychotherapist in private practice. Over the past ten years, drawing on discourse and conversation analysis, her main research interests and publications have been concerned with the complexity of identity issues (race, gender, sexuality) and definitional problems (sexual and racial harassment/violence). Current research and writing interests include self psychology, intersubjectivity and contemporary relational theory. Her publications include Culture, Power and Difference (with A. Levett, I. Parker and E. Burman, 1997).

Ann Levett was an associate professor and a clinical psychologist at the University of Cape Town until 1996. Her main research interests have been in discourse analysis and other qualitative approaches to gender and power-related issues. She is now a psychotherapist. She is co-editor with Amanda Kothler, Erica Burman and Ian Parker of Culture, Power and Difference (1997).

Margot Pujal i Llombart gained a PhD on the topic of feminist knowledge, gender and science, and the social construction of women's identities from the Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain in 1991. She has been teaching social psychology and the psychology of groups in the Unitat de Psicologia Social there since 1989. She also teaches on postgraduate courses on socioconstructionism, critical theory and gender, ‘gender as a category to analyse psychosocial reality’ and on ‘Otherness as a social construction’. Her current research and writing interests are in the areas of subjectivity, power relationships, social change and autobiography.