Challenging (the History of) Psychology: Rewriting Psychology as a Feminist Practice

Introduction: Theory, Practice, and the Feminist Challenge

Feminist scholarship in psychology has long dealt with the historical tension between theory and practice, challenging the notion that psychological knowledge can be understood as a purely theoretical or neutral enterprise. As feminist historians, epistemologists, and other theorists have shown, psychological “theories” are inseparable from the “practices” through which they are enacted, such as observation, measurement, experimentation, diagnosis, and intervention (Rose, 1996a; Rutherford, 2021). Far from being neutral channels of discovery, these practices have historically encoded social hierarchies, particularly those related to gender, class, and ethnicity, shaping what counts as a legitimate object of study, who is authorized to produce knowledge, and what qualifies as scientific evidence. Feminist psychology has made this entanglement visible, exposing how psychological knowledge has been implicated in the reproduction of gendered norms and power relations (see, for instance, the recent Palgrave Handbook of Power, Gender, and Psychology by Zurbriggen & Capdevila, 2023). By making these dynamics explicit, feminist psychology seeks not only to critique but also to reconfigure the theoretical and practical foundations of the discipline, developing modes of inquiry and intervention that are reflexive, situated, and oriented toward social transformation (M. Fine & Gordon, 1989; Morawski, 1997).

From this perspective, a feminist history of psychology must also serve this transformative purpose. Just as feminist psychology aims to advance social change according to feminist principles, a feminist historiography of psychology should align with these same ends. ¹ The aim of this paper is to discuss what a feminist history of psychology entails, its assumptions, implications, and methodological challenges, and to consider how such a history can support psychologists, students, researchers, and practitioners in developing a more socially engaged theory and practice committed to transforming inequalities. Only those histories that critically interrogate the social and political conditions of knowledge production can contribute to reimagining the discipline and its emancipatory potential.

More specifically, our contribution lies not in introducing a new feminist framework but in clarifying the methodological value of feminist historiography for rethinking the relation between theory and practice in psychology. Rather than positioning feminist historiography merely as a corrective or additive perspective, such as the recovery of forgotten women or the identification of bias, approaches that remain widely reproduced in many pedagogical and institutional contexts, we approach it as a methodological orientation for interrogating how psychological knowledge is historically constituted. We argue that feminist science studies, genealogical analysis, and critical histories of psychology can be brought into more explicit conversation as a mode of inquiry attentive to how psychological categories are co-produced through practices, dispositifs, and epistemic norms. In this sense, the paper seeks to synthesize and sharpen an existing orientation rather than to claim conceptual novelty. Over the past decades, a wide range of feminist and critical histories of psychology have developed arguments compatible with the approach advanced here, albeit under different labels and across partially disconnected conversations. Our aim is therefore to render these contributions more legible as part of a shared feminist historiographical project and to clarify their methodological significance for rethinking the relation between theory and practice in psychology.

The feminist historiographical orientation advanced here adopts a sociohistorical and genealogical approach to psychology: one that positions its practices and dispositifs (laboratories, tests, diagnostic manuals, professional roles, etc.) as constitutive of the discipline’s categories and theoretical frameworks (Danziger, 1990; Pickren & Rutherford, 2010; Richards, 2002). From this perspective, historical critique involves tracing how particular apparatuses have delimited what psychology could perceive and articulate. At the same time, gender is treated as a fundamental analytical category that cuts across all levels of scientific practice: it shapes who formulates questions, who is recognized as a knowing subject or as an object of study, how methods normalize male experience as the standard, and how psychological categories including intelligence, hysteria, and resilience, among others, crystallize gendered social norms. In this sense, the production of knowledge does not merely describe difference; it actively participates in producing it (Morawski, 1994).

Together with poststructuralist feminist theory, feminist historiography thus functions not only as critique but as a methodology for transformation. Recognizing that the theories we apply are historically, culturally, and politically situated becomes a form of ethical practice: it entails acknowledging the performative power of knowledge and its capacity to intervene in people’s lives (e.g., Hacking, 1996; Rose, 1996a; Smith, 2007). This denaturalization provides conceptual tools to problematize current assumptions and modes of production, while also enabling methodological tools, such as situated knowledge, embodied reflexivity, and epistemic responsibility, for rethinking the relationship between theory and practice in contemporary psychological inquiry (Wigginton & Lafrance, 2019). By relativizing the conceptual and methodological foundations of psychological science, feminist history opens the possibility of redesigning research questions, methods, and validation criteria so that feminist reflexivity and situatedness become constitutive elements rather than decorative additions.

Bridging theory and practice is not a secondary task but an ethical and political imperative: psychological concepts are not mere descriptions of the world; psychological concepts do things in the world. The divide between theory and practice is itself a historical construct, maintained through institutional and methodological conventions. By tracing how gendered practices of experimentation, measurement, and diagnosis co-constituted the discipline’s core theories, the feminist genealogy we propose reveals that theory has always been practice, and practice has always been theory.

As Borch-Jacobsen and Shamdasani (2012) argue, historical inquiry can sometimes be more effective than any epistemological critique in delegitimizing a theory or practice, by revealing the arbitrariness that underlies it. Critical history unsettles the given, exposing what has been naturalized as inevitable or self-evident. Introducing a genealogical and critical historical approach into feminist psychology may help to mitigate the risk of reproducing the very assumptions that feminist psychology seeks to challenge. As Bharj and Hubbard (2023) observe:

the pressure to conform to contemporary psychology’s emphasis on interior, quantifiable cognitive processes, alongside a feminist desire to imagine a palatable form of power to strive for, leaves feminist psychological theorizing vulnerable to an ahistorical and myopic understanding of power as wholly comprised of individual choice, against the liberatory values upon which feminist psychology is built. (p. 17)

By tracing the historical contingencies that shape psychological categories and subjectivities, a genealogical feminist psychology resists individualistic notions of power. Instead, it situates psychological knowledge within broader socio-political and epistemic formations, making visible the material and institutional power conditions that sustain particular ways of knowing, feeling, and being.

The next section elaborates the feminist historiographical methodology that grounds this approach, before applying it (in the third, fourth, and fifth sections) to three major genealogies of modern psychology: the construction of sexual difference, the experimental production of authority, and the culture of diagnosis. The paper concludes in the sixth section with principles for reconfiguring the relationship between theory and practice in psychology as a feminist project.

Feminist Historiography as Genealogical Approach

Understanding how psychology has been configured as a discipline requires examining the historical conditions that enable its emergence and legitimization as a science. Feminist historiography starts from this premise, seeking to reveal how gender, intersecting with race, class, and ethnicity, and power are embedded in the very process of doing science, and how this entanglement has, in turn, shaped the history of psychology. Early feminist critiques such as Weisstein’s (1993) Psychology Constructs the Female exposed how psychological knowledge participates in the production of gendered assumptions, anticipating many of the concerns developed in later feminist historiography.

Against a “teleological” approach (see Smith, 2016), feminist critical historiography proposes a genealogical perspective that, following the Foucauldian tradition, focuses on the apparatuses, discourses, and practices through which knowledge and subjectivity are produced. Rather than seeking the “pure” origins of psychology, this perspective centers on the conditions of possibility for its emergence: the laboratories, measurement techniques, diagnostic manuals, educational institutions, and medical or moral languages that defined what could be recognized as “psychological.” Genealogy thus dismantles the illusion of continuity and reveals psychology as a hybrid field, shaped by relations of power, gender, class, and culture. Feminist genealogies, for example, have examined how “difference”—particularly sexual difference—was naturalized through scientific practices, and how this process shaped access to epistemic authority and configured subjectivities (e.g., Haraway, 1988; Harding, 1991; Keller, 1985, 1995; Rutherford, 2021; Schiebinger, 1989).

Following Rose (1996b) and Rutherford (2013, 2018), a critical history seeks to expose the conditions that make current forms of subjectivity possible. It analyzes the co-constitution of the psychological, the social, and the subjective, unsettling what is taken as natural or true by revealing the contingent factors that have made it so. A critical feminist history ² extends this inquiry, asking who is authorized to produce knowledge, from which positionalities, and with what epistemic and social consequences (Balltondre & Jiménez-Alonso, 2023; Rutherford, 2021). It examines how psychological science has reified essentialist notions (e.g., of gender), upheld oppressive social practices, and allowed sexist assumptions to permeate and reinforce scientific knowledge (Rutherford, 2013).

This sociohistorical and genealogical reading challenges the presentist narrative of linear progress that glorifies “great men and great ideas” while erasing the gendered and social conditions that made psychological knowledge possible (Balltondre & Jiménez-Alonso, 2023; Jiménez-Alonso & Balltondre, 2023). Canonical histories have consolidated an androcentric image of psychology, minimizing the roles of technologies, institutions, and subjects. In contrast, feminist historiography highlights discontinuities, multiplicity, and contingency, questioning universal claims and opening space for other voices and experiences (for a brief overview of critical historiography in the history of psychology, see Rutherford, 2013). It examines how the organization of early laboratories, the division of roles between experimenter and subject, and the codification of diagnostic categories acted not as mere context but as drivers of conceptual formation.

A genealogical approach also traces how psychological categories emerge and become psychologized (Danziger, 1997). Concepts such as intelligence or personality gradually entered public and scientific language, where they were interpreted and managed as mental and subjective phenomena. Historians such as Danziger (1997), Richards (1987), and Smith (2005) have shown that psychological categories are historically contingent and discursively unstable (see also Hacking, 2007). These categories function as vehicles for producing and maintaining particular visions of social order. As Smith (2005) writes, “When we develop our knowledge of human beings, we do not just change knowledge but potentially what it is to be human” (p. 56). The same applies to history itself as an inquiry into humans (Smith, 2016). In this reciprocal dynamic, Alexandra Rutherford (2020) has foregrounded gender: psychology is shaped by gendered theories and practices, it directly theorizes gender, and it makes empirical and theoretical claims about men, women, non-binary identities, and gender within science. Reflecting critically on this opens space for possible change (Rutherford, 2020; Rutherford & Pettit, 2015). A feminist critical approach, therefore, goes beyond documenting women’s contributions to psychology. It examines women’s situated experiences within exclusionary scientific structures (García, 2005; Kohlstedt, 1995; Lerner, 1975 ). And it also questions the very conditions under which gendered subjectivities and psychological categories became possible. Pioneering work by Scarborough and Furumoto (1987) not only recovered women’s participation in psychology but also analyzed the structural sexism shaping their careers. Our proposal builds on that foundation to interrogate how notions such as objectivity, neutrality, rationality, and truth have historically been intertwined with masculine values and with an ideal of the researcher as a disembodied, emotionless, and context-free subject (Haraway, 1988, 1989; Harding, 1991; Keller, 1985).

This perspective also challenges how disciplinary histories themselves are written: which narratives are told, which are silenced, and how forms of storytelling reproduce androcentric assumptions. The task is not merely to “add women” to an unchanged canon but to reconstruct how questions are framed, evidence produced, and concepts circulated through gendered institutions, policies, and everyday practices. In this sense, it opposes the recent trend of academic purplewashing, the superficial “add women and stir” approach, in favor of rethinking the epistemic foundations of gendered psychological knowledge.

Following Tuana (2006), feminist historiography also considers epistemologies of ignorance: how gender values shape not only what we know but also what we ignore or leave unfunded, and the epistemic consequences of such absences. Along with epistemologies of ignorance and epistemologies of resistance, other kinds of absences have been identified by decolonial feminisms. Decolonial feminisms focus on the connections between capitalism, colonialism, and racial hierarchies (Allen, 2022). This also serves as an antidote to the notion that hegemonic science is universally grounded and produces knowledge for all people.

Some projects have sought to decolonize psychology and its history (see, e.g., Bathia et al., 2024; Takasuna, 2007). Decolonizing psychology entails examining how Eurocentric cultural assumptions within the psy disciplines construct psychological realities, shape notions of subjectivity, and define research rationalities (Bathia et al., 2024).

As Bathia et al. (2024) puts it, decolonizing psychology made us:

aware of the ways that psychologists have participated quite overtly in constructing a gender system that enforces patriarchy and colonization, and [made us] appreciate more thoroughly that gender was just one vector through which power—and coloniality—were enacted to privilege some forms of knowledge and knowers and suppress others. (p. 78)

As Maria Lugones argues, gender itself is a colonial concept (Lugones, 2007). Seeing it in this way helps us break out of the ahistorical framework of patriarchy (Allen, 2022). Positionality also matters, as decolonial projects are from specific places, geographies, and histories of colonization (Bathia et al., 2024).

In turn, these exercises, which may appear merely theoretical, are deeply connected to practice, as they can contribute to institutionalizing new postcolonial feminist forms of knowledge within mainstream psychology (Wilkinson, 1988). A critical feminist history of psychology thus operates both as an epistemological critique and as a political project. It dismantles the fiction of universality, revealing that objectivity was built upon systematic exclusions—of women, of non-normative experiences, and of non-Western knowledges (Rutherford, 2021)—while asserting the right to retell history from alternative standpoints, making visible peripheral agencies and subaltern forms of knowledge.

Situated epistemologies articulated by Haraway (1988) and Harding (1991) conceive partiality not as a weakness but as a condition of rigor. Knowing from a specific, embodied, social, and historical location entails assuming responsibility for the effects of one’s claims and remaining open to contestation and plurality. Within psychology, this stance extends critique beyond doctrines to the institutional and methodological practices that sustain them. The classical separation between observer and observed has long defined the experimental tradition (Danziger, 1990; Richards, 2002); feminist historiography shows that this distinction is political, reproducing dualisms between reason and body, mind and emotion, and the rational male subject versus the feminized passive other. Re-examining the history of psychology through this lens denaturalizes its ontological and methodological assumptions and reveals how such dichotomies shaped both scientific practices and modern subjectivities (Balltondre & Jiménez-Alonso, 2023).

Ultimately, a critical feminist history offers a framework for imagining more inclusive and critically reflexive ways of theorizing and practicing psychology. In this intersection of genealogy, critique, and epistemic responsibility lies the core of the feminist challenge: the use of history as a tool for both epistemic and social transformation.

In the following section, we focus on a first domain where these intersections become visible: the historical construction of (gender) difference as a foundational principle of modern psychology.

Constructing Difference: Gendered Practices

Feminist historiography has revealed how the category of “difference,” and particularly “sexual difference,” became one of the foundational axes of psychology (Keller, 1985; Laqueur, 1990; Rutherford, 2021; Schiebinger, 1989; Weisstein, 1993). From its origins, psychology actively participated in defining what it means to be “man” or “woman,” while claiming scientific neutrality. Theories of intelligence, emotion, morality, and personality were shaped by assumptions about gender, class, sexuality, and race that were presented as natural truths. Exploring the genealogy of difference therefore means inquiring into the very heart of psychology as a social and cultural science. It involves tracing not only the ideas but also the practices and instruments through which difference became measurable and actionable.

Poststructuralist feminist critiques, drawing on Foucauldian analyses of discourse and power (Foucault, 1977) and developed within feminist theory (e.g., Allen, 2022), call for an epistemological shift: from conceiving difference as an individual attribute to understanding it as an effect of discursive and power relations. Rather than searching for “true” differences between men and women, the aim is to trace how particular distinctions were historically constructed as significant while others were rendered irrelevant (Unger, 2007; Unger & Denmark, 1975). What psychology designates as “gender,” “character,” or “aptitude” thus appears as the crystallization of wider social hierarchies sedimented in scientific categories.

Understanding gender as a social construct also implies examining how gender itself constructs knowledge. A feminist genealogical lens allows us to deconstruct the Darwinian and evolutionary arguments historically used to justify sex differences and social inequalities. From Stephany Shields’ (1975) classic paper “Functionalism, Darwinism, and the Psychology of Women” to Evelyn Richards’ (2017) Darwin and the Making of Sexual Selection, and works such as Gould (1996) and Roughgarden (2013), these analyses expose how scientific narratives naturalized gender and sexuality through biology, transforming historically contingent social arrangements into apparently self-evident biological facts.

According to Laqueur (1990) and Schiebinger (1989), the construction of sexual dimorphism took place in the mid-18th century and progressively extended anatomical distinctions into the moral and intellectual domains. Physical differences between men and women were reinterpreted as indicators of psychological hierarchy, eventually being anchored in the brain (Shields, 1975). This became, in Shields’ (1975) words, “one of the most popular means of providing proof of female mental inferiority” (p. 741). The move from body to brain was decisive: it provided a material substrate for claims about intellect, rationality, and emotional capacity.

Phrenology was among the first popular attempts to provide a neurological foundation for sex differences in intelligence and temperament, and it offers a paradigmatic case for feminist historical analysis. Though rarely acknowledged in psychology textbooks, phrenology acted as a technology of the self (Foucault, 1977), shaping modern notions of subjectivity. By popularizing a new psychological lexicon of mental faculties, it encouraged self-assessment and contributed to the psychologization of the self and society (Rose, 1996a). It also marked a milestone in constructing the “cerebral subject” (Vidal, 2009): by localizing traits in specific brain regions, it laid the groundwork for the brain-centrism that defines contemporary thought. In this sense, phrenology did not merely describe difference; it enacted it through practices of measurement, visualization, and classification that rendered character and aptitude physically legible. From 19th-century phrenologists palpating skulls to the EEGs of the 1930s and today’s brain scans, the aspiration to visualize the mind persists (Vidal & Ortega, 2017). These continuities highlight how the desire to quantify mental life endures and how such technologies shape both our understanding of human capacities and the norms surrounding them.

Although Franz Gall (1758–1828) did not propose distinct brain organs for sexual identity, most phrenologists assumed natural differences between men and women. Women were said to possess more developed moral and sentimental faculties, and men to excel in intellectual and reflective ones (Cornel, 2014). These distinctions did not simply mirror prevailing gender norms; they stabilized them within a framework presented as objective and scientific. By embedding gendered assumptions into neurological cartographies, phrenology transformed social hierarchies into naturalized psychological truths.

Yet phrenology’s framework was flexible enough to serve opposing political agendas: it could legitimize women’s subordination or be used by both male and female advocates for women’s rights (Bittel, 2013; Poskett, 2019). As Bittel (2013) notes, some women used phrenology to reaffirm traditional femininity, others to challenge gendered assumptions or seek self-improvement. These practices could even generate a sense of empowerment among domestic users (Bittel, 2013). These diverse appropriations are crucial for a feminist genealogy: psychological categories circulate within social practices, where they may simultaneously reproduce and destabilize hierarchies.

The feminist historical analysis we are applying to phrenology also illustrates how a genealogical approach and a poststructuralist analysis can be used in history without losing sight of the fact that gender oppression is materially experienced (and that the possibilities for subverting it also involve real people). In history, we cannot overlook the experiential and material aspects of identity and power. As Lazar (2007) points out, discourse is not wholly constitutive of the social; rather, it is one element within broader social practices.

This analysis remains relevant today. Assumptions of sexual dimorphism and biological determinism persist in debates about brain differences and cognitive abilities (in the form of theory of prenatal, sexual hormonal organizations, neural connections, etc.). The contemporary discussion on neurosexism continues this long tradition of naturalizing difference. As C. Fine (2010) argues, “our minds, society and neurosexism create difference” (p. 240). Feminist critiques have shown how claims about male and female brains often rely on selective data interpretation and methodological bias (C. Fine, 2010; Tavris, 1992). More recent neurofeminist scholarship has extended this critique by questioning how “sex” itself is operationalized as a stable biological variable in neuroscientific research. Authors associated with the NeuroGenderings Network and related work (Ciccia, 2022; Rippon et al., 2014; Schmitz & Hoppner, 2014) argue that sex/gender cannot be treated as a fixed explanatory category detached from social practices and embodiment. Research on the “mosaic brain” (Joel & Fausto-Sterling, 2016) further destabilizes binary models of dimorphism by showing that individual brains display heterogeneous configurations rather than two internally homogeneous types. These developments shift the debate from correcting bias to rethinking the conceptual and methodological foundations through which difference is defined and measured.

At the turn of the 20th century, experimental psychology sought to measure the mind and objectify behavior, yet its instruments reflected patriarchal values. Early intelligence tests, studies of hysteria, and theories of emotion were designed in contexts in which the female body served as an object of observation and correction. These frameworks reinforced the ideal of the white, rational, bourgeois male as the universal measure of the human (Schiebinger, 1989; Wynter, 2003). Research on perception, attention, and emotion contributed to the production of a “naturalized difference,” in which physical and mental traits were ranked and normalized. Importantly, the category of “emotion” itself was not a timeless psychological object but a historically consolidated construct. As Dixon (2003) has shown, the modern notion of “the emotions” emerged in the 18th and 19th centuries, reorganizing earlier vocabularies of passions and sentiments within a secular scientific framework and intensifying the binary opposition between emotion and reason. Within this conceptual architecture, emotionality could be aligned with femininity and rational control with masculinity. As Weisstein (1993) and Shields (2007) demonstrated, early psychological theories routinely conflated cultural stereotypes with scientific evidence, reinforcing gendered notions of intellect, emotion, and rationality. Feminist scholarship has since destabilized this binary: rather than treating emotion as a natural female trait, authors such as Jaggar (1989) and Ahmed (2010), among many others, reconceptualized emotions as socially mediated and politically meaningful practices, thereby challenging the epistemic hierarchy that opposed emotionality to rational authority.

Throughout the 20th century, these ideas were reformulated through what Shields (1984, 2007) called the theory of complementarity. Women were portrayed as naturally emotional, intuitive, and caring, while men embodied reason, control, and objectivity. This discourse of “complementary difference” maintained hierarchy under the guise of harmony. Psychology helped institutionalize these norms through studies on affect, personality, and adjustment: research on emotional expressiveness and maternal instinct framed women’s “emotional competence” as both biological destiny and moral duty (Shields, 2013). In education and employment, it justified directing women toward caring professions (teaching, nursing, social work), casting emotional labor as innate rather than socially imposed.

These logics persist in contemporary categories such as emotional intelligence, resilience, and leadership, which subtly reproduce gendered expectations—associating emotion management with women and authority with men. Yet, as Illouz (2007) shows, this psychological discourse can also be reappropriated through what she calls emotional capitalism. In modern societies, the vocabulary of psychology and therapy has merged with that of the market, turning emotional skills into economic assets. Traits once seen as moral virtues (empathy, care, self-sacrifice) are now reframed as professional competencies. Emotional regulation becomes both a moral obligation and a productivity requirement, producing the neoliberal emotional subject governed not by repression but by the imperative of self-optimization (Illouz, 2007).

Recognizing this historical fabric allows us to rethink psychology’s current role. Theories conceived in unequal contexts require critical, situated interpretation today. Psychological categories emerge from concrete practices—of experimentation, diagnosis, and intervention—and are sustained by historical regimes of truth with real social effects.

In the following section, we turn to one of the key sites where power, authority, and gender have been co-produced: the psychological laboratory and its experimental practices.

Experimenting with Power: Reflexivity and Positionality in Feminist Psychology

If the history of modern psychology can be read as a history of practices, then the laboratory has been one of its privileged sites. It is there that knowledge takes material form through instruments, protocols, and hierarchical relations that embody a certain idea of science: control, objectivity, repetition, measurement. Yet, as feminist and critical studies of science have shown, the laboratory is not a neutral space but a site where power relations are organized and reproduced (Danziger, 1990; Morawski, 1997). Danziger (1990) showed how experimental methods are not merely tools for observing the mind but historically situated forms of social relations between the researcher and the researched. This is, in Danziger’s (1990) terms, a social dispositif that defines differentiated positions: the experimenter—rational, masculine, active—and the subject—frequently female or feminized, passive, observed (Morawski & Steele, 1991).

This division of roles is not anecdotal; it constitutes one of the foundational matrices of psychological epistemology. Within the laboratory, the distance between those who produce knowledge and those who are subjected to it reinforces the idea of a universal mind and a “view from nowhere” (Haraway, 1988). But this “distance” is, in fact, a staging of social hierarchies. Women, racialized subjects, children, and members of the working classes were historically positioned as the objects of study; their bodies and behaviors became testing grounds for theories elaborated by others. In this way, the experimental structure replicated the subject–object asymmetry that underpins modern scientific rationality and that also sustains the gendered divisions within it (Harding, 1986, 1991; Keller, 1985).

Feminist epistemological critique has dismantled the claim to neutrality that legitimizes this hierarchy. Far from being a space of “pure” observation, the laboratory is a theater of power and representation, where decisions are made about which phenomena become visible, which bodies are measurable, and which behaviors count as normal or deviant. Every methodological choice (the design of the experiment, the selection of subjects, the instruments of measurement) is permeated by cultural and political values. Psychological science does not merely produce knowledge; it also produces subject positions, ways of being and speaking that define what is taken to be human, rational, or emotional.

A critical feminist history of laboratory practices in psychology must help to critique the often-invisible sexist biases embedded in scientific activity, which feminist empiricism seeks to dismantle. ³ But beyond this, it must also reveal the radical historical contingency of the ways in which scientific knowledge is constructed (Haraway, 1988). And also, it should further attempt to reflect on better ways of producing knowledge (García, 2003; Harding, 1986). Such reflection involves considering different ways of doing “better” science by incorporating ethical and political dimensions into the very process of knowledge production (García, 2003).

In this context, feminist reflexivity emerges as a tool to destabilize the authority of the observer and to reconfigure scientific practice (Morawski, 2005). To be reflexive does not mean to abandon objectivity but to acknowledge that all research is situated and mediated by the social, historical, and personal conditions of the researcher. It involves examining the very positions (from gender, class, culture, language, and generation) from which knowledge is produced and recognizing how these positions shape the questions that are asked, the methods that are chosen, and the interpretations that are constructed. At the same time, feminist scholars have warned that reflexivity can become a formalized or procedural requirement within mainstream qualitative research, reduced to standardized positionality statements without transforming underlying epistemic assumptions (Lazard & McAvoy, 2017). Reflexivity is often inadequately addressed in qualitative research when reduced to listing personal traits or experiences without explicitly linking them to the research process (Lazard & McAvoy, 2017). When properly applied, reflexivity brings into focus the broader processes of knowledge production (Lazard & McAvoy, 2017); and the historical context in which the research is conducted, when critically constructed, constitutes a highly valuable tool for this purpose.

Furthermore, integrating insights from Science and Technology Studies highlights the role of instruments, protocols, and social arrangements in mediating the co-production of theory and practice. Knowledge is not simply discovered; it is enacted through networks of humans, objects, and institutions (Latour, 1991).

As Despret (2004) suggests, what the laboratory or the field “makes visible” depends on how experimental devices are configured and what kinds of questions are asked. In the history of primatology, Despret showed that when women researchers entered the field and modified the conditions of observation (spending more time with the animals, attending to female behavior, etc.), the hierarchical model that had characterized primatology until then, centered on the dominant male, was destabilized. Descriptions changed: networks of cooperation, negotiation, and affectivity emerged, in which females played decisive roles. Similarly, Despret (2004) analyzes the work of the feminist ethologist Martha McClintock, whose studies on female primates and menstrual synchrony challenged dominant androcentric paradigms in behavioral science. When experimental conditions in laboratory with rats were altered, by increasing space, allowing freedom of movement, or changing the sequence of interactions, female rats ceased to appear as sexually passive and were instead described as active and interested in sexual encounters (Despret, 2004). These examples analyzed by Despret show that the difference does not “reveal” itself as a natural fact; it is fabricated within a given apparatus and conditions. Transforming the apparatus or the questions also transforms what can appear as data.

In Despret’s words, animals and humans “teach us” if we learn to listen to what our questions make them do, if we understand what they are actually responding to (Despret, 2004). Science, therefore, does not discover preexisting behaviors; it co-produces them together with the subjects it studies (Despret, 2004; Haraway, 1988). This relational conception of experimentation displaces epistemic authority: to know is also to allow oneself to be affected, to be willing to be transformed by what one observes.

This perspective connects with Haraway’s (1988) concept of situated knowledge: objectivity is achieved not from a universal vantage point but from a network of partial perspectives that engage in dialogue and mutual recognition. From this standpoint, feminist psychology can understand the laboratory not merely as a space of control but as a potential site of relational encounter, where theory and practice are consciously intertwined. Rethinking the experiment as a space of co-production involves dismantling the vertical logic of the dominating observer and replacing it with a horizontal logic of collaboration, care, and reciprocity. In practice, this translates into both methodological and ethical transformation. Feminist-inspired studies in psychology have introduced participatory research approaches, collaborative methods, and qualitative frameworks that seek to redistribute epistemic authority (e.g., M. Fine & Torre, 2019). Participatory action research, photovoice, and focus groups are examples of how research practice can become a practice of dialogue and mutual recognition. Rather than controlling variables, these approaches embrace the complexity of relationships and value reflexivity as an integral part of knowledge production.

This paradigm shift also requires rethinking the criteria for validating psychological knowledge. If classical objectivity relied on distance and replicability, feminist objectivity rests on transparency and responsibility. Acknowledging one’s own limits, theoretical choices, and the conditions under which a study is produced does not weaken rigor; it strengthens it. By incorporating this ethic of responsibility, feminist psychology redefines the very notion of evidence: what counts as “data” is no longer an isolated fact but the outcome of a situated relationship. Reflexivity, therefore, is not merely an introspective gesture; it is a form of epistemic politics. By questioning who can speak, who can observe, and who can be observed, it destabilizes the hierarchies that sustain scientific authority. Positionality, in this sense, is not an obstacle but a source of knowledge: it allows us to understand how power permeates the very act of knowing and how structural inequalities are reproduced within research spaces.

In short, building on longstanding feminist interventions, we argue for a psychology attentive to how research settings may reproduce or rework relations of power; and for a history of psychology that allows the laboratory, the interview, or the classroom to be read as spaces in which authority is made visible and open to critique. Feminist scholarship has long insisted that reflexivity and positionality should be treated not as optional additions to research but as constitutive of responsible knowledge production. From this perspective, research can be understood as an exercise in collective responsibility and critical openness, and psychological knowledge as inseparable from its political effects. This approach entails understanding power not as it is conceived in liberal feminism, typically framed in terms of a positive social good that must be redistributed (Allen, 2022). Rather, it involves bringing into these spaces the historical weight of “subjections” that poststructuralist feminism has analyzed, and trying to change (male) concepts of power as power-over, domination, or oppression to more transformative and empowering notions of it, connecting power to its capacity to produce a change through engagement with others (Allen, 2022).

The next section will address another dimension where theory, practice, and power intersect in psychology: the culture of diagnosis and the new forms of psychologization of everyday life, in which the historical legacy of difference and control finds new expressions under the language of well-being and happiness.

Diagnosing Society: From Hysteria to the Psychology of Happiness

The history of psychological diagnosis can be read as a mirror of the cultural history of modernity. Each era has classified distress in different ways, often showing a tendency to transform social, political, or relational problems into individual issues (Foucault, 1977; Rose, 1998). From 19th-century hysteria to the contemporary psychology of happiness, the discipline has actively participated in shaping the subjectivities aligned with the values of its time. A feminist history of psychology allows us to trace these transformations and to reveal how diagnoses are not mere descriptions of symptoms but devices of normativity that regulate bodies, emotions, and behaviors.

At the turn of the 20th century, hysteria was one of the most influential diagnoses in consolidating psychological and medical knowledge about women (Scull, 2009). Born at the intersection of medicine, morality, and the emerging field of clinical psychology, hysteria embodied the anxieties of an era in response to female emancipation (Showalter, 1986). “Hysterical” women came to represent disorder, uncontrolled emotion, and deviant sexuality (Showalter, 1986). Their bodies became surfaces onto which the conflict between reason and passion, order and the threat of excess was inscribed (Porter, 1993). Treatments, from hypnosis to confinement or electrotherapy, were as spectacular as they were disciplinary: the diagnosis served to restore the female body to a framework of domesticity and docility (Showalter, 1986).

Pathologizing femininity simultaneously contributes to the definition of normative masculinity. Clinical categories function as complementary mirrors: the emotional, unstable, and dependent woman legitimized the figure of the rational, self-controlled, and productive man (Shields, 2007).

Similarly, examining the histories of male hysteria highlights how gender shaped psychological diagnosis across the sexes. Attitudes toward masculinity influenced both diagnosis and the behavior of male physicians (Showalter, 1993). During the First World War, male hysteria was renamed “shell shock,” allowing us to continue reflecting on gendered mandates as well as the tensions and forms of distress associated with early 20th-century masculinity (Showalter, 1986, 1987). Fear, perceived lack of courage, and patriotism were medicalized, and the disorder was regarded as shameful and “effeminate” (Bourke, 1999; Showalter, 1986, 1987, 1993). In the late 19th century, men were also coded as neurasthenics, a diagnosis characterized by fatigue, anxiety, and nervous exhaustion, often linked to the pressures of modern life, which also reflected socially constructed notions of bourgeois masculinity and proper behavior (Ruiz Cuenca, 2021).

Gilman (1993) asks whether the official nosology of the DSM, in its restructuring of hysterical neurosis into conversion disorder, dissociative disorder, histrionic personality disorder, and related categories, “did more than relabel an existing disease or whether these new labels are the self-conscious description of the manifestation of hysteria in the 1980s” (p. 354). What Gilman (1993) does not doubt, however, is that patients learn to have “conversion disorders” or “factitious disorders with psychological symptoms” within the medicalized world in which we live, and that these labels shape our contemporary sense of being gendered patients (p. 353).

The genealogy of hysteria reveals that diagnoses are, above all, social narratives about power and obedience (Goldstein, 2001). They are also about resistance, because patients developed varied approaches to their own disorders and, in some cases, managed to resist treatments (Arnaud, 2015). In this sense, diagnostic categories can be understood as interactive classifications. As Hacking (1995, 1996) has argued, classifications in the human sciences do not simply describe individuals but interact with them, producing “looping effects” through which people come to understand and modify themselves in relation to these categories.

In the 20th century, the science of the soul aligned with a broader political project: that of patriarchal and capitalist modernity, which demanded useful, predictable, and emotionally regulated bodies. Within this context, diagnoses diversified but retained their normative function. Categories such as “neurosis,” “frigidity,” “female depression,” and, more recently, anxiety disorders or emotional exhaustion perpetuate the same logic of regulating affect and behavior. Diagnostic manuals (DSM, ICD) do more than classify symptoms; they organize ways of life. As feminist scholars such as Ehrenreich and English (1978), Ussher (2010, 2011), and many more emphasize, medical-psychological knowledge has repeatedly served to justify women’s structural distress as an individual problem, disconnecting it from their material conditions of existence.

Even today, studies show that women are more frequently diagnosed with “psychological” or “psychosomatic” disorders in response to physical symptoms similar to those of men (Barsky et al., 2001; Tavris, 1992). This tendency reflects the persistence of a historical bias: the idea that the female body is governed by emotion and, therefore, less capable of expressing suffering in rational or “objective” terms (Tavris, 1992; Ussher, 2011).

Ussher (2010, 2011, 2023) has extensively examined the ways in which women’s depression, anxiety, and other mental health challenges have been pathologized and medicalized. She critiques biomedical and traditional psychological approaches that locate the causes of women’s higher rates of depression within their own bodies or psyches, often emphasizing reproductive or hormonal factors (Capdevila & Zurbriggen, 2023). Instead, Ussher adopts a social constructionist perspective, situating women’s mental health distress in their experiences of discrimination, violence, and rigid gender norms (Ussher, 2010, 2011, 2023). She also calls for society to address the social and political context that engenders women’s distress (Capdevila & Zurbriggen, 2023; Ussher, 2023).

As Capdevila and Zurbriggen (2023) note, “structural and systemic factors are tremendously important in understanding the role that (gendered) power plays in individual lives” (p. 615). This perspective, in turn, shifts the focus of resistance toward structural and cultural dimensions rather than individual resilience. ⁴

In recent decades, this diagnostic culture has incorporated a new form of regulation: the psychology of happiness (Cabanas & Illouz, 2019). In the neoliberal context, the promise of well-being has replaced the imperative of obedience, yet the disciplinary function persists (Cabanas & Illouz, 2019). Distress is no longer named as pathology but as a lack of adjustment, a deficit of resilience, or insufficient emotional intelligence (Cabanas & Illouz, 2019). The individual is invited to become their own therapist, to monitor their emotions, and to optimize their affective performance. Positive psychology, coaching, and self-help constitute the new moral grammar of affective capitalism (Cabanas & Illouz, 2019; Illouz, 2007).

As we have already noted in the previous section, traditional feminine virtues (empathy, availability, sensitivity) reappear as professional and relational skills demanded by the market (Illouz, 2007). This shift, far from neutralizing gender hierarchies, reconfigures them. As Illouz (2007) demonstrates, the contemporary emotional economy assigns women a central role in managing care and emotional balance. The feminization of emotional labor reinforces inequality under the rhetoric of freedom and self-realization (Illouz, 2007).

This displacement of diagnosis toward emotional self-assessment is a new psychologization of society. The constant demand for happiness, self-care, and positivity transforms subjective experience into a form of symbolic capital. Those who fail to be happy are perceived as morally deficient, responsible for their own sadness. As Ahmed (2010) reminds us, happiness functions as a moral technology that aligns subjects with social norms. This psychology of happiness perpetuates a sophisticated form of control: it no longer imposes itself from the outside but seduces from within (Cabanas & Illouz, 2019). Diagnosis becomes internalized; the clinical gaze turns into a mode of self-surveillance (Cabanas & Illouz, 2019).

A feminist history of psychology proposes to reverse this logic. Instead of medicalizing or moralizing suffering, it invites us to recognize its social and political dimensions. Distress is not an individual deficit but an indicator of structural imbalances of precarity, inequality, and lack of recognition (Cabanas & Illouz, 2019). In this sense, diagnosis should mean listening and contextualizing rather than classifying and normalizing. It should be understood as an act of care and epistemic justice, rather than a tool of control. By recovering the collective dimension of suffering, feminism offers a framework for rethinking psychological practice as a form of resistance to both pathologization and affective conformism.

To conclude, from the diagnosis of hysteria to the psychology of happiness, a critical feminist history of psychology can illuminate how the discipline has both accompanied and contributed to transformations of power. At every stage, psychology has served not only to describe but also to prescribe modes of subjectivity, inscribing them as either healthy or pathological. Analyzing this continuity from a feminist perspective does not entail rejecting clinical practice but rather restoring its political dimension. Diagnosing is not merely about identifying symptoms but taking part in the construction of meanings about what counts as a good life or a failed one. The feminist task, precisely, is to open up the field of possibilities so that suffering, desire, and difference can be thought beyond the logics of control and normalization; what Butler (2004) would call reimagining the livable conditions of human life.

In the final section, we draw these strands together by returning to a longstanding feminist aspiration: to reconfigure the relationship between theory and practice, and between knowledge and care, in ways that transform psychological inquiry and intervention.

Rewriting Psychology as a Feminist Practice

The genealogies presented in the previous sections, on difference, experimentation, and diagnosis, show that psychology does not merely describe the world but actively participates in shaping it (e.g., Hacking, 1995, 1996; Rose, 1996a). Psychological theories and practices have shaped subjectivities, bodies, emotions, and forms of social relation, often in alignment with the dominant values of each historical period. Consequently, the task of a feminist history of psychology cannot be limited to report past biases; it must aim to transform the discipline from within, accounting for its modes of knowledge production and social intervention in reconfiguring psychological knowledge and practice (Jiménez-Alonso & Balltondre, 2023). In this sense, it aims to change the relationship between theory and practice. Instead of conceiving theory as a set of abstract truths and practice as their mere application, it proposes understanding both as interdependent dimensions of the same critical action. To theorize is also to practice; to practice is also to produce theory. This principle, inherited from the feminist tradition, turns psychological work into an exercise of situated responsibility: every act of research, intervention, or teaching becomes an opportunity to rethink how knowledge is produced and legitimized.

Yet this proposal is not merely conceptual. One concrete space where we have sought to operationalize this reconfiguration is our own pedagogical practice in teaching the history of psychology. Rather than adding feminist authors as supplementary content, we have reorganized the curriculum so that feminist critique functions as a structuring lens. Writing and practicing a feminist history of psychology in the classroom enables a more effective embedding of gender within the undergraduate curriculum, while also raising awareness of its significance for scientific excellence (Rees, 2011) and for fostering more equitable societies. This has involved revising canonical narratives, foregrounding silenced genealogies, critically examining the gendered construction of methods and diagnoses, and inviting students to produce situated interpretations of historical cases.

Methodologically, we have adopted collaborative and dialogical formats, such as podcast-based projects or the making of short documentaries, through which students are asked not only to recount historical developments but also to analyze how psychological knowledge has participated in producing difference and hierarchy. Assessment criteria explicitly value reflexivity, ethical positioning, and the capacity to connect epistemological analysis with professional responsibility. In this way, the classroom becomes a laboratory where theory is tested through practice, and practice is understood as knowledge production.

Preliminary evidence from student feedback and sustained engagement suggests that this approach modifies how future psychologists understand their discipline: less as a neutral accumulation of findings and more as a historically situated field with ethical and political implications. Importantly, this transformation is not achieved through ideological prescription but through structured critical inquiry into the discipline’s own archives and categories.

At the professional level, such a reconfiguration implies moving beyond the longstanding emphasis on adapting individuals to existing social structures. A feminist perspective instead asks how psychological expertise might contribute to transforming the structural conditions that generate vulnerability and exclusion. This shift requires rethinking evaluative criteria, professional norms, and institutional incentives, not only within clinical or research settings but also within training environments.

At the same time, we recognize the limits of our current efforts. Institutional constraints, time pressures, and persistent Eurocentric biases shape what can be transformed in this practice of academic activism. Our pedagogical practice should therefore be understood not as a finished model but as a situated experiment, one that reveals both the possibilities and the fragilities of integrating knowledge, care, and activism.

Rewriting psychology and its history as a feminist practice thus entails a dual movement: one of memory and one of transformation. It involves critically revisiting the exclusions that have structured the discipline while simultaneously testing alternative ways of teaching, researching, and intervening. If feminist genealogies have shown how psychological knowledge has been implicated in processes of differentiation and control, they also open the possibility of reorienting the discipline toward listening, recognition, and relational accountability.

Ultimately, to rewrite psychology as a feminist practice is to shift its center: from the isolated subject to the relational bond, from control to attention, from correction to understanding. This shift does not inaugurate a wholly new discipline but deepens and extends ongoing feminist and critical interventions. Where psychological knowledge is enacted through reflexivity, accountability, and care, the discipline itself is gradually reconfigured in practice.