| Long abstract |
As a critical psychologist in Britain in the mid-1990s, I experi-enced many of the effects that queer theory, critical feminism and post-structuralism had upon social science research and discourse theory at this time. Wide-ranging debates about ma-terialism, essentialism, and biological reductionism revolved around the purloining of the human subject by mainstream social, psychological and biomedical science. The critical pro-ject’s devotion to decentering the same subject, destabilizing the taken-for-granted, and deconstructing the practices warranted by the mainstream contributed to the writing of thousands of research articles and conference presentations, not to mention hundreds of books and as many careers launched in the mo-bilization of the critical agenda. My own doctoral work on the examination of “compulsory heterosexuality” at the site of the “couple” as constituted by and within the psy-discourses was typical for the time. People like me were usually referred to dis-paragingly within the mainstream as “social constructionists” or worse “constructivists.” We moved through our doctoral years occasionally caught up with dilemmas over relativism which would spur a whole other rake of research articles and papers dedicated to the declaring of the reality of death, the holocaust, and furniture. Some of us were labelled “critical realists” when we got too concerned about the political, “unreconstructed feminists” when we worried overly about “woman,” and unreflexive allegiance to any of the great “isms” (Marx, Freud, “Fem-in”) necessitated some serious time spent in the careful study and contemplation of Donna Haraway’s (2013) groundbreaking work Simians, Cyborgs, and Women where we would be firmly reminded that all knowledge is situated, all identities fractured, and that the “local” tops the “global” every time when it comes to theorizing. In general, at this time, “psychoanalysis” was at best a foolish word, at worst, a bad word.
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