ABSTRACT
Critique of instantiated discourses and practices seems to have ushered in an interregnum, a pause wherein a crisis of meaning ensues. This pause provides an opportunity, a space for new forms of reflection and novel formulations about what it is to be human. This special issue introduces a collection of papers representing a rich tapestry of feminist, decolonial, psychoanalytic, queer, and clinical insights which pave inroads into making sense of and transforming possibilities for being and practicing. The papers in this issue coalesce around three dimensions and commitments: (1) recentering marginalized epistemology, (2) reconfiguring ontological assumptions, and (3) providing possibilities for being and practice beyond the foreclosures of hegemony. In so doing, the authors provide scholarly and clinically sophisticated resources for navigating cultural territory where conventional and mainstream meanings and methods are in significant flux. Each of the pieces in this special issue was presented in the “Gender and Sexuality” track at the Psychology and the Other Conference (2023).
Critique of instantiated discourses and practices seems to have ushered in an interregnum, a pause wherein a crisis of meaning ensues. What does it mean to be alive? How do we understand being in bodies? What methods enable us to explore available subjectivities within contexts of power? Indeed, consensus within psychology is wavering as dissatisfaction with prevailing paradigms mounts (see e.g., Layton, Citation2023; Raskin, Citation2022). In particular, the harms and constraints associated with reductive meaning systems and bygone binaries are brought to the fore. In their wake, however, uncertainty and its attendant fears are provoked (Goodman et al., Citation2021). Yet a genuine grappling with these questions may provide the very capaciousness needed to reckon with the interregnum.
There is a need to develop more just and more expansive meaning systems. Perhaps this wavering confidence enables access to the humility required to rethink models for human subjectivity and redress policies, practices, and structures that have been insufficient and harmful. In other words, the lapse in reining paradigms presents an opportunity to embrace other(ed) methods, tools, and epistemologies that aid us in more fully understanding experiences of being.
However, while dissatisfaction with a status quo may be apparent, we are simultaneously surrounded by rapidly developing technologies designed around its universalized truth claims. There is a risk that unchallenged knowledge systems, interpretations, policies, and practices are being calcified and thereby, the reductive and harmful effects of these logics are exacerbated. As a result, we may be further entrenched within dynamics of power when we are both less confident in their capacity to serve us and more desperate for better models. How, then—given these constraints—may we approach the project of recentering and embracing better models of humanity?
In many ways, Studies in Gender and Sexuality and the Psychology and the Other community (Goodman & Freeman, Citation2015) coalesce around these questions and aims. Both uplift transdisciplinary and critical exploration of being and subjectivity at the intersections of cultural and political formations. They also share a commitment to dialogue and methods through which renewed theory and practice can be made possible. These possibilities are realized in multiple ways. First, there is an explicit valuing of divergent and marginalized epistemology. It is from, and with, already existing—yet marginalized—knowledges that prevailing paradigms may be transformed into new and more creative thought systems. This is in part possible because other(ed) knowledge systems offer novel insights into what it means to be human, which illustrates the second way that the collaboration between this journal and Psychology and the Other may be fruitful. Divergent epistemologies lend to an ontological widening that reconfigures what it means to be human. Third, by challenging these epistemological and ontological constraints, new forms of personhood and possibilities for action become conceivable to render transformation.
In this special issue introduction, we articulate how these three aforementioned channels are uniquely animated by this original collection of Gender and Sexuality scholarship. The articles within this issue were developed out of papers originally presented at the Psychology and the Other conference in October of 2023, as part of the newly established “Gender and Sexuality” track. Brought together, they represent a rich tapestry of feminist, decolonial, psychoanalytic, queer, and clinical insights that pave inroads into making sense of and transforming possibilities for being and practicing. As we introduce overarching themes that thread together this multitudinous collection of papers, we situate them in conversation with these three dimensions of (1) recentering marginalized epistemology, (2) reconfiguring ontological assumptions, and (3) providing possibilities for being and practice beyond the foreclosures of hegemony.
When reckoning with the interregnum of meaning— the lapse between paradigmatic regimes—it may be just as vital to consider the how we go about understanding and devising new concepts as we do the what that results from these processes. Which epistemologies grant increased possibilities for transformation? How are the nuances of human experiences honored intricately, without succumbing to the perils of one-size-fits-all claims and fanatic idolatry? In this special issue, epistemologies that have been derided, subjugated, inferiorized, and pathologized are drawn upon, including Global South perspectives (Besoain, Citation2024; Zafar, Citation2024); Black Studies (McLeughlin, Citation2024), LGBTQ+ psychoanalysis (Gherovici, Citation2024; McLeughlin, Citation2024); “matrescent epistemology” (Sidesinger, Citation2024); and several threads of feminism, including native, Latinx, and decolonial feminisms (Besoain, Citation2024; Sikri, Citation2024). Both epistemological pluralism and methodological diversity are uniquely exemplified across these six special issue papers.
Indeed, marginalized epistemologies remind us that how we devise hermeneutically just and more expansive paradigms necessitates recentering what has been silenced, rather than merely renewing outmoded paradigms or attempting to decontextualize sense-making by claiming to discover something brand new. For instance, there are many examples of how to create meaning in the face of erasure, existential and physical death, estrangement, and mass violence, dislocation, and displacement. English and Black Studies scholar Christina Sharpe (Citation2016) contends with Blackness and being in the wake of structural, bodily, and psychological violence enacted on Black people.
From this standpoint, Sharpe (Citation2016) articulates wake-work as a process that can be instrumental in reckoning with death, the atrocities of enslavement, and ongoing subjugation. Wake-work is an embodied practice of tending to physical, emotional, and spiritual needs, but wake-work also invokes intellectual creativity to engage actions of critical resistance, healing, and memorialization. Sharpe (Citation2016) invokes the word “wake” to refer to the wakes left behind by transatlantic slave ships; the funeral wakes that characterize grief and mourning when access to rituals has been stifled and the physical bodies of loved ones have been denied to Black people; and the process of being awake, by illuminating Black existence in the aftermath of slavery and contesting the violence that continues to indict Black being.
Sharpe’s work is one of many examples of how—through which perspectives and tools—prevailing assumptions, paradigms, and structures may be illuminated and creatively resisted. When it comes to making sense of and transforming possibilities for subjectivity, such scholarship demonstrates how drawing upon and contextualizing marginalized thought opens up possibilities to contend with the crises of meaning and violence that results when existing models fail us. The work of Saidiya Harman (Citation2008) and Sylvia Wynter (Citation2001) similarly illustrate how transdisciplinary avenues may expose mechanisms of dehumanization and estrangement toward actualizing models better suited for resistance, creativity, and living.
Papers within this issue similarly engage in a diverse processes of working with marginalized epistemology, including emergent meanings of gender dysphoria in Pakistan (Zafar, Citation2024), the process of becoming a mother (Sidesinger, Citation2024), the act of writing to become alive (Sikri, Citation2024), queer resistance of normative theory (McLeughlin, Citation2024), understanding existence in the interstices of gendered and life-death binaries (Gherovici, Citation2024), and the emancipatory potential of Latin American intersectional feminisms (Besoain, Citation2024). However, we propose that there is also a centering of another type of marginalized ontology and epistemology—their undefined aspects that provide insights into frontiers of sense-making and possibilities for action.
A central process undertaken in these papers is the fleshing out of undefined onto-epistemologies, those that seem to exist in between identity, diagnostic, and social categories constructed by power. Morrill (Citation2023) has referred to this as an interstitial onto-epistemology to highlight the ways-of-knowing and being that are often bypassed and collapsed into hegemonic meaning systems but may be especially well-positioned to creatively rethink hegemonic power. Morrill (Citation2023) was inspired by critical-liberation psychologies and builds upon, for instance, Chicana feminist author Gloria Anzaldua’s (1987) “border culture.” Border culture similarly espouses the merits of understanding the lived realities of those who inhabit the intersections of multiple worlds– national, cultural, linguistic, and identity “borders.”
Taken together, the works in this special issue not only clarify and recenter marginalized epistemology, they go above and beyond to grapple with the interregnum by elucidating those interstitial onto-epistemologies. As Sikri (Citation2024) writes, “I am resurrecting the non-living (in this case, who I have termed the AnOther).” The AnOther moves toward theorizing fluidity and reconciling paradoxes of what cannot be easily known or pinned down to any one thing. Besoian (Citation2024) also invokes Anzaldua’s (1987) border thinking to situate the collective and cultivate “new acts of citizenship that expand the boundaries of the psychoanalytic field as a political entity.”
It is our hope that this collection of articles aids in reconfiguring what it is to be human. As Wynter (Citation2001) proposes, being human is praxis (see e.g., McKittrick, Citation2015). Drawing upon Fanon (Citation1967), Wynter understood social processes to bring about being. Divergent, interstitial, and transdisciplinary perspectives, therefore, enable the rethinking of personhood as sociogenic. Interstitial onto-epistemologies provide specific insights into where boundaries of human-ness are drawn and how these ontological negotiations are demarcated and defended across intrapersonal, social, cultural, and theoretical-discursive dimensions.
These articles trouble individualistic, material, time-bound, and other decontextualized assumptions about what it means to be human. For example, the scholars herein illustrate how we are ontologically shaped in relationship to others (Sidesinger, Citation2024), to time (Gherovici, Citation2024), to symbolic constructs of diagnosis, medico-legal processes (Zafar, Citation2024), to the birth-life-death continuum (Gherovici, Citation2024; McLeughlin, Citation2024), and to land and nature (Besoain, Citation2024; Sikri, Citation2024). Sikri (Citation2024) for instance, puts forward that writing is an ontological practice through which we come alive. Moreover, an ontological argument is put forward that humans are not static creatures across time, situations, and places. There are parts of us that are uncapturable by any singular meaning. These interstitial ontologies include liminal experiences within transition, such as between birth and processes of becoming – as in becoming a mother (Sidesinger, Citation2024), becoming alive (Sikri, Citation2024), and transitioning and transcending gendered categories (Gherovici, Citation2024; McLeughlin, Citation2024).
In reconfiguring what has been othered, these articles not only make sense of being and transforming, but the actions and possibilities that exist beyond foreclosure. Writing is also an action (Sikri, Citation2024), a political tool that challenges and expands subjectivities, similar to those identified by Besoain (Citation2024). Several papers contend with themes of grieving and healing, (re)connecting with land, birth and death, what it means to exist and how, and the retrieval of the past through our futures.
As we, the editors of this special issue, bridged these themes across communities, manuscripts, presentations, and conversations, we were called to reflect upon our own processes of theorizing being and reconfiguring imaginaries. Our collective reverie, as members of the Psychology and the Other conference team, frequently delved into questioning what it is to be human, what it is like, who is othered, and how we may inquire about these experiences. This grappling formed the basis to create an explicit forum that creatively explored dimensions of gender, sexuality, and embodiment of marginalized onto-epistemologies. Thus, this platform for “Gender and Sexuality” scholarship was conceived as the most recent addition to the conference tracks. The track was intended to open space for generative discourses that challenge conventional paradigms and steward creative and hardy constructs that do justice to human complexity and dynamism. As we reflexively peered into our own subject formations, we accessed a window into the possibilities to make another space available.
Acknowledgement
A special thank you to Wenqing “Shelly” Xue whose editorial assistance, careful attention to detail, and thoughtful additions elevated this project in significant ways. Also, without the support of the Center for Psychological Humanities and Ethics team and the Lynch School of Education and Human Development at Boston College, this special issue would not have been possible. Lastly, the Psychology and the Other community remains a deep wellspring from which this type of work is allowed to flourish. We are grateful for its vibrant activity and the space it creates for new possibilities to form.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Zenobia Morrill
Zenobia Morrill, Ph.D, is an Assistant Professor in the Clinical Psychology Department at William James College. Her research areas include critical and liberation psychologies, psychotherapy process, and qualitative inquiry. She also serves as the Senior Research Associate of the Center for Psychology Humanities and Ethics at Boston College, former fellow of the American Psychoanalytic Association (ApsaA), and on the executive board of the Society for Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology (STPP; division 24 of the American Psychological Association), and the Society for Qualitative Inquiry in Psychology (SQIP; division 5 subsection of the APA). She also is an editorial board member for the Psychology and the Other Book Series and the Journal of Humanistic Psychology.
Karley Guterres
Karley Guterres (she/her) M.A., MTS, is a first year doctoral student in the Counseling Psychology program at Boston College. After completing her Master’s in Mental Health Counseling and Theological Studies from Boston College, Karley completed a post-graduate fellowship with the Massachusetts Institute for Psychoanalysis, as well as a research fellowship with the Albert and Jessie Danielsen Institute. She enjoys academic, research and clinical endeavors, and is an affiliate of the Center for Psychological Humanities and Ethics at Boston College. [email protected]
Sofia Rietti
Sofia Rietti is the Project Administrator at Boston College’s Center for Psychological Humanities & Ethics, currently pursuing a Master’s in Mental Health Counseling. Sofia made a significant shift from the corporate technology sector, embarking on a career change into the field of psychology. Her research interests lie in women’s mental health and the intersection of mind-body practices. [email protected]
David M. Goodman
David Goodman, Ph.D, is a Clinical Psychologist, Faculty Member, and Director of the Center for Psychological Humanities and Ethics at Boston College. He has appointments in Boston College’s Philosophy, Formative Education, and Counseling, Developmental, and Educational Psychology departments. In addition, Goodman is also the Series Editor for the Psychology and the Other Book Series with Routledge and has published over a dozen books bringing psychology, philosophy, and theology into conversation with one another. His abiding interest is in expanding the capacity of clinicians to think more capaciously about human identity, suffering, and potential, with much of his scholarship and leadership focused on this work. [email protected]
References
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- Gherovici, P. (2024). Gender transition between life and death. Studies in Gender and Sexuality, 25(2), 84–92.
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- McKittrick, K. (Ed.). (2015). Sylvia Wynter: On being human as praxis. Duke University Press.
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- Sidesinger, T. (2024). Maternal excess: Opening to maternal knowing in the perinatal period. Studies in Gender and Sexuality, 25(2), 93–103.
- Sharpe, C. (2016). In the wake: On blackness and being. Duke University Press.
- Sikri, K. (2024). Writing to become alive. Studies in Gender and Sexuality, 25(2), 76–83.
- Wynter, S. (2001). Towards the sociogenic principle: Fanon, identity, the puzzle of conscious experience. In A. Gomez-Moriana & M. F. Duran-Cogan (Eds.), National Identities and Socio-Political Changes in Latin America, 30–66. Routledge.
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