Psychologizing and feminization: from the English novel of domestic fiction to the psychology of women's magazines

Abstract

This project aims to analyze the problematic links between the historical processes of feminization and psychologizing, from the period conventionally known as “modernity”. According to Nancy Armstrong (1987/1991) about the rise of domestic fiction novel in England, will discuss the extent to which the imperatives of bourgeois femininity –collected and reorganized in these media-narrative– allowed the establishment of a psychological subjectivity innovatively. Before psychology came to be institutionalized, many of its future disciplinary domains were already in the domestic fiction. Our hypothesis, therefore, is to suggest that bourgeois codes –that tried to regulate an idea of the feminity focused on domesticity– promoted, at the same time, certain conditions for the emergence of psychology. After making a genealogy of such novels and reviewing some of the most important elements in the hybridization between psychologizing and feminization, we see the forms of regulation procured by these historical plots today. Specifically, we address this alliance through disclosure magazines aimed at women with the title “psychology”