The Social Psychologising of Emotion and Gender A Critical Perspective

Locke, Abigail (2011) The Social Psychologising of Emotion and Gender A Critical Perspective. In: Sexed Sentiments. Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Gender and Emotion. Rodopi, Amsterdam, The Netherlands. ISBN 9789042032415

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Abstract

This chapter offers an overview of psychology’s approach to sex
differences in emotion, beginning from a discussion of how
psychology has approached emotion. The chapter takes a
critical, social-constructionist stance on emotion and critiques
psychology’s essentialist stance. Moreover, it introduces a new
direction in psychology in which emotion and gender are studied
from a discursive perspective, in which emotion words and
concepts can function interactionally. The article considers two
examples. In the first, a woman is positioned as emotional and
by implication, irrational. The second example investigates how
the popular concept of ‘emotion work’, one that typically
constructs women as down-trodden, can in fact be used as a resource for young women to manage their identities in
interactions. Indeed it is constructed as something that makes
them powerful in relation to the vulnerable males they discuss.

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