“It sounds like a whisper”: feminist psychology and the gendering of power

In her inaugural lecture, Rose Capdevila, Professor of Psychology at the OU, will discuss research around the gendering of power in three contexts: activism, the history of psychology and social media.

Informed by intersectional feminist theory, the lecture will explore the relational constitution and legitimisation of gender in these spaces.

Abstract

This inaugural lecture will discuss Professor Capdevila’s research around the gendering of power in three contexts: her early work on gender and activism; interest in the history of feminist psychology; and her research, over the last decade, on social media and the online environment more broadly.

Informed by intersectional feminist theory, which argues that different types of discrimination can operate together to make each other worse it will follow a loose chronological trajectory across these three contexts and importantly, focus on how a collaborative work ethos has been fundamental to these projects.   

Drawing on discussions and publications with and around the research group Beryl Curt, and later the Discourse Unit, Professor Capdevila’s early work around gender and activism explored how these co-constructed in ways that, in many cases, functioned to provide access to power for individual women without extending this to women more widely. The discussion will aim to unpack the concepts of “mother”, “politics”, and “activist” to argue that we can reach a more useful understanding of identity if we address these not as stable and pre-existing, but rather as shifting and complex products. It was these initial explorations that led to an interest in how we make sense of mothering identities and the role gender plays in that.

Research around mothering identities led to her involvement with feminist scholars and organisations dedicated to relevant areas of Psychology - Professor Capdevila's home discipline. One of these, Psychology’s Feminist Voices (PFV), a multimedia digital archive, has been the focus of recent work with POWES (Psychology of Women and Equalities) colleagues on the history of feminist psychology in the UK, which provides the second context. This oral and archival history project has recently produced an online exhibit entitled “Lasting Legacies and Feminist Futures: UK Feminist Psych”, the research and background to which will be discussed.

Professor Capdevila will conclude with a third context: research on the role of social media; how we curate our “selves” and make sense of others in online environments. This research has been conducted with academic and private sector partners, but primarily with Lisa Lazard, Professor of Psychology at the OU.

This online environment has provided a step change for feminism by allowing new ways of doing politics, in particular activism, and, so, of accessing power. It has contributed to a growth in both the acceptability of and backlash against feminism. Social media in particular has been widely implicated in the rise, if not the production, of problematic issues such as “fake news”, trolling, cyberbullying, narcissism, and many other problematic practices. Yet, social media has also become an integral part of most people’s lives and, importantly, our everyday lives have become embedded in social media.

Professor Capdevila will draw on these three research contexts to explore how we might work to make these spaces equitable, collaborative, and constructive.

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