PRACTICING FEMINISMS, RECONSTRUCTING PSYCHOLOGY Notes on a Liminal Science

Practicing Feminisms, Reconstructing Psychology is a valuable survey of developments to date in feminist psychology and a provocative assessment of its future possibilities. For many psychologists engaged with the questions raised by modern feminist, the reconciliation of scientific methods and feminist commitments has been a complicated and sometimes perplexing project. In her book, Jill Morawski attempts to move beyond the apparent impasses toward a constructive feminist psychology. The book assesses the substantive advances feminist psychology has made and proposes ways in which those transformations can lead to new research and methodologies. These transformative interventions, Morawski argues, have often consisted of local and partial alterations to established methods rather than a programmatic "metatheory" or a formulaic methodology. She reviews a variety of exemplary studies that demonstrate how such intermittent practices, taken together, constitute a groundword for radically new forms of psychological inquiry. The study describes feminist challenges to long-held conceptions of objectivity, subjectivity, and validity and examines emergent problems and ongoing debates. The feminist innovations discussed reveal the impossibility of a pure and abstract objective stance and demonstrate the feasibility of situated and critical objective practices. Morawski also shows how experimental investigative strategies are generating new perspectives on subjectivity, which incorporate agency as well as dependence, reflection as well as reactivity. Feminist inquiry is modifying the procedures through which knowledge is warranted, with different evaluations of validation processes. Despite the transformations in these areas, the pursuit of a feminist psychology remains in transition, in a "liminal" space. Among the emerging issues Morawski explores are vicissitudes of reflexivity, the investigator's self, and the cultural bases of psychological knowledge.

Jill G. Morawski is Professor of Psychology at Wesleyan University and editor of The Rise of Experimentation in American Psychology.