The Palgrave Handbook of Power, Gender, and Psychology

The Palgrave Handbook of Power, Gender, and Psychology takes an intersectional feminist approach to the exploration of psychology and gender through a lens of power. The invisibility of power in psychological research and theorizing has been critiqued by scholars from many perspectives both within and outside the discipline. This volume addresses that gap. The handbook centers power in the analysis of gender, but does so specifically in relation to psychological theory, research, and praxis.  Gathering the work of sixty authors from different geographies, career stages, psychological sub-disciplines, methodologies, and experiences, the handbook showcases creativity in approach, and diversity of perspective.  The result is a work featuring a chorus of different voices, including diverse understandings of feminisms and power. Ultimately, the handbook presents a case for the importance of intersectionality and power for any feminist psychological endeavor.

The Palgrave Handbook of Power, Gender, and Psychology is a rich treasure trove for feminist psychologists regardless of their specific interests, and for political and social psychologists regardless of whether they know much about feminist psychology. It offers insightful, sophisticated analyses, using intersectional approaches, to understanding many contemporary social and political issues (interpersonal violence, surveillance, and social media to name only a few). At the same time, it offers exceptionally useful introductions to many topics by centering the ways that gender and power construct and are constructed within different domains (interpersonal interactions, media representations including on social media, within policy settings, and more).

Abigail Stewart, Sandra Schwartz Tangri Distinguished University Professor of Psychology and Women's and Gender Studies, University of Michigan, USA

 

The Palgrave Handbook of Power, Gender,and Psychology brings together an impressive array of chapters showcasing the incisiveness and importance of feminist psychologies that foreground power relations in their analyses and applications. The book features key feminist writers from around the world, tackles a broad range of topics and approaches, and highlights the necessity of careful, reflexive scholarship aimed at understanding gender and psychology. It should be standard reading for psychology students, academics, and practitioners.

Catriona Macleod, Distinguished Professor of Psychology and SARChI Chair of Critical Studies in Sexualities and Reproduction, Rhodes University, South Africa

 

This book is all you will need for any equalities-based teaching in and around Psychology. It testifies to the vitality and significance a sustained feminist commitment brings to critiquing oppression and supports practices of resistance to oppressive gendered discourses in Psychology. Authors are experts in their fields and the volume spans key current issues and debates facing psychology, psychologists and all who use or are subjected to psychology. It will be a core text for my teaching and as a collection is a unique resource.

Erica Burman, Professor of Education, Manchester Institute of Education, School of Environment, Education and Development, The University of Manchester, UK

 

Intersectionality is a cornerstone of contemporary feminist psychology, and power analysis is crucial to intersectionality. Yet as intersectionality has diffused into many areas of psychology, the power analysis has often been lost. This book is a healthy corrective, with its emphasis on and elaboration of the centrality of power in the psychology of gender. It is a must-read for any psychologist who aspires to apply an intersectional approach in their work.

Janet Shibley Hyde, Professor Emerit of Psychology and Gender & Women’s Studies, University of Wisconsin—Madison, USA

 

I am delighted to endorse this luscious collection of transnational essays on power and gender in psychology. Written in the ink of intersectionality and feminism, taking seriously racial capitalism, hetero-patriarchy, local context and herstories, disability and reproductive justice, these essays crucially center questions of power and gender just at a time when right wing/fascist regimes rise across the globe endangering women, femmes and trans folx, rolling back gender justice movements.

 

This book erupts just when it is needed – to be taught/read/critiqued/extended in schools and community settings; in clinics and kitchens; in bedrooms and childcare settings; in butcher shops and hair salons; in libraries, welfare offices, immigration centers and in the bathrooms of religious spaces; on line and in music… wherever gender is being performed and transformed/silenced and flaunted/re-imaginedand queered through a radical intersectional lens, structurally and intimately.

 

This volume embodies and enacts, educates and provokes, both resistance and re-imagination.  It offers a provocative pajama party – yes take it to bed – of scholars and practitioners around the globe, asking hard questions of gender, abuse, power, trafficking, bodyweight, parenting, bodies, madness, sports, aging, surveillance, work and home. Just when regimes around the globe are demanding that we SHUT UP about hetero-patriarchy, racial capitalism and ruthless misogynoir, this volume is a gorgeous and intentionally unsettling refusal.

Michelle Fine, Distinguished Professor of Critical Psychology and Women/Gender Studies at the Graduate Center, CUNY, USA and Visiting Professor, University of South Africa, RSA

 

The Handbook of Power, Gender, and Psychology is a much-needed intervention to acknowledge and credit feminist scholarship and analysis across multiple domains of study. Its contributors name feminist scholarship as foundational to understanding these domains and they engage its urgent analytic and applied value with rich nuance.

Bonnie Moradi, Professor of Psychology, Director, Center for Gender, Sexualities, and Women’s Studies Research, University of Florida, USA

 

Women are everywhere in contemporary psychology but feminist analyses have been repeatedly and systematically marginalized. In response, this useful volume insists that power is a verb with many gendered meanings. Its diverse chapters present all psychologists with chewy argument for feminist psychology that resists being swallowed by the psychology of gender.

Peter Hegarty, Professor in Psychology, The Open University, UK

 

A stunningly expansive collection of field-leaders and emerging voices who represent the vanguard of critical approaches to power,psychology, intersectionality, and social transformation. Both theoretically rich and deeply accessible, Zurbriggen, Capdevila, and their contributors show how feminist psychology can redefine the terms of engagement at this pressing moment in human history, social science, and global democracy. This volume will be the definitive resource for feminist political psychology for at least a generation.

Patrick R. Grzanka, Professor and Dean for Social Sciences, University of Tennessee, President (2023-2024), Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues, USA

 

Hallelujah! A significant and timely collection that addresses the core issue of gender construction that psychology largely glosses over: Power. Who has a right to be heard? Who has standing as a citizen? How is gender constructed as a means to control access to power and autonomy? This book is a game-changer and should be in the hands of every gender researcher in the psychologicalsciences. Now!

Stephanie A. Shields, Professor Emeritx, Psychology & Women's, Gender, & Sexuality Studies, The Pennsylvania State University, USA

 

As a scholar of objectification for 30 years, I’ve bemoaned how our individualist-centered field and broader neoliberal cultural framing of gender reduces research and intervention to the rigged game of “empowerment feminism.” Our current political climate demands that we replace this essentializing, divisive approach with one that centers power dynamics. Enter Zurbriggen and Capdevila’s outstanding volume, with feminist psychological science and theory, across a vast array of sites where gender and power intersect, to provide a truly empowering foundation for the collective action necessary to create a more equitable society. 

Tomi-Ann Roberts, Professor of Psychology, Colorado College, USA

 

Zurbriggen and Capdevila animate the elephant in the feministroom: power. By expertly bringing together diverse understandings of power and feminisms, their handbook offers valuable background and insights across a representative array of topics central to constructing a complex, intersectional, useful psychology of women, gender, and sexuality. Researchers and theorists, practitioners, activists, and the simply curious are sure to be drawn into this wide-ranging, scholarly resource.

Janice D. Yoder, Academic Affiliate Professor of Psychology and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, The Pennsylvania State University, USA

 

Across a wide variety of social, personal, and physical domains, gender and power are metaphors and models for each other. In The Palgrave Handbook of Power, Gender, and Psychology, a geographically and generationally wide range of authors explore these connections in a wide range of topics, fields, and disciplines both traditional and innovative – including the complicity of psychology. The book is an encyclopedic guide to concepts, theories, examples, and strategies to change how power and gender are linked, in everyday life as well as academic disciplines. References and suggestions for further exploration abound.

David G. Winter, Emeritus Professor of Psychology, University of Michigan, USA

Power, Gender and Psychology is not only an extraordinary achievement, but a gift to scholars and practitioners. Impressive in its sweep and range, it brings together the best of contemporary research on gender and psychology, is not afraid to ask challenging questions, and keeps power centre-stage in all its interrogations – from new technologies to mental health, to sexual harassment to work and care. An absolutely essential contribution that will be a source book for years to come.

Rosalind Gill, Professor of Cultural and Social Analysis, City University London, UK

Eileen L. Zurbriggen is Distinguished Professor of Psychology at the University of California, Santa Cruz, USA where she is also affiliated with the Feminist Studies department. Her most recent book, co-authored with Ella Ben Hagai, is Queer Theory and Psychology: Gender, Sexuality, and Transgender Identities (2022).

Rose Capdevila is Professor of Psychology at the Open University, UK. Her current research is on gender in digital spaces and the history of UK feminist psychology. Rose is a past co-editor of Feminism & Psychology and co-authored A Feminist Companion to Research Methods in Psychology (2022) with Hannah Frith.