Gender and Sexuality Arena

Reflecting on Cosmetic Surgery

Body image, Shame and Narcissism

• By Jane Northrop.

Published April 2012

Cosmetic surgery represents an extreme form of modern grooming. It is the fastest growing medical specialty, yet misconceptions abound about those who undertake it and their reasons for doing so. With a grounded approach, engaging 30 women through in-depth interview, this study explores how they…
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Sex Trafficking in South Asia

Telling Maya's Story

• By Mary Crawford.

Published September 2011

This book is a critical feminist analysis of sex trafficking. Arguing that trafficking in girls and women is a product of the social construction of gender and other dimensions of power and status within a particular culture and at a particular historical moment, this book offers the necessary…
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Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and Maternal Subjectivity

• By Alison Stone.

Published September 2011

In this book, Alison Stone develops a feminist approach to maternal subjectivity. Stone argues that in the West the self has often been understood in opposition to the maternal body, so that one must separate oneself from the mother and maternal care-givers on whom one depended in childhood to…
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The Madness of Women

Myth and Experience

• By Jane M. Ussher.

Published March 2011

Why are women more likely to be positioned or diagnosed as mad than men? If madness is a social construction, a gendered label, as many feminist critics would argue, how can we understand and explain women's prolonged misery and distress? In turn, can we prevent or treat women’s distress, in a…
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Critical Psychology

• Edited by Ian Parker.

Published March 2011

Critical psychology has emerged as a vibrant site of research and reflection on the assumptions and practices of its host discipline. As serious scholarship flourishes in the area as never before, this new collection from the Routledge Major Works series, Critical Concepts in Psychology, meets the…
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Secrecy and Silence in the Research Process

Feminist Reflections

• Edited by Róisín Ryan-Flood, and Rosalind Gill.

Published October 2010

Feminist research is informed by a history of breaking silences, of demanding that women’s voices be heard, recorded and included in wider intellectual genealogies and histories. This has led to an emphasis on voice and speaking out in the research endeavour. Moments of secrecy and silence are less…
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Domestic Violence and Psychology

A Critical Perspective

• By Paula Nicolson.
• Series Edited by Jane Ussher.

Published June 2010

This book rethinks the way psychological knowledge of domestic violence has typically been constructed. It puts forward a psychological perspective which is both critical of the traditional ‘woman blaming’ stance, as well as being at odds with the feminist position that men are wholly to blame…
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Hard Knocks

Domestic Violence and the Psychology of Storytelling

• By Janice Haaken.

Published April 2010

This book draws on interviews carried out over a period of eight years, as well as novels, films, and domestic violence literature, to explain the role of storytelling in the history of the battered women’s movement. The author shows how cultural contexts shape how stories about domestic abuse get…
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The Gendered Unconscious

Can Gender Discourses Subvert Psychoanalysis?

• By Louise Gyler.

Published March 2010

Feminist interventions in psychoanalysis have often attempted either to subvert or re-frame the masculinist and phallocentric biases of Freud's psychoanalysis. This book investigates the nature of these interventions by comparing the status and treatment of women in two different psychoanalytic…
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Memory Matters

Contexts for Understanding Sexual Abuse Recollections

• Edited by Janice Haaken, and Paula Reavey.

Published July 2009

This book is grounded in the debates of the 1980s and 1990s that surrounded recollections of childhood sexual abuse, particularly those that emerged in the context of psychotherapy. When growing numbers of therapists claimed that they were recovering deeply repressed memories of early sexual…
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