Just Methods

An Interdisciplinary Feminist Reader

Alison M. Jaggar

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317264743
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

The supplemented edition of this important reader includes a substantive new introduction by the author on the changing nature of feminist methodology. It takes into account the implications of a major new study included for this first time in this book on poverty and gender (in)equality, and it includes an article discussing the ways in which this study was conducted using the research methods put forward by the first edition. This article begins by explaining why a new and better poverty metric is needed and why developing such a metric requires an alternative methodological approach inspired by feminism. Feminist research is a growing tradition of inquiry that aims to produce knowledge not biased by inequitable assumptions about gender and related categories such as class, race, religion, sexuality, and nationality."Just Methods" is designed for upper-level undergraduate and graduate students in a range of disciplines. Rather than being concerned with particular techniques of inquiry, the interdisciplinary readings in this book address broad questions of research methodology. They are designed to help researchers think critically and constructively about the epistemological and ethical implications of various approaches to research selection and research design, evidence-gathering techniques, and publication of results.A key theme running through the readings is the complex interrelationship between social power and inequality on the one hand and the production of knowledge on the other. A second and related theme is the inseparability of research projects and methodologies from ethical and political values."

Part I

FEMINIST CRITIQUES OF METHODOLOGY

1

The Humanities

The humanities are a cluster of disciplines dedicated to studying the human condition and the meanings of human life. In an influential 1959 lecture and subsequent book, The Two Cultures, British scientist and novelist C. P. Snow drew a sharp contrast between the humanities and the sciences based on their respective methodologies. He contended that the humanities and the sciences comprised two distinct cultures in modern society and that the breakdown of communication between them was a major obstacle to solving the problems of the world. Snow’s work was widely read and discussed in Great Britain and North America, where the expression “two cultures” became popular shorthand for the supposed contrasts between two methodological approaches to understanding the world. Scientific methods were understood as designed to screen out the influence of emotion and value; they were seen as quantitative, precise, systematic, and reliant on observations that could be replicated by any properly situated observer. They produced knowledge regarded as objective in the sense of invariant across time and culture. By contrast, the knowledge produced in the humanities was seen as expressing the distinctive insight and vision of a unique human consciousness, and the methods of the humanities were recognized as purposely utilizing emotion and value. Although the knowledge produced in the humanities is often valued for its universal meaning, it is infused simultaneously with the subjectivity of specific individuals and with the values of specific times and places.

These widely accepted accounts of the contrasts between methodology in the humanities, on the one hand, and the sciences, on the other, are embodied in the administrative structure of contemporary knowledge-producing institutions and funding agencies. Today, humanities disciplines include philosophy, the classics, literature, literary criticism, comparative literature, art, art history, art criticism, art theory, music, and musicology. Cultural and area studies of regional interdisciplinary fields such as American Studies, East Asian Studies, and Middle Eastern Studies are also often categorized as humanities disciplines, although they include methods characteristic of the social sciences. Another borderline discipline is history, traditionally regarded as central to the humanities but moving increasingly in the direction of social science. It should also be noted that several disciplines categorized administratively as social sciences, such as cultural anthropology, sociology, political science, archaeology, and parts of economics, in fact often include qualitative descriptions and analyses of the types regarded as characteristic of the humanities.

Administrative distinctions among disciplines do not reflect natural divisions among kinds of knowledge; instead, they are historically and culturally contingent artifacts, which inevitably incorporate a degree of arbitrariness and stereotyping. One theme running through this book is that the supposed contrasts between methodologies in the sciences and the humanities are often overdrawn; in particular, that the methods used in the social sciences include more humanistic and evaluative elements than is commonly supposed. However, the present chapter includes methodological reflections from disciplines of philosophy, history, and literature, generally categorized as humanities. These disciplines are quite diverse but reflection on their methods reveals some parallels across the disciplines as they have evolved over the past four decades in response to feminist challenges.

FEMINIST METHODOLOGY AS CRITIQUE OF ANDROCENTRISM

Western feminist scholarship in the humanities at first took the form of a revolt against the exclusion of women and the culturally feminine from traditional Western ideals of what it means to be human. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, feminist historians challenged the presentation of Western history as a narrative of men’s achievements, an unending parade of kings, generals, and statesmen. Similarly, feminist literary critics pointed to overwhelmingly male literary representations of heroes, facing distinctively masculine predicaments and coming of age or proving themselves through distinctively masculine adventures; if women in literature had adventures, the critics noted, they were typically sexual adventures. Feminist philosophers pointed out that Western philosophy imagined the ideal human as male; the ideal knower was a man of reason; the ideal citizen was a male property-owning warrior. If philosophers discussed women as knowers, it was generally to derogate their reasoning capacities by portraying them as emotional and intuitive; if they noticed women’s work, which made possible the leisure and wealth of the ideal male citizen, they represented it as closer to nature than men’s and less than fully human.

Feminists responded to these exclusions by revising the humanities to include women and the culturally feminine. Feminist critics began to focus on portrayals of women and gender in literature and also to study the work of women writers. Feminist philosophers began to challenge philosophical construction of the feminine as inferior to the masculine and to recuperate the work of long-forgotten women philosophers. A few women had always been present in traditional histories, mostly warriors and queens (or warrior queens) such as Joan of Arc, Catherine the Great, Cleopatra, and Boadicea; however, feminist historians began to focus also on more ordinary women in those spheres of life culturally defined as feminine. They supplemented diplomatic and military histories with social and family histories.

Feminist work in the humanities was conceived originally as a project of inclusion and balance. Its values were those of equality and androgyny, and it insisted that women were as fully human as men, including being as capable of participating in humanities scholarship. However, the feminist project of expanding the humanities canon provoked queries about why male-dominant ideals of humanity had been presented and accepted for so long. Could it be because most artists and humanities scholars had been male, producing art and knowledge for overwhelmingly masculine audiences? Methodological questions began to be raised about the “male gaze” of artists and audiences and about what it might mean to “read as a woman.” Philosopher Janice Moulton argues that philosophy’s dominant method, the adversary paradigm, reflects values that are culturally masculine; she points out some limitations of this method, which facilitates silencing people with less social power and confidence, including many women. Feminist concerns about exclusion developed into concerns about bias and misrepresentation.

GYNOCENTRIC METHODOLOGY

Feminist scholars of the 1970s and early 1980s quickly discovered that expanding the canon required more than simply inserting materials dealing with or authored by women. In an often-quoted phrase, feminist scholarship is not just a matter of adding women and stirring. As Joan Kelly-Gadol points out, women’s lives cannot always be understood through categories developed to make sense of men’s lives; for instance, periods traditionally categorized as times of progress in Western history were often times when the status of women declined. Declaring that women are fully human means more than insisting that women are capable of performing men’s activities and living up to male standards; this simply pushes women into a masculine mold. Some argued that the male-biased ideals that have pervaded the Western humanities must be challenged and supplemented or even replaced by more gynocentric ideals.

Gynocentric feminist scholarship sought to transfer women from the margins to the center of the humanities. Its methodology called for rebuilding the humanities from women’s perspective. The new canon would be informed not only by feminist critiques of androcentrism but also by distinctively feminine perspectives, methods, and values. Thus, in the 1980s the ethics of care was promoted as a distinctively feminine way of doing ethics. A classic example of the gynocentric approach is artist Judy Chicago’s heroic-scale installation, The Dinner Party, which features an enormous triangular table set for thirty-nine women. The installation utilizes media that are culturally associated with the feminine, porcelain plates and intricate textiles, and each plate features an image based on the butterfly, symbolizing the central core of a vagina.

Gynocentric feminist methodology was also known as “difference feminism.” It recognized that gender differences are also inequalities, so that men and whatever is categorized as masculine receive disproportionate honor, authority, and power, and women and whatever is culturally defined as feminine are degraded and subordinated. Gynocentric feminist methodology inverted traditional gender valuations, seeking to replace the ideal man of the Western humanities tradition with an ideal woman. However, the emphasis on supposed differences between men and women and between the culturally masculine and the culturally feminine obscured many other differences among them.

DIFFERENCE AS METHODOLOGY IN THE HUMANITIES

Feminist methodological debates of the 1980s were dominated by concerns about what came to be called essentialism. In the context of feminist methodology, essentialism is the assumption that it is possible to identify a generic woman and a generic man, whose characteristics represent women’s and men’s real natures and whose situations represent the universal condition of each sex. Critics of essentialism pointed out that the supposedly universal woman at the center of gynocentric feminist theory has often been privileged along a number of dimensions; for instance, like most of the guests at The Dinner Party, she was often imagined as white, Western, and upper- or middle-class. The supposedly universal man was imagined as similarly privileged. When the situation of privileged women and men is taken as the model for understanding the situation of all women and men, those who are less privileged—who are the large majority—either become invisible or are “othered,” that is, treated as exceptions to the norm. Political strategies recommended on the basis of these models are likely to disregard the interests of those seen as “other.”

Feminist challenges to essentialist methodologies were continuous with the challenges to universal theorizing posed by other new disciplines such as queer theory and ethnic and postcolonial studies. Work in these disciplines revealed that supposedly universal representations of humanity typically incorporated historically contingent values and reflected specific political interests. They brought into question the Western humanities’ traditional aspiration to present a view of the human condition sub specie aeternitatis.

The category of difference began to be used in a new way to explore the production of social identities through the interplay of historical forces and individual agency. Differences were regarded as contested and identities as only temporarily stable. Lines between disciplines were blurred as scholars in one discipline borrowed methods from others. For instance, the so-called new historicist approach in literary criticism encouraged reading sociological, medical, legal, and political documents alongside literary texts.

CONTEMPORARY CHALLENGES FOR FEMINIST METHODOLOGY IN THE HUMANITIES

The humanities are often regarded as illuminating universal values, but for feminists they have political as well as ethical significance. The Western humanities tradition frequently glorifies “the” human individual, who is simultaneously unique and representative of all humanity. Over the past thirty years, feminist studies, together with other disciplines such as queer theory and ethnic and postcolonial studies, have not only revealed the specific, partial, and local values often used to characterize the universal human; they have also questioned when any individual can ever stand for all. Yet reflection on the value and meaning of human life still seems indispensable. One challenge for feminist methodology in the humanities is to consider how to construct salient categories between the individual and the universal, and how to recognize systematic forms of domination while finding humanity in diversity.

A second challenge may be to contest the cultural categorization of the humanities as feminine. Whether the division between “two cultures” of the sciences and the humanities was gender neutral when it was drawn a half century ago, today it is interpreted in deeply gendered terms. For instance, many regard the sciences as providing objectivity while the humanities offer only insight. Both the sciences and the humanities aspire to universality, but conclusions of the sciences are presented with mathematical precision in which the only aesthetic quality is a spare elegance; by contrast, the value of the humanities lies in their form as much as their content. The sciences are technical and professionalized, whereas the humanities are broad, interdisciplinary, and allow intervention by amateurs. The sciences are directed toward the pragmatic masculine goal of controlling the world, whereas the humanities are thought to beautify, enrich, and add ethical value to life. The sciences are thought to serve the public interest. The interests served by the humanities are those of the private, feminine sphere. Finally, the sciences have become increasingly wealthy in comparison with the humanities.

These factors as well as the influence of feminism may help to explain why women scholars are clustered disproportionately in the humanities rather than the sciences. One of the few humanities disciplines in which men still far outnumber women is philosophy, perhaps because many philosophers struggle to promote an image of their discipline that resembles the sciences in being technical, precise, and objective; it may not be accidental that philosophy is also the humanities discipline in which feminist work remains the most marginal. Feminist scholars are especially well placed to challenge the gendered methodological stereotypes that rationalize the devaluation of the humanities in the academic hierarchy and in the public mind.

JOAN KELLY-GADOL

The Social Relation of the Sexes: Methodological Implications of Women’s History

…

Women’s history has a dual goal: to restore women to history and to restore our history to women…. In seeking to add women to the fund of historical knowledge, women’s history has revitalized theory, for it has shaken the conceptual foundations of historical study. It has done this by making problematical three of the basic concerns of historical thought: (1) periodization, (2) the categories of social analysis, and (3) theories of social change.

… I should also like to show how the conception of these problems expresses a notion which is basic to feminist consciousness, namely, that the relation between the sexes is a social and not a natural one. This perception forms the core idea that upsets traditional thinking in all three cases.

PERIODIZATION

Once we look to history for an understanding of woman’s situation, we are, of course, already assuming that woman’s situation is a social matter. But history, as we first came to it, did not seem to confirm this awareness. Throughout historical time, women have been largely excluded from making war, wealth, laws, governments, art, and science. Men, functioning in their capacity as historians, considered exactly those activities constitutive of civilization…. Women figured chiefly as exceptions, those who were said to be as ruthless as, or wrote like, or had the brains of men. In redressing this neglect, … compensatory history is not enough…. Nor could it be another subgroup of historical thought, a history of women to place alongside the list of diplomatic history, economic history, and so forth, for all these developments impinged upon the history of women. Hence feminist scholarship in history … came to focus primarily on the issue of women’s status. I use “status” … throughout … to refer to … the roles and positions women hold in society by comparison with those of men.

In historical terms, this ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: The Project of Feminist Methodology
• PART I. FEMINIST CRITIQUES OF METHODOLOGY
• PART II. FEMINISTS RETHINKING METHODOLOGY
• Index
• Credits