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Feeling Gender: A Generational and Psychosocial Approach is a tour de force: a timely, intelligent, nuanced and well-researched book. It offers a wealth of novel and important insights into not just gender, but all those aspects of human experience that live in the liminal space between psyche and society. Most significantly, by using feelings as the lens through which to examine social transformation, Nielsen offers a paradigm-shifting epistemological framework; a way of viewing the world that captures the interdependent relationship between subjectivity and culture.
Based on a longitudinal project involving three generations of white, heterosexual Norwegian women and men as they move from childhood and youth to adult life, Nielsen aims to “trace the experiences during the life course that made women and men in different historical generations feel differently about gender and how this became a drive toward new life projects and changed gender relations” (p. 13). The book explores how feelings of gender shift between and across generations – both in response to and as a driving force for larger social transformation.
By focusing on feelings, Nielsen provides a distinctly psychosocial lens for understanding the social transformation of gender. Feelings, Nielsen explains, “represent a certain kind of personal and embodied meaning” and “are also thoroughly social” (p. 1). Feelings, within this framework, are socially embedded and relationally constructed, but also distinctly personal and individual. Nielsen therefore avoids the binary distinctions between inner and outer worlds, mind and body, subjectivity and culture that so often lead to reductionist discussions of gender as either socially constructed or biologically determined. Standing at the borderland between self and culture – the internal and external worlds – our feelings are shaped by social norms, but can also operate as a force for social transformation. Feelings offer a crucial framework for understanding