Women, men, and all the other categories

Abstract

This article looks at psychological theory and research that aims to capture and study human diversity in new ways. Human diversity, increasingly framed in terms of intersectionality - focusing the mutual interrelatedness of central social categorizations such as gender, ethnicity/race, social class and sexualit(ies) - has recently come more forcefully onto the research agenda for psychologists. The article argues that for psychological research to be able to usefully theorize and study diversity in everyday lives, it needs to find new ways to incorporate the impact on individual lives of both large and small sociocultural, and sometimes political, contexts into research. Gender studies within psychology, as well as cross-disciplinary gender studies, have developed bodies of theory and empirical research about many diversity issues that can give helpful contributions to such developments of psychological theory and research.

Keywords:

• human diversity
• every day lives
• intersectionality
• social categories
• gender
• feminist theory