ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the limitations of the foundations of traditional psychological approaches in theorising multiplicity and intersectionality, considering the ways in which mainstream psychological research has strengthened and maintained the oppressive status quo. I examine critical psychological work which, influenced by liberation movements in the West and the Global South, utilises post-structural, feminist, queer, post-colonial, and decolonial theory to understand the workings of power, ideology, and discourse. I contemplate the move to language in critical psychology and look to complicate this by attending to the messy, sensuous experience at the level of the body drawing on the affective turn. I critique critical psychology for its limited engagement with post-colonial and decolonial theory and argue that we must centre an understanding of intersectionality and coloniality. I thread this theoretical work together to provide a framework for attending to the embodied experiences of alterity and the experience of being-in-the-world for QTPOC.
