Nicola Gavey

Phone: +64 9 373 7599 ext 86877
Email: n.gavey@auckland.ac.nz
Room: HSB 538
Office hours: Please email for appointment
Home page: Gender and Critical Psychology Group

Nicola originally trained as a clinical psychologist and worked for a few years in the community before taking up an academic position. She has a strong interest in the possibilities for teaching, research and scholarship to inform social debate and change, and maintains ongoing conversations with those working in the community on education, support, advocacy and activism around sexual violence and gender issues more broadly. Nicola was a foundational member of the Gender and Critical Psychology Group (and earlier the Psychology Discourse Research Unit) within the Department of Psychology. She has close links with other scholars in this area, within New Zealand and internationally. In 2005 she was a Fulbright New Century Scholar and visiting scholar at the Victims of Violence Program, affiliated with Harvard Medical School. In 2008 she was a visiting scholar at the Graduate Centre, CUNY, New York City, where she also worked with the New View Campaign to raise critical awareness about female genital cosmetic surgery. Her research has been supported by Health Research Council of New Zealand, Marsden, and other externally-funded grants. Nicola and Ginny Braun, also in the Department of Psychology, are Editors of Feminism & Psychology (Sage, London).

Nicola has wide-ranging interests within a critical psychology of gender. The central focus of her research has been on understanding and challenging the ways in which normative cultural values and practices support rape and sexual coercion. One strand of her current research involves a critical analysis of contemporary understandings of the impact of rape, and theorizing the implications of a trauma lens for a wider logic of sexual violence prevention. Also related to sexual violence prevention and a broader ethic of equality in sexuality, she is interested in examining gendered norms of identity, embodiment, and practice. This includes an interest in physical feminism and the possibilities for transgressive femininities in relation to sport, for instance; as well as the gendered norms and values reiterated within so-called ‘sexualised’ ideals and further promoted within industrialized sex (pornography, prostitution, and so on) and ironically normalized and contained within the rhetoric of neoliberalism and postfeminism. Other key interests include violence against women, biomedicalization, and activism.

• Gavey, N. & Schmidt, J. (in press, 2010). ‘Trauma of rape’ discourse: A double-edged template for everyday understandings of the impact of rape? Violence Against Women.
• Tolmie, J., Elizabeth, V., & Gavey, N. (2010). Is 50:50 shared care a desirable norm following family separation? Raising questions about current family law practices in New Zealand. New Zealand Universities Law Review, 24(1), 136-166.
• Liebert, R., & Gavey, N. (2009). "There are always two sides to these things”:  Managing the dilemma of serious adverse effects from SSRI use. Social Science & Medicine, 68, 1882-1891.
• Gavey, N. (2009). Fighting rape. In Renee J. Heberle and Victoria Grace (Eds). Theorizing sexual violence (pp. 96-124). New York: Routledge.
• Gavey, N. (2005). Just sex? The cultural scaffolding of rape. London and New York: Routledge.

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