Reclaiming the Person: Intersectionality and Dynamic Social Categories Through a Psychological Lens

Psychology’s conventionally treatment of individuals’ engagement with and resistance to the societal processes in which they
are embedded has come under scrutiny amid the rise of postmodernist and critical feminist perspectives (among many others)
in the social sciences. A sample of social psychology’s responses to these critiques is presented in the recently published
book, Social Categories in Everyday Experience edited by Shaun Wiley et al. (2011). In this essay, the challenges of seriously addressing the critiques of psychology’s conventional treatment of social categories,
which implicate fundamental assumptions of the discipline, are discussed. Further, it is argued that in order to effectively
construct psychological accounts of political activism and social change amid theories that are increasingly cognizant of
the complexities and contingencies of social embeddiness, the person must be reclaimed and revisioned. Notions of agency that
complement an intersectional and systemic vision of the social world are discussed.