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Dismantling the Master’s House with the Mistress’ Tools? The Intersection Between Feminism and Psychology as a Site for Decolonization

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Abstract

This chapter reviews strategies for challenging colonialism and androcentrism in psychology. It examines how knowledge and practice in mainstream psychology reflects and reproduces coloniality through positioning ways of being observed across the world, and particularly in colonized spaces, as pathological deviations from Western norms. The authors consider how feminist epistemologies can be useful tools for confronting this epistemic violence, while also recognizing the history of feminisms being used to perpetuate colonial and heteropatriarchal power. Therefore, they suggest that decolonial feminist approaches are particularly useful for addressing both coloniality and androcentrism within feminisms, psychology, and feminist psychology. The chapter presents three decolonial approaches—accompaniment, indigenization, and denaturalization—and highlights examples of decolonial feminist psychological work that employ these strategies.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Decolonial and post-colonial scholarship uses a range of terms to characterize global power structures and relations between colonizing and colonized spaces. These include dichotomies such as Global North/South, Western/Eastern, and minority/majority World. Since these relations are always socially and historically situated there is no one term that can sufficiently capture these nuances, so throughout this chapter we switch between terms to reflect common usage in the literature being discussed.

  2. 2.

    In this we are using the term “community” fairly loosely, and in line with our reading of Greenwick’s (2004) conceptualization, to capture communities as networks of individuals and groups with some shared goals and perspectives, who may or may not share physical space or social identities, as well as the more traditional conception of communities as groups of people living in close proximity or coming from the same background. Regardless of the type of connection that characterizes a community, “these connections are always partial” (Greenwick, 2004, p. 101) and so we can never fully represent the homogeneous and shifting nature of a community.

  3. 3.

    This point is reminiscent of Williams et al. (2002), who argued that much of feminist psychology assumes gender as a primary social and identity category. This assumption disregards Black feminist work on intersectionality and it reproduces problematic notions of universal womanhood/sisterhood that constitute assimilation to Eurocentric standards. What a decolonial analysis adds is recognition that claims about gender as a primary organizing principle of social life reflect a history of colonial imposition.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology and Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies Program, Ithaca College, Ithaca, NY, USA

    Natasha Bharj

  2. Department of Psychology and Kansas African Studies Center and Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study (STIAS), Stellenbosch University, Stellenbosch, South Africa

    Glenn Adams

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  1. Natasha Bharj
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Correspondence to Natasha Bharj .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of California, Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz, CA, USA

    Eileen L. Zurbriggen

  2. The Open University, Milton Keynes, UK

    Rose Capdevila

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Bharj, N., Adams, G. (2023). Dismantling the Master’s House with the Mistress’ Tools? The Intersection Between Feminism and Psychology as a Site for Decolonization. In: Zurbriggen, E.L., Capdevila, R. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Power, Gender, and Psychology . Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41531-9_11

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