Towards a Feminist Standpoint in Refugee Mental Health Research
Article Sidebar
Main Article Content
Abstract
Historically, psychiatry has been criticized by feminist activists and scholars as a patriarchal and misogynist discipline. I argue that feminist approaches can contribute to refugee mental health research by questioning some of its epistemological assumptions, by centering the experiences of women and other marginalized groups, and by acknowledging the social, cultural and political dimensions in the production of scientific knowledge about refugees, potentially bridging the gap between academia and activism in ways that are relevant to the subjects involved.
This paper includes 1) an overview of some contributions that feminist scholarship has made to the fields of mental health and refugee research, 2) a critical reflection on the intersections between psychiatry and migration studies, highlighting how gender has been read as a binary category used primarily to compare differences between sexes, and 3) a discussion of possible future directions for broadening the scope of refugee mental health research.
Article Details
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Journal of TCI is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence, unless otherwise stated. Please read our Policies page for more information.
References
Angel, K. (2012). Contested psychiatric ontology and feminist critique: ‘Female sexual dysfunction’ and the diagnostic and statistical manual. History of the Human Sciences, 25(4), 3-24.
Bäärnhielm, S., Laban, K., Schouler-Ocak, M., Rousseau, C., & Kirmayer, L. J. (2017). Mental health for refugees, asylum seekers and displaced persons: A call for a humanitarian agenda. Transcultural Psychiatry, 54(5-6), 565-574. doi:10.1177/1363461517747095
Barsky, R. F. (2017). Arguing and justifying: assessing the Convention refugees' choice of moment, motive and host country: Routledge.
Beiser, M., & Hou, F. (2017). Predictors of positive mental health among refugees: Results from Canada’s General Social Survey. Transcultural Psychiatry, 54(5-6), 675-695. doi:10.1177/1363461517724985
Bhuyan, R., Osborne, B., Zahraei, S., & Tarshis, S. (2014). Unprotected, unrecognized: Canadian immigration policy and violence against women, 2008-2013.
Butler, J. (2006). Gender trouble : Feminism and the subversion of identity. Routledge.
Butler, J. (2021). “Women” as the subject of feminism. In Power and inequality (pp.47-50). Routledge.
Chamberlin, J. (1975). Women’s oppression and psychiatric oppression. Women look at psychiatry. Press Gang.
Cole, E., Rothblum, E. D., & Espin, O. M. (2013). Refugee women and their mental health: Shattered societies, shattered lives. Routledge.
Crawley, H. (2001). Refugees and gender: Law and process: Jordan Publishing Limited.
de Billy Garnier, S., & Lavallée, M. (2018). Défis et stratégies des Colombiennes en exil à Québec. Migration et intégration, 15-54.
Diamond, S. (2014). Feminist resistance against the medicalization of humanity: Integrating knowledge about psychiatric oppression and marginalized people. Psychiatry disrupted: Theorizing resistance and crafting the (r) evolution, 194-207.
Dodd, J. (2015). “The name game”: Feminist protests of the DSM and diagnostic labels in the 1980s. History of psychology, 18(3), 312.
Fassin, D. (2013). The Precarious Truth of Asylum. Public Culture, 25(1 (69)), 39-63. doi:10.1215/08992363-1890459
Foster, V. (2007). ‘Ways of knowing and showing’: Imagination and representation in feminist participatory social research. Journal of Social Work Practice, 21(3), 361-376.
Foucault, M. (2003). Madness and civilization: Routledge.
Gergen, K. J. (2005). Narrative, moral identity, and historical consciousness. Narration, identity, and historical consciousness, 3, 99.
Haraway, D. (1988). Situated knowledges: The science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective. Feminist studies, 14(3), 575-599.
Hekman, S. (1997). Truth and method: Feminist standpoint theory revisited. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 22(2), 341-365.
Herman, J. L. (2015). Trauma and recovery: The aftermath of violence--from domestic abuse to political terror: Hachette UK.
Hustvedt, S. (2017). The Delusions of Certainty: Hachette UK.
Jansen, G. G., & Rae Davis, D. (1998). Honoring voice and visibility: Sensitive-topic research and feminist interpretive inquiry. Affilia, 13(3), 289-311.
Johnson, T. (2011). On silence, sexuality and skeletons: Reconceptualizing narrative in asylum hearings. Social & Legal Studies, 20(1), 57-78.
Kimball, M. (1975). Women, sex role stereotypes and mental health: Catch 22. Women Look at Psychiatry, ed. Dorothy E. Smith and Saraj. David (Vancouver: Press Gang Publishers, 1975), 121-142.
Kleinman, A. (1988). Rethinking psychiatry: from cultural category to personal experience. Free Press; Collier Macmillan.
LeFrançois, B. A., Menzies, R., & Reaume, G. (2013). Mad matters: A critical reader in Canadian mad studies: Canadian Scholars’ Press.
Mahler, S. J., & Pessar, P. R. (2006). Gender matters: Ethnographers bring gender from the periphery toward the core of migration studies. International migration review, 40(1), 27-63.
Monk, J. (2015). Gender and feminist studies in geography.
Morrow, M. (2017). “Women and madness” revisited: The promise of intersectional and mad studies frameworks. Critical inquiries for social justice in mental health, 33-59.
Morrow, M., & Malcoe, L. H. (2017). Critical inquiries for social justice in mental health: University of Toronto Press.
MSunnia. (2020). What potential do queer perspectives offer to re-thinking migration studies? Kohl: a Journal for Body and Gender Research, 6(3).
Nawyn, S. J. (2010). Gender and migration: Integrating feminist theory into migration studies. Sociology Compass, 4(9), 749-765. doi:https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1751- 9020.2010.00318.x
Palmary, I. (2018). Psychology, migration studies, and their disconnections : A review of existing research and future possibilities. South African Journal of Psychology, 48(1), 3-14. doi:10.1177/0081246317751276
Pandolfo, S. (2018). Knot of the soul: Madness, psychoanalysis, Islam. The University of Chicago Press.
Pérez Troncoso, E., & Piper Shafir, I. (2015). Género y memoria: articulaciones críticas y feministas. Athenea digital: revista de pensamiento e investigación social, 15(1), 0065- 0090.
Shultz, J. M., Garfin, D. R., Espinel, Z., Araya, R., Oquendo, M. A., Wainberg, M. L., . . . Espinola, M. (2014). Internally displaced “victims of armed conflict” in Colombia: the trajectory and trauma signature of forced migration. Current psychiatry reports, 16(10), 475.
Simplican, S. C. (2017). Feminist disability studies as methodology: Life-writing and the abled/disabled binary. Feminist Review, 115(1), 46-60.
Smith, D. E. (1976). Women and psychiatry: Women's Research Centre.
Somers, M. R. (1994). The narrative constitution of identity: A relational and network approach. Theory and society, 23(5), 605-649.
Srigley, K., Zembrzycki, S., & Lacovetta, F. (2018). Beyond women's words: Feminisms and the practices of oral history in the twenty-first century: Routledge.
Timmerman, C., Martiniello, M., Rea, A., & Wets, J. (2015). New dynamics in female migration and integration: Routledge.
Tollefsen Altamirano, A. (1997). Feminist theories and migration research-making sense in the data feast? Refuge: Canada's Journal on Refugees, 4-8.
Tomes, N. (1994). Feminist histories of psychiatry. Discovering the history of psychiatry, 348- 383.
Wang, E. W. (2019). The collected schizophrenias: Essays: Graywolf Press.
Wang, Q., Coemans, S., Siegesmund, R., & Hannes, K. (2017). Arts-based methods in socially engaged research practice: A classification framework. Art/Research International: A Transdisciplinary Journal, 2(2), 5-39.
Wimmer, A., & Glick Schiller, N. (2002). Methodological nationalism and beyond: nation–state building, migration and the social sciences. Global networks, 2(4), 301-334.
Yakushko, O., & Espín, O. M. (2010). The experience of immigrant and refugee women: Psychological issues. In H. Landrine & N. F. Russo (Eds.), Handbook of diversity in feminist psychology (pp.535-558).
Yakushko, O., & Morgan-Consoli, M. L. (2014). Gendered stories of adaptation and resistance: A feminist multiple case study of immigrant women. International Journal for the Advancement of Counselling, 36(1), 70-83. doi:10.1007/s10447-013-9191-y