Nora Ruck

Intersectionality has become a central concept in feminist theories and movements worldwide. Coined initially to understand how Black American women were rendered invisible in U.S. American anti-discrimination law around 1990, it has since traveled to both political activism and social scientific research worldwide. In this paper, we argue that there are challenges in transferring the concept from its origins in a late-20th-century liberal democratic and capitalist society to a different historical and socio-political context. We employ the epistemological operation of “strangification” to reflect on the potential and limitations of applying intersectionality to understand mechanisms of overlapping oppressions in the authoritarian socialist one-party regime of the German Democratic Republic (GDR; 1949–1990). We ask what needs to be considered when “estranging” intersectionality from its context of origin and applying it in a context-sensitive manner to the GDR. Drawing on an empirical analysis of biographical interviews with individuals from different social backgrounds, including lesbian, migrant, and Jewish communities, and on a theoretical examination of the preconditions of the concept, we theorize that “politically conformist behavior” with the Socialist Unity Party was the central principle determining relations of inequality and oppression in the GDR. We present this article as a call for a context-sensitive use of intersectionality, highlighting the need to examine its original assumptions and to consider whether the categories and overarching principles of social organization suggested by theorists of intersectionality require adaptation; without such reflection, uncritical application risks overlooking key dimensions of oppression or obscuring the complexity of intersecting power structures.

Critical participatory action research (CPAR) is a key methodological approach in psychology for advancing social justice. While CPAR has been fruitfully combined with both qualitative and quantitative methods, tensions remain around its integration with interpretive approaches grounded in a hermeneutics of demystification. This paper addresses these tensions by exploring the potential of methods relying on a hermeneutics of demystification within a feminist CPAR project conducted with women’s counselors. The study focused on the emotional experiences of women’s counselors working in autonomous women’s counseling centers, which have been shaped by decades of NGOization and increasing bureaucratization. In collaboration with three practitioner-researchers, the project employed collective memory-work and the documentary method to interpret group discussions. We examine how these methods, each rooted in a hermeneutics of demystification, enable the uncovering of latent dimensions of counselors’ experiences. Through sample interpretations, we demonstrate how CPAR can benefit from such methods not only to reveal deeper layers of meaning but also to support the development of critical consciousness. We conclude that a hermeneutics of demystification can promote social justice in CPAR by collectively raising critical consciousness. We outline three pathways for integrating hermeneutics of demystification into CPAR: by employing methods that reconstruct latent layers of meaning, by engaging with theory, and by historical contextualization. By bridging these methodological traditions, the paper contributes to debates on the compatibility of reconstructive methods with participatory research and highlights their combined potential for promoting social justice in psychological contexts.

This study explores the psychologization of the women's movement by examining the activist practice of consciousness‐raising in a transnational perspective. We follow the lines along which P/psychological concepts that were appropriated and developed by North American feminist activists during the late 1960s and early 1970s traveled to the German‐speaking countries and were translated, adopted, and transformed by feminist activists in Germany and Austria. We explore both the process of psychologization as the practice traveled from the United States to German‐speaking countries and the various dimensions of psychologization: diffusion of Psy‐expert discourse beyond the borders of the psy‐disciplines, academization, individualization, and meta‐psychologization. With the latter term, we aim to capture the relationship between (feminist) P/psychology and its critique.

Social and liberation movements all over the world have acted on the premise that oppression is kept alive, among other ways, through psychological mechanisms. Feminist and critical race epistemologies such as “feminist standpoint theories” and “epistemological ignorance” suggest that there might be different forms of not knowing involved depending on the social location of the (not) knowing subject. In this paper we suggest that the concrete psychological mechanisms involved in not knowing or outright ignorance differ according to one’s position in the social fabric of oppression and privilege. Drawing on various critical psychological and psychoanalytic reflections, as well as interpreting selected passages from a group discussion among elderly retirement home residents in Vienna, we illustrate how social position is translated into lack of knowledge about systems of oppression and privilege

Social conflicts are often discussed in the form of public scientific controversies in knowledge societies. This paper analyzes several public controversies tackling issues of gender inequalities between evolutionists (evolutionary psychologists and evolutionary psychologically oriented journalists) and feminists (feminist scientists and journalists) in US media between the early 1980s and the early 2000s. The inquiry focuses on rhetorical strategies of “boundary work” participants used to make their point and strengthen their public authority on the issues discussed. By practicing boundary work, scientists distance themselves from ideology. It is suggested that Antonio Gramsci's works on hegemony and the intellectuals allows to think about intellectual's roles in ideological struggles in a different way: the public scientific controversies analyzed occurred at a time when “traditional” gender and family models had lost their hegemonic role and gender relations were rather thoroughly rearranged. They can thus be understood as part of a larger social struggle for cultural hegemony on issues of gender and sexuality.