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

We argue that a feminist history of psychology is not merely a corrective add-on to existing narratives but a methodology for transforming the discipline’s concepts, practices, and forms of authority. Drawing on sociohistorical and genealogical approaches, we examine how psychological knowledge has been produced through specific dispositifs (laboratories, tests, diagnostic manuals, professional roles) and how these have encoded gendered, racialized, and classed hierarchies. Rather than treating “theory” and “practice” as separate domains, we show how psychological theories are inseparable from the experimental, diagnostic, and institutional practices that enact them, and how these practices shape subjectivities and social order. The paper develops three intersecting genealogies of modern psychology: (1) the construction of sexual difference as a foundational axis of psychological theory and measurement; (2) the experimental production of authority in the laboratory, and the feminist reworking of reflexivity and positionality; and (3) the culture of diagnosis, from hysteria to contemporary happiness and resilience discourses, as technologies of regulation and self-surveillance. Across these domains, we mobilize feminist epistemologies of situated knowledge, ignorance, and critique to denaturalize core psychological categories and to foreground their political effects. We conclude by outlining principles for rewriting psychology as a feminist practice that links knowledge and care, relocates authority in relational and participatory methodologies, and reorients psychological work from individual adaptation toward structural transformation. In doing so, we propose feminist historiography as a crucial resource for imagining other possible (histories of) psychology.