Sexual gaslighting is key tounderstanding how gender sets the foundationsfor and consequences of gaslighting: becausewomen’s sexuality is already a site of vulner-ability—subject to gender-based stereotyp-ing—it easily becomes a feature of gaslighting.In the examples provided here, being a cultural“outsider” amplified the harm of these tactics.Gaslighting works by mobilizing stereotypesof female sexuality into assaults on women’srealities, creating a surreal environment thatlimits their autonomy and mobility

). Carla’s husbandtried to convince her she was sleeping withmen in the neighborhood, pointing to men onthe street, asking her to identify which oneswere waiting for her. He called her a “prosti-tute” for having an IUD (intrauterine device,a form of birth control) and forced her to haveit removed. His sexual gaslighting strategiesinhibited Carla’s mobility

In summary, gender stereotypes, intersect-ing inequalities, and institutional discrimina-tion create unequal conditions in intimaterelationships. The association of femininitywith irrationality, alongside intersecting ine-qualities, is built into interpersonal relation-ships and social institutions, generatinggender-based vulnerabilities to abuse

Institutions such as police, housing pro-grams, universities, and workplaces alsoaffect how inequalities translate into intimate

Answering this question requires payingattention to what gaslighting does: it system-atically constructs victims as “crazy” anddestabilizes their realities.

I definegaslighting as a set of attempts to create a“surreal” (Ferraro 2006) social environmentby making the other in an intimate relation-ship seem or feel “crazy.” I argue that gas-lighting tactics become consequential whenabusers mobilize macro-level inequalitiesrelated to gender, sexuality, race, nationality,and class against an intimate other. By conse-quential, I mean that such tactics damagevictims’ sense of reality, autonomy, mobility,identity, and social supports.

We arrive ... at the following principle: Thedetermining cause of a social fact should besought among the social facts preceding itand not among the states of the individualconsciousness . . . The function of a socialfact ought always to be sought in its relationto some social end

which Marx first devel-oped his concept of "alienation," oralienated labor

The Protestant Ethic and the Spiritof Capitalism (Weber, 1958)-is a classicof psychological sociology which hasstimulated a variety of modern work onthe role of individual values and motives(religiously derived or otherwise) in eco-nomic behavior and social change

This face derives its name fromits emphasis on understanding how indi-viduals interact with each other usingsymbols. Blumer, following Mead, iden-tifies the essential elements of symbolicinteractionism:(T)hat human society is made up of individu-als who have selves (that is, make indica-tions to themselves); that individual action isa construction and not a release, being builtup by the individual through noting and in-terpreting features of the situations in whichhe acts; that group or collective action con-sists of the aligning of individual actions,brought about by individuals' interpreting ortaking into account each other's actions.(Blumer, 1962:184; emphasis added)7

We are not in social psychology building upthe behavior of the social group in terms ofthe behavior of the separate individualscomposing it, rather we are starting out witha given social whole of complex group ac-tivity, into which we analyze (as elements)the behavior of each of the separate indi-viduals composing it. (Mead, 1934:7)

S-[O]-R: stimuli (S) arevaried and behavioral responses (R) areobserved in order to make inferencesabout the psychological nature and pro-cesses of the "organism" (0) or person.

This paper seeks briefly to establish thatthere are indeed three identifiable and dis-tinctive faces of social psychology (whichconstitute a reasonably exhaustive andmutually exclusive set), to show that eachhas its distinctive substantive andmethodological foci, to critically discussthe strengths and weaknesses of each, andto show that one domain's weaknesses arecomplemented by the strengths of an-other

urrent "crisis" of social psychology largely reflects the division of the field into threeincreasingly isolated domains or faces: (1) psychological social psychology, (2) symbolicinteractionism, and (3) psychological sociology (or social structure and personality).

What we need, instead, is a micro-mechanism that can explain the repetitive actions that make up socialstructure such that interactions and their accompanying cognitions restupon noncognitive bases.Such a mechanism, I will attempt to show, is provided by interactionritual chains. Such chains of micro-encounters generate the central featuresof social organization-authority, property, and group membership-bycreating and recreating "mythical" cultural symbols and emotional ener-gies. The result of microtranslating all social structure into such interactionritual chains should be to make microsociology an important tool in ex-plaining both the inertia and the dynamics of macro structure.

The structure is in the repeated actions of communi-cating, not in the contents of what is said; those contents are frequentlyambiguous or erroneous, not always mutually understood or fully expli-cated. People do not always (or even usually) have a very accurate ideaof the political state to which they defer, the organization in which theywork, or the family or circle of friends with whom they associate

rom a microviewpoint, what is the "social structure"? In microtranslation,it refers to people's repeated behavior in particular places, using particularphysical objects, and communicating by using many of the same symbolicexpressions repeatedly with certain other peopl

t. The ultimate basis of property and of private au-thority is political authority, backed up by the power of the military. Po-litical and military authority, however, are based upon a self-reinforcingprocess of producing loyalty or disloyalty

? Any organization involves authority, the power of certain peopleto give and enforce orders which others carry out. The basis of authorityis a chain of communications

anizations, that is, to repeated exchanges at conditions negotiated on aonce-only basis. These are economically more efficient than continually re-negotiating relations among workers, or among suppliers and manufac-turers, when there are tasks of any degree of complexity to be carried out.This argument is tantamount to claiming that the structural consequenceof the cognitive features documented by microsociologists is to replaceopen-market exchanges with taken-for-granted routines in organizationalnetworks