Abstract
Power is both ubiquitous and elusive. It pervades culture, institutions, politics, relationships, and identities, affecting socialization processes as well as individuals’ mental and physical health and well-being. It is the broad influence of power that makes it relevant to psychologists across the full spectrum of subfields within the discipline. Furthermore, power is gendered, exercised differently by and toward people living within the farthest-reaching context of gendered power: patriarchy.
It is from these basic understandings that Eileen Zurbriggen and Rose Capdevila invited a diverse array of 60 international scholars to explore how gendered power plays out within their disciplinary subfield of psychology. The result is the 33 chapters of the Palgrave Handbook of Power, Gender, and Psychology. Most authors spontaneously grounded their contribution in history and then used psychology to interrogate uses of power, trusted people to serve as the experts of their lives, stressed the importance of structure and systemic change over individuals’ resistance, and heralded the centrality of intersectionality in exposing how power plays out for individuals and groups across diverse social categories and thus serves as the fuel for inequality. The overarching caution that emerges is that by decontextualizing people's lives and by taking a largely individualistic perspective, feminist psychologists run the risk of ignoring the power of gendered power, that is, how power and gender are co-constructed.
Interestingly, no single definition of power guides the contributors. Rather, authors frame power within their own subfield of expertise and convincingly explicate its effects. Some authors focus on power at broad, macroscopic levels. For example, Elizabeth Cole concludes that intersectionality is not about race, class, and gender per se, but rather about racism, capitalism, and sexism, that is, processes of power. Lauren Duncan insightfully expands traditional conceptualizations of power as power-over (coercion) and power-to (empowerment) to include power-with: solidarity to take collective action to improve the status of a group that is motivated by identity, injustice, and efficacy. Heather Bullock and Melina Singh call for a shift in attention away from tacitly deficient people living in poverty toward exposing inequality, power, and class exploitation.
In other chapters, authors center the individual but always, and importantly, within context. For example, Rachel Robnett and Kristin Vierra examine how gender and power interact throughout gendered childhood socialization within patriarchy to oppress women and girls, calling for their resistance by developing critical consciousness to recognize structural oppression and work toward social change. Jane Ussher recognizes that women's higher rates of depression and anxiety are real, but rather than pathologize individuals, she critiques hetero-patriarchal power, citing the critical roles played by women's disproportionate lack of access to economic resources, education, and employment as root causes. Similarly, Helen Malson, Andrea Lamarre, and Michael Levine link disordered eating not only to individual powerlessness but also to sexism and other forms of oppression.
There is too much in any handbook to adequately sample in a review but the Editors helpfully provide abstracts for each chapter at the start of the book, leaving it to readers, from feminist scholars to grad students and practitioners, to pick and choose per their interests. The book builds on the 2006 Task Force on Feminist Political Psychology formed by the Society for the Psychology of Women and resulting in a special section in Psychology of Women Quarterly in 2010; for these political scholars and activists, the full book is a must-read.
