Comentoring, Collaboration, and Community: Feminist Approaches Within an Australian University

By Jessica Gildersleeve

Image by Europeana from Unsplash 

Helmi Herman, Estonian e-Repository and Conservation of Collections Providing Country: Estonia CC0 Naine by Herman, Helmi (autor) - Tartu Art Museum, Estonia - CC0.

If you picture academic mentoring, you might imagine a wise professor guiding a junior colleague through the labyrinth of university life. But what if mentoring wasn’t a one-way street? What if it wasn’t so inherently corrupted by the power relations evident in professor/early career researcher relationship? What if it was a vibrant, supportive network where everyone learned from each other, shared power, and built something bigger than themselves?

That’s the heart of “comentoring,” a feminist approach to professional development in academia, which disrupts institutional hierarchies and instead empowers those typically marginalised in traditional university settings. In a recent article published in Feminism & Psychology, a group of interdisciplinary researchers from the University of Southern Queensland share how they’ve put these ideas into practice, and why it’s making a difference for them and their communities.

Academia can be a tough place, especially for women and people from minority backgrounds. Despite making up the majority of staff in Australian universities, women are still clustered in lower-level, teaching-only roles and were hit hardest by the extra burdens of the COVID-19 pandemic. Many report feeling isolated, marginalised, or burned out.

Traditional mentoring often reinforces hierarchies and power imbalances. It can be rigid, transactional, and even competitive. The authors of the article found themselves craving something different: a sense of community, mutual support, and genuine collaboration, rather than competition.

Comentoring does something quite different. Instead of a top-down relationship, it’s about building horizontal, democratic partnerships. Everyone brings something to the table, and everyone benefits. The group describes their approach as “a village,” a network of colleagues who support each other through the ups and downs of academic life, both professionally and personally.

This model is rooted in feminist values of empathy, solidarity, and a commitment to social justice. It recognises that everyone’s circumstances are different, and that life’s challenges, like caring for children, dealing with illness, or navigating grief, aren’t distractions from academic work, but sources of knowledge and strength. The group posit that comentoring should be underpinned by a commitment to social justice and the elevation of underrepresented voices. It’s about embracing the humanness of academic life, valuing relationships, and creating space for everyone to thrive.

The group’s comentoring journey began organically, through informal networking and shared interests. Over time, they built a core community of seven academics with diverse backgrounds in psychology, social work, literary studies, education, creative arts, and sociology. They regularly invited others from both inside and outside of the university into their projects.

What sets their approach apart is its flexibility and inclusivity. Leadership rotates based on interest and expertise, not job title. Early career researchers and research students are encouraged to take the lead on papers and projects, with more experienced colleagues offering guidance and support. Authorship is determined by contribution, not hierarchy.

This isn’t just feel-good theory. The group’s collaborative approach has led to tangible successes. For example, a cross-national project on the experiences of transgender people in prison resulted in 12 published manuscripts (far exceeding their original goal), international recognition, and invitations to deliver professional development for prison staff. Their work has influenced policy guidelines and contributed to real-world change.

By matching research assistants and students with academics from different disciplines, they fostered interdisciplinary learning and innovation. Including community members and people with lived experience as co-authors ensured that their research was relevant, impactful, and grounded in real-world needs.

Comentoring isn’t just about surviving academia; it’s about transforming it. By fostering genuine collaboration, empathy, and shared leadership, we can create communities where everyone has the chance to grow, contribute, and make a difference, based on precisely who they are. In a world that often prizes competition and individual achievement, that maintains hierarchies and overlooks the effects of intersectional identities, that’s a radical but profound idea.

Author Bio: 

Jessica Gildersleeve FHEA is Professor of English Literature at the University of Southern Queensland, Australia.

Original Manuscript: 

See the article this blog was based on here.

This manuscript is part of our latest F&P Special Issue: Advancing a plural, reflexive, and inclusive psychology through feminist mentoring

#GentleParenting: critiquing the “fifth shift” of intensive mothering in the “pandemic afterlives”

 by Vange Holtz-Schramek

Image description and source:

This meme depicts the coach of the Kansas City Chiefs, Andy Reid, speaking calmly to the team’s tight end Travis Kelce during Superbowl LVIII. Kelce is shown to be yelling directly at his coach’s face. The caption overlaid on Reid is “Me trying to gentle parent,” while the caption overlaid on Kelce is “My kid not gentle childing.” Source: AdoreAshlynn on r/nflmemes, Reddit.

Who doesn’t like gentle things? In theory, most of us do. Add this adjective to anything and we might be tempted: gentle dryer sheets, etc. During the pandemic lockdowns, the dominant trend in my online parenting groups was “gentle parenting,” a cluster of positive parenting practices that focalize the development of children’s emotional self-awareness. The woman who wrote the book (2016) on gentle parenting, Sarah Ockwell-Smith, developed her own understanding of this parenting approach through her experiences as a mother, not through specific or accredited training (i.e., as a child behavioralist or psychologist as examples). For Ockwell-Smith, gentle parents are driven by empathy for both parent and child – a gentleness extended from self to other.

Parenting trends come and go – some linger, some pass swiftly. In my sphere, I have seen, recently, “snowplow parenting,” and “lighthouse parenting”; yet my hunch is that these are both constructed in relation to this dominant parenting zeitgeist of our era, gentle parenting. I knew that this trend had currency when I began to see it crop up in journalism and comedy specials. In such venues, critics take aim at gentle parents for being too lenient with their children, for not educating them about the realities of life. On the flip side, some parents who attempt gentle parenting find themselves up against a wall – one perhaps best described by the meme shared at the outset of this post. The meme suggests, for instance, that a parent’s intention to be “gentle” is well and good, yet children may not be able to get on the same wavelength.

So, gentleness – it sounds good, in theory. In my recent piece, I set out to investigate what might be lurking below gentleness: what gentleness may be occluding, or what social coercions it may be perpetuating. Since most gentle parenting content these days is disseminated through social media platforms, specifically Instagram and TikTok, I sought out #GentleParenting content here. My cross-platform mixed-method analysis involved two-stages of data collection and combined programmatic analysis with both critical discourse analysis and contextual visual discourse analysis. My dataset was governed by a timeframe of one month late in 2023, and data accorded to hashtags including #GentleParenting and those associated such as #ConsciousParenting, #MomLife, etc.

My findings correspond to four key themes, which offer a complex and multi-hyphenate portrait of #GentleParenting. First off, as is common to social media and especially the power of influencers within this domain, the creators in my dataset – many of whom boast thousands of followers and even millions of views – do not identify themselves as accredited psychologists or behavioralists. Like Ockwell-Smith, who coined “gentle parenting,” these creators determine their credibility via the experiential knowledge they have accumulated via parenting. This presents a notable shift in parenting culture of the West that has long adhered to dogmas such as patriarchal motherhood and both intensive and scientific mothering, all of which undermine parents’, and usually mothers’, opinions and practices when it comes to child-rearing in favor of medical or psychological expertise as determined by, through the majority of the twentieth century, the male establishment.

Second, while this phenomenon can be understood as positive in its efforts to allow parents to regain control over childrearing, it also poses some challenges, including its propagation of wealthy, white feminist presentations in digital networks, as well as its insistence upon adding additional parenting labor. Thus, as I set out to explore the question, “Who gets to be gentle?,” I ultimately found that, consistent with feminist social media expressions on mainstream platforms, the answer is white, able, thin women with both class and beauty privilege, not to mention the leisure time and/or resources requisite to create and maintain #GentleParenting audiences with content that is well-styled, edited, and produced. Who among us can take on more? Who might have a staff on-hand (though hidden from the camera) to enable such performative #GentleParenting presentations?

Third, counter to a central component of parenting discourses – that of competition between parents as well as correlating judgment targeted at other parents – the humorous posts in my dataset, which comprised 37% of all posts, instead convey empathy through satiric takes on #GentleParenting. A specific trope within #GentleParenting on TikTok, the “What I Thought #GentleParenting Was,” series, offers a potential resurgence for forging radical mothering community online. These videos are stylistically unkempt – with untidy homes, children who are not perfectly behaved, and creators who demonstrate authenticity within parenting performances. They thus hold great promise for a turn away from the idealized, performative presentations of parenting within online platforms – creating space and options outside of perfectly-styled parenting, ones that can increase parental stress to conform to, often, unrealistic aims.

By using such TikTok videos to critique the pressures to perform perfect parenting online, I see an emerging trend arising, that of what I term “the fifth shift.” While Arlie Hochschild coined the “second shift” to refer to the domestic and affective labor mothers in dual-earner nuclear families enact once they finish their day jobs, and, more recently, Andrea O’Reilly and Fiona Joy Green (2021) named “the emotional and intellectual labor of motherwork and the homeschooling of children” under pandemic circumstances as the “third and fourth shifts” (p. 20), I argue that there is for parents using social media a “fifth shift” in which they are required to perform their parental identities on social media through tropes conversant with postfeminist neoliberalism, such as heterosexual femininity and beauty (styled hair, clothes, makeup, etc.), thoughtfully-created image and video production, and parenting performances that continue to uphold intensive mothering’s “good mother” figure (Bowles-Eagle, 2019, p. 767), who is always composed and never complains. Such a critique is particularly resonant in our post-pandemic landscape in which parental stress reached staggering levels and has since been labelled by the U.S. Surgeon General as a paramount public health issue.

Yet, while the “fifth shift,” may offer much-needed empathy via satiric posts, the political outcomes of broader #GentleParenting communities remain uncertain. As with any exhibited behavior on social media under its capitalist attention economy, a performer’s intentionality cannot be known with surety. In an era when self-care has taken on neoliberal preoccupations, how can #GentleParenting communities transpose their efforts towards uplifting the aims of feminist mothering for all? Further research into this community needs to continue to question the performances of lay expertise within this space, including potential harms accorded to mis- and disinformation therein, as well as keeps tabs on “Who gets to be gentle?” and who is left out of such discourses.

Author Bio:

Evangeline (Vange) Holtz-Schramek is a writer, mother, researcher, and educator from west coast unceded territories of the nation known as Canada. They are completing a dissertation in online mothering at McMaster University, where they are also an Instructor in the Communications Studies & Media Arts Department. You can find their writing in creative and critical venues including Feminist Media Studies, the Journal of Digital Social Research, The Ampersand Review, and CV2.

 

References

Bowles-Eagle, R. (2019). ‘Have you tried ginger?’: Severe pregnancy sickness and intensive mothering       on Instagram. Feminist Media Studies, 19(5): 767-769.

Hochschild, A. (1989). The second shift. Penguin.

Ockwell-Smith, S. (2016). The gentle parenting book. Little, Brown.

O’Reilly, A., & Green, F. J. (2021). Mothers, mothering, and COVID-19. Demeter Press.

 

 See the article this blog was based on at: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/09593535251327891 

Feminist ethic of care in academic knowledge production: Reflections from disability researchers

Our article delves into reflections from researchers working in the field of feminist disability studies, with a focus on proposing care as an ethic aimed at reshaping relationships in academic studies. It began with the problem of "speaking for others" and the proposal of "speaking with" to enable the production of counter-narratives by historically silenced people.

Care as an ethic for research is thus related to the methods used to produce embodied knowledge; interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary tools to facilitate the relationship between academia, activism, and communities; pending challenges regarding critical accessibility, especially in cases of intellectual and mental disabilities; tensions concerning the hierarchy of expert and experiential knowledge; and resistance through slow research to the mandates of academic productivity, associated with androcentric, neoliberal, and ableist logics.

In this context, thinking of care as an ethical foundation in the process of academic knowledge production implies addressing its paradoxical etymological roots in the Latin cura, which denote two conflicting meanings. As we further explain in the article, one meaning refers to worries, troubles or anxieties emerging, in this case, from the relationship with marginalised participants and communities. The other meaning refers to providing for their welfare, with a positive connotation related to attentive conscientiousness to the fulfilment of their rights. We think these paradoxical roots account for the dual feminist identity that involves blurred and complex boundaries for those who navigate academia and activism and are committed to questioning their own well-established ableist epistemic legitimacy.

A feminist stance aims therefore to make room for scholar activism, while also highlighting the remaining challenges for creating greater dialogue, exchange and experimentation with new methods and techniques to research with disabled women and gender non-conforming people.

Concrete practices of disclosure, listening, writing with and reflexivity shed light on how to implement procedures from a feminist perspective that are conscious and engage with the places of enunciation of the actors involved in processes of social knowledge production in the disability field. Through these practices, the problem of “speaking for others” may be addressed, for example, offering participants the option to use their real names in all publications. Additionally, research participants may be invited to coauthor training collaborative guides and materials (such as this one on tools for developing feminist disability teaching and research or these videos on civic education for people with intellectual disabilities)

Finally, reflexivity on the problem of “speaking with” leads all authors of this paper to acknowledge the hybrid location from which we write as Latin American. We have the privilege of access to the English language and to networks that allow us to publish in highly indexed journals. We also have professional trajectories and personal histories that include migration, as well as mental health and disabling conditions that connect us with our research field. The experiences of disabling conditions and of close affective relationships with people who face the daily social disadvantages of disability have allowed us throughout our different academic trajectories to exercise an embodied reflexivity. This acknowledgment of personal experiences with disability, not only as a biographical event but as a position within a power field where multiple agents operate interdependently, helped build networks aimed at challenging ableism present not only in academia but also among professionals, families and even activists. In that context we have encouraged participation and achieved producing knowledge with the people we have worked with. This has not always been an easy task, since it implies the junction of not only methodological decisions and common interests, but also fostering lasting relationships based upon common moral principles and values about what disability as a plural and heterogeneous field should look like.

As we state in the article, we want to highlight the theoretical production made by Latin American researchers, rooted in a region characterised by higher education and research institutions with small budgets, but where feminisms have had a powerful development, especially in recent times, influencing theoretical and political work around topics such as "care". This, in turn, connects us with the marginality of the broader academic community. In the case of disability researchers from Europe, for example, while their labour conditions and positions within the global knowledge production market may differ, they also situate themselves at the margins of their own disciplines.

Therefore, we think a caring approach to disability must involve an orientation toward shared knowledge production that, beyond raising questions about the communities in which it circulates in and the kinds of relationships that validate it, must maintain and improve emotional, physical and material wellbeing for all participants. By reframing the challenge of including people with disabilities in research, care as an ethic for academic knowledge production might enable necessary shifts in thinking about these processes from a shared experience between nondisabled and disabled persons, contributing to the modification of current academic and scientific validity criteria and research methods within both fields and beyond.

Author bios:

Constanza López Radrigán earned a bachelor’s degree in social communication and a professional diploma in Journalism from the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso. She has a PhD in Interdisciplinary Studies on Thought, Culture and Society (Universidad de Valparaíso). She is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the Millennium Institute for Care Research (MICARE) and she is a Young Researcher at the Millennium Nucleus on Disability and Citizenship (DISCA). Her current research project is focused on exploring caring practices to promote sexual and reproductive autonomy of women with intellectual and developmental disabilities in Chile.

Andrés Aparicio is a Systems Engineer from Pontificia Universidad Javeriana (Colombia) and a Doctor in Arts with an emphasis on Theatrical Studies and Practices from the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. He is Associate Researcher of the Millennium Institute for Care Research (MICARE) and Adjunct Researcher of the Millennium Nucleus on Disability and Citizenship (DISCA). His research is focused on body diversity and epistemology of practice, their relationship to technology both as process and artifact, and their application to care, understood broadly.

Marcela Tenorio D. is a full-time Professor at the Psychology School of the Universidad de los Andes (Chile). She is also an Alternate Director of the Millennium Institute for Care Research (MICARE). She earned a professional diploma in Psychology from the Universidad de los Andes (Colombia) and a doctoral degree in Psychology from the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. She was a postdoctoral fellow at Birkbeck College at the University of London, sponsored by Professor Annette Karmiloff-Smith. Her research focuses on understanding the variables that promote human rights, social and community inclusion of people with disabilities.

See the F&P article this blog is based upon at: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/09593535241306536 

ANNOUNCEMENT: NEW EDITORS

 15 December 2024

Dear Feminism & Psychology community

It is with great pleasure that I introduce you to the new editors of Feminism & Psychology. From January 2025, Feminism & Psychology editorial processes will be overseen by Professor Tracy Morison as editor-in-chief. Tracy is an Associate Professor in the Critical Health Psychology Programme at Massey University, Aotearoa/New Zealand. She has a wealth of publishing and editing experience, and has contributed significantly to feminist and critical theories, alongside in-depth qualitative methodologies. She is well acquainted with F&P processes and approach, having worked as editor for the past three years and as book reviews editor before that. Tracy will be joined by Professor Floretta Boonzaier in editor capacity. Floretta is a Professor in Psychology at the University of Cape Town, South Africa, and Co-Director of the Hub for Decolonial Feminist Psychologies in Africa. She works in feminist, critical, social and decolonial psychologies, with special interests in intersectional subjectivities, participatory methodologies and gender-based violence. Welcome on board, Tracy and Floretta!

Tracy and Floretta will make further announcements in due course regarding associate editors and the editorial board. These announcements will be in line with the usual term-based review and appointment processes.

I have thoroughly enjoyed the 12 years that I spent as editor-in-chief of the journal. It is an extraordinary privilege to work with authors, reviewers and an editorial board who are passionate about the aims of the journal, and to learn from colleagues from around the globe. I am grateful for the support provided by the SAGE office, our associate editors (Ngaire Donaghue; Maria Gurevich; Jeanne Marecek; Lorrie Radtke; Annadís Greta Rúdólfsdóttir; Sarah Riley; Ingrid Palmary; Kopano Ratele; Eva Magnusson), our book reviews editors (Stephanie Taylor; Sue Jackson; Tracy Morison; Jabulile Mavuso; Sudarshan Kottai), our editorial assistants (Lindsay Kelland; Jabulile Mavuso; Pedro Pinto; Ryan du Toit, Sibongile Matebese; Megan Reuvers; Megaera Jones), and our consulting editorial board. A special thanks goes to my co-editors – Jeanne Marecek, Rose Capdevila, Tracy Morison, Rebecca Lawthom – for their dedication to rigorous and supportive editorial processes, and for being wonderful colleagues.

Feminism & Psychology holds a special place for the publication of ground-breaking feminist work in and around psychologies, enabled by the founding collective led by Sue Wilkinson and carried on by Nicola Gavey and Virginia Braun as editors prior to my, Jeanne, Rose, Tracy and Rebecca’s terms. The possibilities and challenges of Feminism & Psychology are aptly captured in our 30th anniversary editorial, and I shall not repeat them here. Suffice to say that the journal represents a very rich space of feminist scholarship.

I encourage you to continue to contribute to the journal in whatever way suits you (submitting papers; reviewing; offering to be on the editorial board; prescribing papers to students; engaging with our special issues or virtual special issues; proposing special issues, submitting blogs). The strength of the journal lies in the many contributions (seen and unseen) by the community of feminist scholars around the globe. Warm thanks to this wonderful community!

Best wishes,

Catriona Macleod

Postfeminism in prison: Women correctional officer’s accounts of gendered appearance at work

 

In contemporary culture where neoliberal principles of individualism, choice and free-market systems operate on the individual, looking attractive has renewed relevance for women. Dominant social discourses construct the expectation that women should maintain a heteronormatively attractive, or sexy, appearance (Elias et al, 2017; Gill, 2007). This body focus has both intensified and extended over the last decade, encompassing more social contexts (for example, pregnancy) and scrutinising more bodily areas (as I write, dermaplaning is trending, although Elias et al. in 2017 use examples like the ‘thigh gap’, and ‘tech neck’). Individual work, self-surveillance, and consumerism are constructed as necessary to achieve these heteronormative attractiveness standards, so that women’s bodies become centrally situated in achieving a sense of success and identity (Riley et al, 2017). Gill (2007) connects these shifts to how a postfeminist sensibility shapes women’s meaning making of gender and appearance.

But what happens for women when these culturally ingrained postfeminist beauty expectations meet an environment where women are socially penalised for having an attractive or traditionally feminine appearance?

Early research into prison work identified that women constantly battle gender stereotypes which construct all women, but particularly feminine appearing women, as incapable, and a risk when working with male prisoners (Jurik, 1988). Indeed, despite Australia’s long penal history, women have only been allowed to work in male prisons since the 1970s (O’Toole, 2006). More recent research found that women prison workers use strategies to manage their marginalisation such as crafting their looks to reduce markers of femininity within their appearance, and behaving in ways understood to be masculine (Burdett et al, 2018; Ricciardelli & McKendy, 2020).

I myself had experienced these prejudices, after stepping into an Australian men’s prison for the first time as a 24-year-old cis-gendered woman commencing her career in prison work. I had always worn two layers of mascara to leave the house, but was it worth the risk of colleagues assuming I was trying to flirt with the prisoners or with them? Would my mascara prevent me being taken seriously?

Many years later, Professor Sarah Riley, Professor Christine Stephens, Dr Alice Beban, and I (all of Massey University, Aotearoa New Zealand) examined the discourses used by women working in Australian men’s prisons to make sense of their appearance, the implications of contradictory postfeminist and prison expectations for women’s sense of self, and how women prison workers enacted agency.

We used a cooperative inquiry method, which is a form of participatory action research involving co-learning with a small group of others in cycles of action and reflection, over an issue of mutual concern (Riley & Reason, 2024). Sixteen women between the ages of 25 to 60 took part, across four inquiry groups and six different high security correctional centres. Each group met five to six times, engaging in actions within their workplaces (for example, changing something about their appearance) which were then discussed during meetings. Distinctions between researchers and participants are collapsed in cooperative inquiry, and as a fellow woman working in prisons, I both facilitated and engaged in the inquiry. With permission from the participants, we used the data from these groups to complete a Foucauldian informed thematic analysis.

When asking how women made sense of their appearance and identity in prison work, we identified three overarching patterns of talk. The first was a ‘look good, feel good, be good’ discourse, where female prison workers of all age groups linked beauty work to personal confidence and professional ability. The women not only engaged in beauty work to feel more confident while at work, but paid careful attention to their uniformed appearance, including neat hairstyles, polished boots, and ironing. Here, postfeminist imperatives to look attractive were complemented by organisational discourses to appear ‘sharp’ while in their para-military uniforms.

Most often however, postfeminist and organisational discourses clashed. To negotiate conflicting postfeminist and prison appearance expectations, in the second pattern of talk, participants linked their beauty practices to their identity, drawing on postfeminist constructions of beauty work as choiceful and pleasurable. Again, this pattern of talk occurred across participants of all ages. This enabled participants to discursively legitimise their continued beauty work within an environment where it is often seen as problematic.

In the third pattern of talk, participants further negotiated conflicting postfeminist and prison appearance expectations through a ‘look good, but not too good’ argument, which allowed them to engage in some elements of beauty work (for example, “neutral” makeup), so long as they also engaged in extensive monitoring of their appearance and body language to avoid looking overly attractive or sexy. Younger women, whose age connected them more to sexualising discourses, were particularly careful to regulate their appearance in this way.

The power of postfeminist discourses is particularly notable in this prison workplace, where normative beauty standards remained a priority to participants despite conflicting occupational discourses that devalued all types of femininity. Although the participants’ accounts were heavily shaped by social and organisational discourses, our findings demonstrated that agency can be enacted within existing power structures. Participants drew on available discursive resources to find strategies which helped them to succeed. Despite the individualised nature of these strategies, we found that women’s presence in men’s prisons and motivation to succeed represents a level of resistance to status quo. Although this article has focussed on discursive restraints for female prison workers, our work opens the door to examine further possibilities for wider, structural forms of resistance.

References

Burdett, F., Gouliquer, L., & Poulin, C. (2018). Culture of corrections: The experiences of women correctional officers. Feminist Criminology, 13(3), 329–349. https://doi.org/10.1177/1557085118767974

Elias, A. S., Gill, R., & Scharff, C. (2017). Aesthetic labour: Beauty politics in neoliberalism. In A. S. Elias, R. Gill, & C. Scharff (Eds.), Aesthetic labour: Rethinking beauty politics in neoliberalism (pp. 167–181). Palgrave Macmillan UK. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-47765-1

Gill, R. (2007). Postfeminist media culture: Elements of a sensibility. European Journal of Cultural Studies, 10(2), 147–166. https://doi.org/10.1177/1367549407075898

Jurik, N. C. (1988). Striking a balance: Female correctional officers, gender role stereotypes, and male prisons. Sociological Inquiry, 58(3), 291–305. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-682X.1988.tb01063.x

O’Toole, S. (2006). The history of Australian corrections. UNSW Press.

Ricciardelli, R., & McKendy, L. (2020). Gender and prison work: The experience of female provincial correctional officers in Canada. The Prison Journal, 100(5), 617–639. https://doi.org/10.1177/0032885520956394

Riley, S., Evans, A., Elliott, S., Rice, C., & Marecek, J. (2017). A critical review of postfeminist sensibility. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 11(12), e12367. https://doi.org/10.1111/spc3.12367

Riley, S., & Reason, P. (2024). Cooperative inquiry: An action research practice. In J. Smith (Ed.), Qualitative psychology: A practical guide to research methods (4th ed., pp. 168–292). SAGE Publications Ltd.

 Author bio:

Claudia Walker is completing her doctoral studies in psychology at Massey University. She currently works within the corrective services field, with almost ten years’ experience spanning both men’s and women’s prisons. Her research explores the gendered experiences of correctional officers, including security staff and specialists, through action research methods.

Please find the online F&P manuscript on which this blog was based: "Postfeminism in prison: A discourse analysis of women correctional officers’ accounts of gendered appearance at work" by Walker et al. 2024

Listening to trans and non-binary young adults reflect on their experiences at single-sex schools

By Lauren Donaldson 

As part of my MSc in Counselling Children and Young People, I conducted research into the experiences of trans and non-binary students at single-sex schools. Participants were living in the UK at the time of the research, and all but one had attended a single-sex school in the UK. One participant had been educated in Iran until the age of 16, when they moved to the UK. I carried out this research as a cisgender, heterosexual, white, non-disabled woman. Hugely conscious of my privileged positioning, I followed trans-sensitive research principles, including a two-phase research approach. In phase one, I worked with three trans participants to decide on the format of data collection (they suggested offering participants a choice between an online individual interview and an online focus group) and the questions that should be asked. In phase two, six trans and non-binary participants aged 18-25 shared their experiences through online individual interviews and an online focus group. Two trans men and two non-binary individuals reflected on their experiences at all-girls schools, and two trans women reflected on their experiences at all-boys schools. Feminist Relational Discourse Analysis (Thompson et al., 2018) was used to explore the structures of power and constructs of normativity that existed in the participants’ single-sex schools, and understand how they related to these in both positive and negative ways.

Previous research (Bower-Brown et al., 2021; Davy & Cordoba, 2020; Frohard-Dourlent, 2018; Jones et al., 2016; Mackie et al., 2023a; Mackie et al., 2023b; Schmitt, 2022) had found that trans and non-binary students are amongst the most marginalised and vulnerable in schools, yet within this research, the voices of trans and non-binary students in single-sex schools specifically had rarely been heard. The research highlighted a need for a greater understanding of the lived experiences of trans and non-binary students and for more supportive environments in schools. I therefore hoped my research would contribute to a deeper understanding and help counsellors facilitate more supportive environments for trans and non-binary students in the single-sex schools that they work in.

The experiences shared by the participants in my research revealed how non-normative gender identities can be both regulated by and challenge the curricula, teaching staff and other students in single-sex schools, which all act to silence nonconformity and construct an acceptable truth of cisheteronormativity. Teachers hold the power to determine who belongs and how one expresses one’s gender identity, yet the power to educate others or enact change tends to be held by the trans and non-binary students themselves, all at a cost to their mental health. There were particular discursive realms that these participants had to navigate as trans and non-binary students at single-sex schools; Personal, Social, Health, and Economic education structured around biological essentialism, being held to normative standards of gender expression, and a sense of not belonging and feeling invalidated. For the participants who had attended all-boys schools, navigating cisheteronormativity was particularly limiting and risky, reflective of wider societal problems of transmisogyny. 

My research was always so much more than just a part of my degree. I felt deeply indebted to the trans and non-binary young adults who had allowed a cisgender researcher into their lives and I want their voices heard as widely as possible. I was therefore delighted to win the Feminism & Psychology and BPS POWES Postgraduate Award for a paper I had written based on my dissertation, and to present the paper at the POWES 2024 Conference in July. Underlain by feminist principles, my research aimed to explore power relations, empower marginalised voices and use these stories to enact change. Feminist Relational Discourse Analysis, including through the use of I poems, played a key role on this.

I conducted the interviews and focus groups for my research as the UK’s Conservative Government was preparing guidance for schools in England on “gender questioning children” in 2023. Elements of this guidance had been leaked and participants reflected on it during the individual interviews and focus group.  In December 2023, the draft non-statutory guidance was published and a public consultation was opened for three months. I contributed to this consultation, sharing the experiences of my participants, anonymised and with their permission, in my response. In May 2024, the Conservative government published draft statutory guidance on Relationships, Sex and Health Education, which was open for consultation for two months. Again, I contributed to this consultation, sharing the experiences of my participants, anonymised and with their permission, in my response.

The outcomes of these consultations have yet to be shared by the new Labour government. However, Keeping Children Safe in Education 2024, the government’s statutory guidance on safeguarding children and safer recruitment, which is updated each academic year, leans heavily on the Conservative’s draft ‘Guidance for Schools and Colleges: Gender Questioning Children’. Keeping Children Safe in Education 2024 also references the Cass Review Report, which has been criticised by many LGBT+ experts, support groups and organisations and in July, the British Medical Association even “call[ed] for a pause to the implementation of the Cass Review’s recommendations whilst the task and finish group carries out its work” (British Medical Association, 2024). Trans and Non-Binary Education has written to the DfE regarding these concerns but have yet to receive a response.

Coming from a central place of power in the UK, each one of these pieces of guidance can be viewed as discursive practices aiming to sustain the ability of educational institutions, including single-sex schools, to maintain a unilateral development trajectory for their students. Any agency that children and young people have around self-determination and gender identity is removed. Through the use of language such as “gender questioning children”,  “gender identity ideology” and “contested belief”, each piece of guidance furthers the discursive erasure of transgender children and upholds a cisgenderist discourse.

Counter to this, my research called for trans and non-binary students in single-sex schools to be accepted, have their feelings validated, and be proactively supported through inclusive policies. I suggested that counsellors working in single-sex schools are well positioned to facilitate this. I concluded my research with the words of an 18-year old trans man who had attended an all-girls school since he was 11. He said, “having someone to just listen to you and validate you is just so important”. I would urge anyone reading this blog to listen to the voices of trans and non-binary youth and join them in their advocacy. To learn from a group of young trans people fighting for the rights of young trans people, please visit https://transkidsdeservebetter.org/.

References

Bower-Brown, S., Zadeh, S., & Jadva, V. (2021). Binary-trans, nonbinary and gender-questioning adolescents’ experiences in UK schools. Journal of LGBT Youth, https://doi.org/10.1080/19361653.2021.1873215

British Medical Association. (2024, July 31). BMA to undertake an evaluation of the Cass Review on gender identity services for children and young people. https://www.bma.org.uk/bma-media-centre/bma-to-undertake-an-evaluation-of-the-cass-review-on-gender-identity-services-for-children-and-young-people

Davy, Z., & Cordoba, S. (2020). School Cultures and Trans and Gender-diverse Children: Parents' Perspectives. Journal of GLBT Family Studies, 16(4), 349-367. https://doi.org/10.1080/1550428X.2019.1647810

Frohard-Dourlent, H. (2018). “The student drives the car, right?”: trans students and narratives of decision-making in schools. Sex Education, 18(4), 328–344. https://doi.org/10.1080/14681811.2017.1393745

Jones, T., Smith, E., Ward, R.,  Dixon, J., Hillier, L., & Mitchell A. (2016). School experiences of transgender and gender diverse students in Australia. Sex Education, 16(2), 156-171. https://doi.org/10.1080/14681811.2015.1080678

Mackie, G., Lambert, K., & Patlamazoglou, L. (2023a). The experiences of psychologists working with transgender young people in school counselling: an Australian sample. Counselling Psychology Quarterly, 36(1), 1–24. https://doi.org/10.1080/09515070.2021.2001313

Mackie, G., Patlamazoglou, L., & Lambert, K. (2023b). The experiences of Australian transgender young people in school counseling: An interpretative phenomenological analysis. Psychology of Sexual Orientation and Gender Diversity, 10(2), 337–349. https://doi.org/10.1037/sgd0000544

Schmitt, I. (2022). Transgressing purity: Intersectional negotiations of gender identity in Swedish schools. Journal of LGBT Youth. https://doi.org/10.1080/19361653.2022.2103609

Thompson, L. Rickett, B., & Day, K. (2018). Feminist Relational Discourse Analysis: putting the personal in the political in feminist research. Qualitative Research in Psychology, 15(1), 93–115. https://doi.org/10.1080/14780887.2017.1393586

About the author:

Lauren Donaldson (she/her) is a Counsellor for Children and Young People. She completed her MSc in Counselling Children and Young People at the University of Northampton in the UK, and works as a counsellor in primary and secondary schools in southeast England.

 

Addressing power and context in “contested” chronic illness: Encounters between critical feminist psychologies and disability

By Joanne Hunt

My interest in critical feminist psychologies has arisen from living with a longstanding diagnosis of myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS) and working with people with the condition in psychological settings. At the same time, I am aware of historically dominant constructions of ME/CFS implicated in intersectional oppressions. Though I term these constructions “historical," they not only persist but are central to an ever-expanding social narrative of  "undeserving" forms of impairment and disability.

In the UK, where I live, the National Health Service (NHS) continues to classify ME/CFS among "medically unexplained symptoms”. This psy-manufactured construct perpetuates the view that ME/CFS is rooted in maladaptive individual psychology and requires correction through individualistic psychosocial interventions (typically cognitive-behavioural). This social narrative continues despite health bodies in the UK and beyond removing recommendations of psychological interventions as clinical treatments for ME/CFS owing to lacking evidence and a multitude of reported harm.

To date, mainstream critique of the psycho-pathologisation of ME/CFS and "medically unexplained symptoms" has understandably focused on paradigmatic conflicts between a (preferred) biomedical and (heavily critiqued) biopsychosocial model. Biomedical proponents argue that social misrepresentation and medical neglect of ME/CFS is driven mainly by bad science. They promote greater allegiance to the (Western) scientific method as a route to emancipation from (bio)psychosocial dominance.

While hegemonic science is important in this arena (e.g., for developing pharmacological interventions that can improve quality of life), there is a risk of minimising the bigger picture, including (1) how power differentials, cultural representations, and socio-political context also impact health and life outcomes, and (2) how other epistemologies can offer valuable pathways to knowledge production and social change.

In contrast, critical feminist theory engages deeply with questions of power and context: how power is deployed, by whom, in whose interests, and with what impact. Moreover, feminist praxis is unapologetically partisan, committed to challenging oppressive power relations and promoting social change. ME/CFS could undoubtedly benefit from psychologically supportive approaches that integrate a feminist ethos. The diagnosis has long occupied a site of scientific, corporate, (bio)political and intersectionally oppressive powerplays, with these powerplays reproduced in clinical encounters.

Moreover, critical feminist psychology’s indictment of how hegemonic Psy individualises, responsibilises, de-politicises, and commodifies suffering in complicity with neoliberal capitalism is highly pertinent to ME/CFS and conditions classified as medically unexplained. Disabled scholar-activists have produced a considerable body of literature locating the marginalisation of many such conditions within a network of interests of a neoliberal-capitalist mode of production and austerity politics. Drawing on such epistemic labours, I have elsewhere suggested that Psy's central role in the apparatus of power relations implicated in this biopolitical project gives rise to a psy-corporate-state complex.

Surely, there are benefits to integrating critical feminist thinking into psychological praxis in this arena. However, feminism has historically struggled to integrate disability as a category of analysis. This lapse is highly pertinent, since ME/CFS and “medically unexplained” conditions represent prime disability rights issues, and are haunted by intersectional power/knowledge hierarchies that position disabled people as Other.  

In this regard, feminist disability studies has much to offer. The field arose from disabled women's and allied scholars' collective recognition that marginally situated knowledges and experiences were being sidelined, both by the (predominantly non-disabled) women's movement and the (predominantly male) disability movement.

As an example of this promise, in {a new article} for a special issue of Feminism & Psychology, I contemplate disability as a feminist issue. I adopt a “feminist disability standpoint”, drawing from the work of disabled feminist scholars and other marginally situated knowledge-producers, to explore how psy might be reimagined in an empowering, socially just and socio-politically cognisant direction in the arena of ME/CFS as conditions labelled as medically unexplained, energy-limiting conditions.

Moving beyond binary and individualistic “biomedical-versus-(bio)psychosocial” debates, a feminist disability standpoint highlights how both models overlook the wider power-laden context that shapes social policies, practices, subjectivities, health and life outcomes. This same context has facilitated the hegemony of (bio)psychosocial explanations of ME/CFS and other stigmatised conditions. This context, historically sidelined by biomedicine and “malestream” psychology, must be acknowledged and addressed within psychological practice.

Addressing power and context does not mean overlooking individual-level phenomena; it is vital to validate biological realities in  ME/CFS and other contested illnesses. While people living with psycho-emotional distress and madness (often called "mental illness") are frequently harmed through psychiatrisation (a form of medicalisation), those with ME/CFS and medically unexplained symptoms are subject to medical neglect and (what might be better termed) 'psychologization'. Therefore, as I discuss in the article, a feminist disability standpoint offers conceptual resources to affirm biological/physical impairment effects in interaction with a social context shaped by oppressive systems of power.

Perhaps most importantly, Psy practitioners should seek to be allies to people living with these health conditions by combining psycho-emotional support, advocacy, empowerment and (where appropriate) information-sharing or "education" while being willing to learn from service users' considerable knowledges. This alliance includes supporting service users in determining their own values and meaning-making, as opposed to values and meaning imposed by society or individual practitioners.

This move, I suspect, requires a radical transformation in dominant practice as well as in the hearts and minds of many practitioners. Integrating a feminist disability standpoint—and its wealth of subjugated knowledges—into psychological theory and practice may offer an in-road towards such transformation.

 

About the author

Joanne Hunt is a disabled researcher and research affiliate at the Department of Women’s and Children’s Health, Uppsala University, Sweden. Her research interests centre on the (bio)politics of stigmatised health conditions, sited at the intersection of critical disability studies, gender studies, critical psychology, and ethics. Particular interests include the psychology of ableism, and challenges and possibilities in developing socio-politically and culturally cognisant, disability-affirmative healthcare.

Twitter/X: @JoElizaHunt @HealthHubris

Find an article related to this blog on the F&P website at: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/09593535241267091