Abstract: This article examines the complex links between gender, class and the `psy' disciplines. It argues that there is a connection between those understandings of `class' embedded within contemporary `psy' discourse and the concepts utilized to render class intelligible when the working classes became a target and object of psychiatry in the l9th century. By adopting a form of historical-discursive inquiry informed by poststructuralist ideas (Foucault, 1971, 1972) the role that the `psy' disciplines play(ed) in problematizing aspects of social existence and rendering them in relation to sets of normalizing judgements is examined. The article highlights that from psychiatry's inception in the 19th century it has been bound up with governing and regulating a specific conception of personhood, arguing that `class' is one such mechanism through which this conception of sociality is governed, managed and administer-ed.

Abstract: Amenorhea, the absence of menstruation, is now considered to be a major diagnostic symptom of anorexia nervosa and has been interpreted as `psychobiological' retreat from adult womanhood. However, such interpretations may be overly simplistic. This article draws on poststructuralist theory to examine the ways in which menstruation and amenorrhea are discursively constituted in relation to constructions of femininity. It is based on interviews with 23 women (21 who had been diagnosed as anorexic and two who were self-diagnosed). Discourse analysis of the interviews indicated that `menstruation' was negatively construed as a signifier of `femininity'. However, it signified a very specific `femininity' that was alien, out of control, highly emotional, sexual, vulnerable and dangerous. It is argued that amenorrhea in anorexia may signify a rejection of this particular negative construction of femininity' rather than of adulthood or femininity per se.

Abstract: Current debates about the utility of the concept of social class for social analysis have been helpful in illuminating the shortcomings of traditional theories and traditional methods of assessment of social class. Yet, social class continues to have an important impact on life chances and worldviews. This article uses data from an interview study of 248 young Londoners (young women and men; black, white and of `mixed-parentage') to examine the place of social class in young people's lives. The young people's accounts indicated that they did not necessarily use occupational groupings in defining social class and that the majority considered themselves to be middle class. Nonetheless, social class was important to the ways in which they thought about themselves. They differentiated themselves from others on the basis of differences in lifestyle, housing, money, speech, dress and behaviour. Some disliked and/or feared people they considered to be from other social classes.

Abstract: To understand all the complexities and ramifications of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation's (FMSF) construct of False Memory Syndrome (FMS), we place FMS in the context of larger contemporary western cultural trends, including: anti-feminism; the deconstruction of mental illness; anti-psychiatry; and the postmodern deconstruction of truth and subjectivity. In these contexts, FMSF emerges as an accomplice of the mental health establishment and a leading force in the heteropatriarchal backlash against women.

Abstract: This article asks whether it is presumptuous for afeminist writer to create characters quite different from herself. Using the particular example of heterosexual novelists' representations of lesbians, it argues that such presumption-although fraught with difficulties-is essential to feminist truth-telling.

Abstract: Women's involvement within both performance and social dance has long been trivialized by cultural analysts and social historians alike. Dance has tended then, to be dismissed as `meaningless'. How...

Abstract: This article asks if the 1970s women's liberation slogan `the personal is political' has privileged a `psychologized', that is an individualistic, version of feminism which, being implicitly grounded in middle-class experiences and concerns, has made invisible those of working-class women. It looks at the problems encountered in trying to use psychology to explain reciprocal-as opposed to individual-concerns and psychoanalysis to explore working-class girls' entry into gendered identity. In doing so, the discussion draws upon Jessica Benjamin's work on cross-gender identification to explore the difficulties faced by daughters who learned from an early age of the relative powerlessness of their fathers. It argues that such experiences can be seen not as instances of individual pathologies, but as examples of how early consciousness of class positioning might provide the roots of women's adult political activity which is founded not on a gendered but on a classed identity.