Healthcare practice and policy impacting disabled groups has historically reduced disability to an individual phenomenon and homogenised experiences of disability. Such practices – which lack cultural and structural sensitivity – risk not only individualising, pathologising and responsibilising social oppressions tied to disability, but also erasing multiply marginalised experiences, knowledges and needs within any given disabled group. Moreover, by overlooking the interlocking macrosystems of oppression that shape identities and produce inequities, the potential for transformative practice and systemic change is reduced. In contrast, intersectionality demands that disability be understood as emerging from personal-political interplays, and beyond a single-axis issue, constituted through mutually reinforcing systems of representation and power. Focusing on myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome and drawing on my own experience as a multiply marginalised disabled person in the UK, I make a case for UK healthcare to be informed by intersectionality, not as empty rhetoric but as critical social praxis and much-needed epistemic intervention.
Mentorship plays a vital role in feminist engagement, which is essential for advancing equity for women and other marginalized individuals in academia. As research and reflection progress in developing inclusive and empowering environments in psychology, feminist mentoring has emerged as a key area for transforming the discipline. Characterized as a lateral, collaborative, advocacy-oriented, holistic, and individualized approach to training and supervision, feminist mentoring models have been developed as a more equitable alternative to traditional hierarchical models. This special issue invited contributions that explore how Feminist mentoring can promote equity, diversity, inclusion, and a sense of belonging across various intersecting social identities within all domains of psychology. Given the substantial number of submissions received, the contributions will be distributed across two issues of the journal. In the first of these two issues, this editorial summarizes the key theoretical foundations, practices, and experiences presented in the first seven contributions on feminist mentoring in psychology.
As a female survivor of abuse in sport, the first author spent more than a decade engaging in harmful embodied practices including alcohol and prescription medication misuse, disordered eating, and self-harm as she attempted to reclaim control over her body. These practices were shaped by historical disciplinary practices imposed on her adolescent body by male sport staff. This paper uses arts-based feminist autoethnography as a methodology to examine how embodied experiences of abuse and trauma persist into adulthood and shape ongoing struggles for bodily autonomy. Drawing on creative methods including drawing, digital photo collage, and poetry, this paper demonstrates how arts-based methods can illuminate embodied, affective, and often invisible dimensions of abuse and trauma that are difficult to access through conventional research approaches. Positioned within feminist scholarship on embodiment, trauma, and creative methodologies, the paper outlines how arts-based autoethnography offers a trauma-informed approach that both supports survivor safety, and generates embodied knowledge. In doing so, the paper advances feminist methodological thinking by illustrating how arts-based approaches can enable survivors of abuse to articulate lived experiences, while minimising the risk of re-traumatisation. In doing so, it makes visible, forms of embodied knowledge, often marginalised in scientific research approaches.
A growing body of empirical research investigates the impact that sexual objectification of young women on social media has on their well-being. The aim of the present study is to explore how young women navigate sexual objectification and body-focused posting practices on social media in the context of postfeminist sensibilities. Drawing on individual interviews, which we analyzed using critical discursive psychology, we found that while participants critiqued the sexual objectification of women on social media, they still engaged in body-focused posting practices for validation. This apparent contradiction was associated with affective struggles related to navigating societal expectations, which they managed through three interpretative repertoires: 'It's only 24 hours', which normalizes the temporary nature of posts as less 'risky'; 'Empowered to post, judged for posting', minimizing personal responsibility by situating practices within collective norms; and 'I show my body if I want to', reclaiming agency by reframing self-sexualization as empowerment. The study highlights the affective struggles participants face in balancing critique, conformity and resistance within a digital landscape shaped by postfeminist frameworks that promote sexualization while valuing individual responsibility and self-surveillance. This study contributes to understanding the nuanced ways young women negotiate agency and objectification in digital spaces.
In Latin America, the Judeo-Christian cis-heteronormative model remains a central framework regulating social, legal, and cultural norms around sexual orientation and gender, systematically excluding LGBT+ people from recognition within parenthood institutions. Drawing on an intersectional feminist perspective, we examine the barriers faced by lesbian, bisexual, and trans women in accessing, imagining, and experiencing mothering under conditions of structural exclusion. A qualitative approach was adopted, using semi-structured interviews and the Intersectional Loom to analyze how participants’ social identities shape these experiences. The analytic sample comprised seven participants from Chile and Mexico. Findings reveal multiple pathways to mothering, including previous heterosexual relationships, adoption, co-parenting agreements, and assisted reproductive technologies. Across these trajectories, participants described persistent constraints such as legal vulnerability, stigma, and limited institutional support. Despite the flexibility and adaptability reflected in these experiences, access to mothering remains unevenly shaped by legal, social, and cultural conditions. The participants’ narratives highlight alternative arrangements of care alongside enduring forms of moral scrutiny and unequal recognition, particularly affecting trans women. Overall, the findings underscore the need for legal reforms to ensure equal access to parental rights for LGBT+ families.
Autism research is often androcentric, and the experiences of autistic women have historically been underexplored. Recently, some researchers have argued that autistic women may experience a distinct phenotype (female autism), characterised in part by the ability to mask autistic social difficulties. However, others argue that the experience of autistic women is shaped by gender expectations and perceptions, and not the result of an essentialised difference. This study aimed to explore the lived experience of masking among autistic women from their own viewpoint, guided by feminist perspectives on epistemic injustice and standpoint theory, which emphasise social power and gendered norms as driving factors in how experiences are understood and validated. We conducted semistructured interviews with six late-diagnosed autistic women, and used interpretative phenomenological analysis to analyse the data. We identified three themes: 'reconciliation of two identities', 'interplay of masking and individual notions of womanhood in society' and 'autism, masking and interpersonal relationships'. Our findings highlight the ways that gendered expectations can influence self-knowledge, shaping motivations to mask and the experience of masking itself. These findings have important implications for support for autistic women at all stages of the lifespan and diagnostic process.
This study explores how men in precarious employment in Surabaya navigate the intersection of masculinities, vulnerability and cultural expectations. Taking a feminist approach to social practice theory, this study situates men's lived experiences within the broader structural and cultural conditions that shape their everyday realities. Our analysis of three precarious male workers' personal narratives reveals how masculinities are performed through endurance, responsibility and silence in the space of instability. Javanese moral values such as wibawa (authority), rukun (harmony), sabar (patience) and nrimo ing pandum (acceptance of fate) are central to these responses, legitimating endurance while discouraging open expressions of vulnerability. These cultural ideals, intertwined with structural precarity, shape how men maintain dignity and masculine identity despite unstable livelihoods. The study contributes to feminist psychology's concern with social justice, intersectionality and marginalised voices by demonstrating how masculinities and vulnerability are not fixed traits but dynamic practices embedded within local moral worlds and the broader structures of precarious labour.
This paper introduces three-dimensional (3D) body mapping, a creative methodological innovation that advances the existing feminist method of body mapping. We developed 3D body mapping to explore how feminist concerns are lived and felt through the body, and to illuminate the forms of knowledge that emerge from these embodied experiences. We situate these concerns within feminist phenomenology and recent turns toward new materialism and more-than-human theory. We then review the body mapping literature, acknowledging the strengths of existing practices while identifying the constraints of 2D formats. Addressing these constraints, we describe the development of 3D body mapping through 'body boards' (like life-sized human pin cushions) with which participants can create spatial representations of embodied experience. To illustrate the method's potential, we present two case studies: one examining the embodied experience of being targeted by online misogyny, and another exploring positive body image and what it feels like to live well in one's body. These examples demonstrate how 3D body mapping elicits rich embodied knowledge and enables novel insights while addressing feminist concerns with systemic inequities and strategies for resistance and resilience. We conclude that 3D body mapping offers participants and researchers a powerful medium for examining embodied knowing.
This article examines how environmental harm is lived, narrated, and politicized by the Mothers of Nguter, a grassroots women's movement protesting hydrogen sulfide emissions from a rayon factory in Central Java, Indonesia. Drawing on interpretive feminist ethnographic analysis of interviews, court observations, and field notes collected between 2022 and 2023, I explore how toxic exposure is articulated through an atmospheric and sensory vocabulary centered on mambu! (stench). The article advances feminist psychological understandings of trauma by conceptualizing environmental harm as atmospheric, collective, and relational rather than solely intrapsychic. Participants describe disrupted breathing, children's recurring illnessess, nocturnal vigilance, and repeated institutional dismissal. Trauma emerges not as a singular psychological wound but as a condition saturating air, domestic space, and intergenerational futures. Simultaneously, maternal activism transforms atmospheric distress into political agency. Through environmental monitoring, storytelling, legal testimony, and collective organizing, the Mothers convert embodied suffering into shared knowledge and public claims for accountability. Maternal care operates as both psychosocial vulnerability and political infrastructure, challenging technocratic denial and asserting women's sensory authority as environmental evidence. By foregrounding atmospheric, embodiment, and maternal labor, the article contributes to feminist psychology debates on trauma, environmental justice, and the politics of care under industrial development and state neglect.
Research probing Black women's health-related decisions has historically neglected to contextualize these decisions within sociocultural influences and access to health-promoting infrastructure. Black women's underrepresentation in health and fitness spaces is often addressed in ways that reinforce stigmatizing messages. Feminist psychologists have long implicated psychology's often decontextualized lenses in sustaining narrow understandings of women's health choices. This study applies an inquiry informed by Black intersectional feminism to explore how Black women describe their interest in physical activity and the circumstances and experiences that create barriers to engaging their interest. Open-ended survey responses from 65 Black Canadian women (M = 23.5 years, SD = 10.72) were coded and analyzed through a reflexive thematic analysis. We constructed four themes: expressions of being in the "right" body, movement centering strengths and possibility, (in)visibility of cultural referents, and activity nourished through community. Barriers included being perceived as a "bad fit," various forms of inaccessibility, and the violation of sociocultural norms. The findings of this study can inform physical activity/exercise interventions that wish to facilitate programming and/or spaces that are culturally affirming and safe for Black women.
Research on men's role in pro-gender equality movements has been growing. Across several Western countries, qualitative research has identified among men a pervasive dualistic construction of feminism as good and reasonable versus bad and extreme. Less is known about the ways in which men's constructions of feminism intertwine with their positioning as feminists and their development of a feminist identity. Through individual semistructured interviews with 31 Italian cisgender men, we explored men's conceptualisation of feminism, their positioning and the path towards feminist identity development. Through reflexive thematic analysis and a constructionist epistemological approach, we identified three themes. (a) A binary construction of bad versus good feminism and the narrative 'feminism is about women' were shared among participants, regardless of feminist identification. (b) Participants drew on these constructions to justify their positions either as outsiders to feminism or as allies. Feminist participants undertook a complex process of negotiation of the space allowed to them within feminism, which influenced their level of engagement in feminist movements. (c) The pathway to feminist identification was described as an ongoing journey towards awareness, catalysed by past and present experiences. In this process, the development of a feminist consciousness became crucial to questioning the norms of traditional masculinity.
This study examines, through a feminist empowerment lens, the trajectories that lead Peruvian adolescent mothers into institutional care following pregnancies resulting from sexual violence, and their lived experiences within these settings. Using a qualitative case study design, the research was conducted in a state-accredited protection institution in Lima. Nine adolescent mothers aged 13 to 17 participated in structured observations and group interviews conducted together with in-depth interviews with one adolescent and two institutional authorities. The findings identified three key moments across a continuum of violence and care: sexual violence within the family, disclosure and engagement with legal and health systems, and life inside the institution. Across these phases, participants encountered multiple forms of revictimization, including within institutions meant to provide care. At the same time, the study documents expressions of resistance and agency, including disclosure, peer solidarity, and collective care. These practices illustrate forms of "power from within" and "power with" that emerge under conditions of profound constraint. Rather than positioning institutionalization as protective by default, the analysis shows how care is often delivered through paternalistic and controlling logics that limit autonomy. The study contributes to feminist psychology by conceptualizing empowerment as relational, situated, and negotiated within institutional contexts.
This article explores the embodied experience of medication-induced abortion through a critical feminist and evolutionary lens. Drawing on personal diaries and narrative, I examine how the physiological process of abortion, particularly the unexpected intensity of the expulsion of large tissue clots, evoked associations with other adaptive ejection functions of the female body: menstruation, childbirth and lactation. I argue that the term "bleeding," as commonly used in relation to medication-induced abortion and rooted in biomedical and risk-oriented discourse, fails to capture the agency of the process. Rather than perceiving abortion as a site of trauma or shame, I experienced it with visceral awe at the female body's self-regulating force. Building on traditions of embodied knowledge, I situate abortion within a dual lens of function and sensation-showing how the same adaptive function can be lived as pain, relief or empowerment, depending on context. By reframing abortion as a powerful act of embodied ejection, like birth and lactation, I invite a shift in how we understand reproductive physiology and its relationship to agency and language. This article contributes to feminist psychology by foregrounding corporeal experience and reclaiming women's bodily knowledge as a generative source of both understanding and cultural meaning.
In the 21st century, war, famine, genocide, and natural disasters have led to the highest levels of forced human migration in recorded history. Enduring global and local inequities rooted in racism and ethnocentrism shape youth well-being but are insufficiently considered in literature aiming to support youth mental health. This paper uses feminist decolonial and critical race theories to disrupt notions that Western perspectives on mental health are superior or the norm, and discusses the social context of Bhutanese refugee youth. We then describe a multiyear (2021-2023) community-based participatory research (CBPR) process with Bhutanese refugee youth and their families in the United States centered on supporting youth mental health. Data analyzed for this study include ethnographic field notes of listening sessions and events as well as transcripts of a focus group, all conducted during this period. Data were analyzed using thematic analysis. Findings illustrate challenges and disillusionment associated with resettlement, along with community-driven supportive efforts. We share recommendations offered by the community that are culturally responsive to their needs and discuss how to promote youth well-being in the context of widespread global inequity.
Girls in Western countries are often sent to therapy to better manage their behaviour. Once in the therapy room, children often rely on nonverbal means to express their thoughts or feelings in therapy interactions. Children demonstrate their understandings of their mental health and awareness of their experiences through bodily postures. Yet there is limited literature that critically examines girls' body language in therapy. The current study uses a critical discourse analysis to investigate reoccurring patterns of postures across two girls' discursive therapy sessions. A Foucauldian power analysis illustrates girls' body language is a form of everyday resistance to deficit-focused interactions. It shows how the girls were identified in problematic ways at times, and how they used their bodies to actively resist and reposition themselves in the therapeutic encounter by using the physical space around them. Findings demonstrate the need for professionals working in therapy contexts to critically examine the meaning of girls' body language to avoid inadvertently positioning them as gendered docile bodies in need of modification and self-management.
Children are socialised to understand themselves and others through gender categories. However, there are few observational studies of how this happens in social interaction. Based on video-recorded interactions at a UK preschool nursery setting, this study uses ethnomethodology and conversation analysis to examine the extent and ways cis-heteronormativity is reproduced through gendered descriptions in interactions involving children and adults in preschool role-play activities. The everyday play activities of 26 children (3-4 years old) were video-recorded over a period of 6 months, totalling 7 hours of recordings. Four episodes of role play were identified in which children used gendered descriptions to organise and allocate roles to themselves and other children. One adult used gendered descriptions to validate or correct the children's role allocations. The children's and the adult's actions in many ways reproduced cis-heteronormative assumptions of identities and relationships. These assumptions were integral to the ways in which they made sense of one another's actions and organised their participation within emerging role-play scenes. The children's role allocations nevertheless sometimes departed from cis-normative expectations, thus leading to a composite picture. This study contributes to a growing body of research that highlights the ways in which gender normativities can shape interaction.
This paper introduces Embodying Fatigue, an ongoing interdisciplinary project responding to the challenges of articulating and understanding the embodied realities of long-term or recurrent fatigue (LTF) experienced as part of a chronic health condition. Developed through collaboration between an academic (Lucy) and artist (Ellie), both of whom have LTF themselves, the project seeks to explore LTF beyond clinical and discursive framings, using creative methods to surface its emotional, relational, and material dimensions. Central to this work is the development of a novel method of embodied data generation: fatigue exploration kits. These kits, grounded in artistic, tactile practice, are designed to facilitate affective engagement, dialogue and create a sense of community with other individuals with fatigue. This paper outlines the background and aims of this ongoing project, details the conceptual and practical development of the kits, and introduces insights from a series of meetings and workshops with public and patient involvement and engagement (PPIE) contributors. Finally, we reflect on future possibilities for expanding and refining the kits as tools for research, care, and creative action.
The mother's departure, both as a factual description and a metaphor for women's resistance to patriarchy, has become an important issue in certain parts of the world. This paper explored the systemic injustices suffered by mothers who left home in rural Western China and their complex impact on adolescents' identity. Using a reflexive thematic analysis approach, we conducted life story interviews with nine adolescents. Synthesizing the findings, they revealed that adolescents' identities may depend on their age at the time of separation from their mothers. Younger children feel abandoned by their mothers and fall into self-doubt (Theme 1). The abandonment is an event that makes them feel deeply ashamed; and they can only respond to the inquiries of those around them with self-silence (Theme 2). They express disappointment at their fathers' lack of responsibility and emotional attachment to their grandmothers (Theme 3). As the children grow older, they come to understand the pressures of their mother's forced departure, and they begin to resist the voices of others and actively construct a new self (Theme 4). The study also found that gendered power relations in patrilineal families, gossiping in neighboring communities, and bullying by school peers all constitute structural oppression against adolescents, putting their identity legitimacy under significant challenge. Therefore, we call for a systematic social transformation to reduce public prejudice and discrimination against nonmainstream families and their children.
