Jeanne Marecek
Jeanne Marecek is a Senior Research Professor and Professor Emerita at Swarthmore College (USA). She was a member of the Psychology Department, the Gender and Sexuality Studies Program, and the Asian Studies Program.
Jeanne and Eva Magnusson (a member of the Umeå Psychology Department) have written Gender and Culture in Psychology: Theories and Practices, which was published in Swedish by Natur Och Kultur (2010) and will be released in English by Cambridge University Press (2012). She has also written (with Rachel Hare-Mustin) Making a Difference: Psychology and the Construction of Gender (Yale University Press, 1990). Jeanne and Eva are working on another book detailing methods of empirical research on the cultural shaping of personal meanings. Jeanne is an Associate Editor of Feminism & Psychology, an international journal of critical feminist psychology. She and Michelle Fine are editors of a book series Qualitative Psychology (NYU Press).
This is how Jeanne describes her interests:
As a feminist in psychology, much of my scholarship and teaching focuses on gender ideologies, gendered subjectivities, and the webs of power in which women in various social locations are embedded. I have been especially interested in how gendered social life is implicated in the troubles for which women seek mental health care and in the care that they receive. I have written about feminism in psychotherapy and I have studied therapists in the US who identified themselves as members of the Feminist Therapy movement. I have also served on the boards of feminist organizations that provided counseling and therapy to low-income individuals, as well as public education and political advocacy.
My involvement with psychotherapy and the mental health establishment has led me to think more broadly about the culture of psychotherapy and the way it has seeped into mainstream popular culture and everyday life in the US. This includes discursive regimes regarding mental “health” and “illness” and “chemical imbalances,” as well as the swelling cascade of diagnoses and pseudo-diagnoses. What are the implications of this ‘psy’ talk for our ideas of personhood, morality, and social relations? Where might feminists and other critical theorists carve out spaces where therapeutic practitioners can sustain a critical political edge and find ways to challenge the corporatization and medicalization of mental healthcare? A project related to this is a Special Issue of Feminism & Psychology, co-edited with Nicola Gavey, devoted to critical feminist examinations of psychiatric diagnoses and the proposed revision of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.
My engagement with Gender Studies has been central in shaping my scholarly commitments. It was through Gender Studies that I was introduced to feminist and critical theory, to post-structuralism, and to the “turn to language.” Colleagues in Gender Studies also brought me into debates about epistemology and ways of knowing. These intellectual movements came to shape my writing and research. As I red and taught empirical work by feminist social scientists outside psychology, my skepticism mounted regarding experimentalism, quantification, measurement, and the factors-and-variables approach that characterizes conventional American psychology. With the help of feminist anthropologists and sociologists, as well as psychologists who stood outside the dominant tradition, I learned other more meaningful ways of producing knowledge about people and the social and cultural contexts of their lives.
I have worked in South Asia, specifically Sri Lanka, for over twenty years. (Sri Lanka, which was earlier called Ceylon, is an island off the southeast coast of India.) There I have worked as a researcher, a university lecturer and supervisor, and a practitioner and trainer in the humanitarian and development sectors. My research has investigated suicide and deliberate self-harm, with a particular focus on girls and young women. In the Sri Lankan imaginary, suicide is not connected to psychiatric illness or depressive despair, but to interpersonal emotions such as shame, anger, and the desire for retaliation. Suicidal episodes are not solitary; often they are carried out in a way that others are witnesses. My local collaborators and I have been especially interested in understanding adolescents’ suicide episodes and their aftermath in the context of family and community relations. In May, I hope to have the chance to tell you more about this work.
Working with adolescent girls and their families has opened broader questions for me about girlhood in Sri Lanka. In particular, I am interested in “big girls,” a local euphemism for girls who have reached puberty but are not married. Daily life as a “big girl” is a precarious affair. Big girls must walk a tightrope between adhering scrupulously to traditional strictures of sexual respectability and embracing news ways of being arising from modernization, internationalization, and the importation of western discourses of romantic love, “female empowerment,” and personal autonomy. How do big girls and their families negotiate the contradiction?
In addition to seeking out feminists in psychology and mental health professions, I hope to connect with gender scholars at Umeå who study girlhood, as well as those who engage in international work, whether in South Asia or elsewhere in the global south.
