ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the imperative in many feminist projects to take women as the object or subject of knowledge without in some way putting the process of knowledge production itself under scrutiny. While there has always been feminist research and criticism in psychology, the emergence of feminist psychology as an acknowledged and identifiable area of research is a fairly recent event. The emergence of feminist psychology from the domain of the psychology of women is an important factor in assessing the political agenda and future possibilities of contemporary feminist research in psychology. Like feminist psychology, feminist anthropology has been seduced by the security of a well-intentioned feminist politics into believing that it can know the anthropological other outside such discursive violences; that it can step outside the structures of power that inflict these violences. Jane Ussher's investigation of the psychology of the female body provides an example of the effects of an orthodox and narrow feminist psychology.
