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The Global Is Local

‘‘The Political is Personal’’ (Else-Quest & Grabe, 2012) opens the door to transnational feminist research. ElseQuest and Grabe (2012) invite Psychology of Women Quarterly (PWQ) readers to make use of country-level indices to examine connections between sociopolitical gender disparities and women’s distress and deprivation. I share these authors’ desire to put the political onto the research agenda of U.S. feminist psychologists, as well as their desire to expand the purview of U.S. feminist psychology beyond the borders of North America. I also share their desire to add to the methodological toolbox of feminist psychology. In what follows, I open the door to international work even wider by proposing additional theoretical and methodological tools. I invite feminist psychologists to incorporate the study of culture, ideology, and context into international research. Peering beneath statistical indices and ‘‘thickening’’ thin numerical data can refine our theories and deepen our knowledge. Furthermore, knowledge about culture—the shared ways in which people make sense of themselves and their social worlds—is crucial both for understanding gendered subjectivities and gender relations and for designing interventions that are culturally acceptable and effective. As Else-Quest and Grabe (2012) note, U.S. psychology has largely been a parochial affair, often basing its ideas about humankind on convenience samples of U.S. college sophomores. Cultural psychologists have bemoaned the folly of extrapolating from such unrepresentative samples (e.g., Arnett, 2008; Henrich, Heine, & Norenzayan, 2010). Yet, the cast of mind of many U.S. psychologists—their epistemological commitments and prereflective assumptions—makes such extrapolations seem unproblematic (Magnusson & Marecek, 2012). Despite some 35 years of critique, the college sophomore habit has maintained its grip on much of U.S. psychology. This suggests that a crucial item for the agenda of international research is disciplinary reflexivity. Disciplinary reflexivity includes the critical examination of psychology’s knowledge-producing structures, professional practices, and self-representations. How is U.S. psychology (like the psychologies of other countries) molded by the culture in which it is embedded? In what ways does the field of psychology in the United States serve to legitimize structures of domination, both within U.S. society and across countries and especially across the North–South global divide? Such reflections can help us to recognize our ethnocentrism and cultural imperialism.