Gail Lewis

Gail Lewis

Visiting Senior Fellow

Department of Gender Studies

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Languages
English
Key Expertise
black feminism, psychoanalysis, subjectivity, intersectionality

About me

Gail Lewis was until recently  Reader in Psychosocial Studies in the Department of Psychosocial Studies at Birkbeck College, and is a psychotherapist having trained at the Tavistock Clinic. She has worked at the Open University and Lancaster University.

Her political subjectivity was formed in the intensities of black feminist and anti-racist struggle and through a socialist, anti-imperialist lens. Among her political and scholarly concerns are the formation of and resistance to gendered-racilised social formations; the relationship between the organisational psychodynamics and the lived experience of racialised and gendered inequality in organisations; and how to bring black feminist, psychoanalytic and sociological understandings of subjectivity into creative dialogue in the interests of generating ‘practice against the grain’.

She was a long standing member of Brixton Black Women's Group and a co-founder of the Organisation for Women of African and Asian Descent (OWAAD). She has been a member of the editorial collectives of the European Journal of Women's Studies and Feminist Review. She has published on feminism; intersectionality; the welfare state, social policy and racialisation; citizenship and personal life; and racialised-gendered experience and black feminism in journals such as Race and Class, Signs, Cultural Studies, Ethnic and Racial Studies; Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society; Identities; European Journal of Women’s Studies, Feminist Theory and Feminist Review. 

She was Visiting Scholar at Clarke University, Massachusetts, USA and holds an Honorary Doctorate from the Tavistock Clinic/Essex University. Her recent collaborations involve working with queer, black, of colour artists and curators working in London.

Expertise Details

black feminism; psychoanalysis; subjectivity; intersectionality