Feminist Methodology

Challenges and Choices

Caroline Ramazanoglu, Janet Holland

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781446235119
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Feminism & Feminist Theory
• Index: Social Sciences

`An accessible, clearly explained review of difficult concepts within this arena as well as relevant debates. Its strengths are in outlining possible considerations that need to be taken into account when making methodological choices. It also clearly explains how these choices impact knowledge production. This book would undoubtedly be of considerable use to anyone seeking to understand and get to grips with feminist methodological issues? - Feminism and Psychology

Who would be a feminist now? Contemporary ?political realism? suggests that the essentials of the battle have already been won, and the current generation of women entering University is used to seeing feminism presented as ?old fashioned?, ?extreme? and ?unrealistic?.

Challenging such assumptions, this important new book argues for the value of empirical investigations of gendered life, and brings together the theoretical, political and practical aspects of feminist methodology.

Feminist Methodology

- demonstrates how feminist approaches to methodology engage with debates in western philosophy to raise critical questions about knowledge production

- shows that feminist methodology has a distinctive place in social research

- guides the reader through the terrain of feminist methodology and clarifies how feminists can claim knowledge of gendered social existence

- connects abstract issues of theory with issues in fieldwork practice.

This timely and accessible book will be an essential resource for students in women?s studies, gender studies, sociology, cultural studies, social anthropology and feminist psychology.

1

Introduction

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Introduction

Three challenges to feminist methodology

What is gender?

What is feminism in the twenty-first century?

Are feminists women?

What is methodology in social research?

Connecting ideas, experience and reality

Method is not methodology

The characteristics of methodology in social research

An ontology is a way of specifying the nature of something

An epistemology is a way of specifying how researchers know what they know

Validity is a way of establishing what counts as true

Power makes a difference to who is able to know what

Knowledge is not separable from experience

Ethics expresses moral judgements, for example on rights, obligations, justice

Accountability allocates responsibility for what knowledge is produced, and how

Is feminist methodology distinctively feminist?

The structure of the book

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Introduction

There are many possible approaches to feminist methodology. We start from the problems that arise when feminist social researchers set out to tell ‘better stories’ of gendered social realities than others. We examine the methodological challenges and choices that they face on the way. We do not prescribe what feminist methods must be, or specify how feminist researchers should proceed. Rather, we want to consider how feminist approaches to social research have been shaped by some of the concerns of western philosophy and epistemology, how feminist responses to these concerns have struck out in differing directions through a variety of methodological problems and solutions, and whether, despite this diversity, there is any sense in which feminist methodology is feminist, and the struggles have been worthwhile.

Methodology is not generally taken to be an exciting area, and those involved in researching gender may well wonder why they should take an interest in methodological problems rather than just getting on with the job. But any researcher who sets out to understand gender relations and grasp their impact on people’s lives has to consider: how (or whether) social reality can be understood; why conceptions of sexuality and gender have some meanings rather than others; how people make sense of their experiences; and how power inhabits knowledge production. In seeking knowledge of gender through social research, feminists make decisions about how to produce and justify their knowledge, whether they do so intentionally or not, and we argue that these decisions matter. They affect what can be known and what gets to count as authoritative knowledge. Decisions about methodology are particularly powerful in the politics and practices of knowledge production.

Feminists (like all other social researchers) have to establish and defend their claims to knowledge of social life, because there is no certain or absolute knowledge against which the truth of everything can be measured. If feminist knowledge is to be believed, it has to be made believable, but there is more than one way of making and justifying knowledge claims (and many ways of failing). There are taken-for-granted distinctions in western thought, for example, between the authority of knowledge produced through scientific procedures, and that of knowledge produced in literature, horoscopes or dreams. It is easy to class feminist knowledge as unscientific, biased and lacking in authority. But the problems raised by feminist methodology are not peculiar to feminism: they are also problems for social research more generally.

We do not attempt to review the full range of feminist adventures in methodology or all areas of feminist expertise, since these are now extensive. Instead, three themes run through the book. The first thread of our argument is that debates on feminist methodology are framed by disagreements in western philosophy over how ideas about the social world can possibly be related to people’s experiences of social life, and to actual social realities. These preoccupations mean that the feminist approaches to social research currently debated in western universities can be very different from other ways of thinking about producing knowledge. Anne Seller (who has taught philosophy in the UK and the USA) says that taking her feminist ideas and debating tradition to the Mother Theresa Women’s University in India confronted her with her own cultural specificity as a philosopher (Seller 1994). She found that her tools for thinking with were characteristically western: ‘the more abstract and theoretical our formulations, the more culturally specific they become’ (Seller 1994: 243). Feminist approaches to methodology entail choices between different strategies for specifying connections between ideas, experience and reality, or for claiming the impossibility or irrelevance of specifying such connections.

Second, we argue that feminist responses to these debates have led to methodological dispute and diversity within feminism. It is problematic that knowledge of gendered lives (like any other claims to knowledge of social reality) cannot be claimed as simply and generally true (in the sense that this knowledge directly and accurately describes an actual reality). Feminists have to find ways of making their knowledge believable, and for evaluating competing knowledge claims, but there is more than one way of connecting feminist ideas with women’s experiences and with particular conceptions of reality.¹

Third, despite this divergence, feminist research is imbued with particular theoretical, political and ethical concerns that make these varied approaches to social research distinctive. Feminist knowledge is grounded in experiences of gendered social life, but is also dependent on judgements about the justice of social relationships, on theories of power and on the morality of social investigation. Feminist researchers are not necessarily in agreement on the meanings and consequences of experience, justice, power, relationships, differences and morality but, despite this divergence, they can potentially negotiate common moral and political positions.

The intertwining of these three themes illuminates critical contradictions in feminist efforts to produce and justify authoritative knowledge of gendered social life across a range of approaches to social research. It follows that this book is an argument for methodology since it is not possible to produce a neutral text on methodology, or to resolve feminism’s inherent contradictions. It is also an argument for the importance of practical, empirical investigation in producing knowledge of gendered social life.

Three challenges to feminist methodology

Feminists have made a range of claims about the position of women in relation to men, and about male domination of social theory. As a result, recent feminism and its claims to knowledge have confronted three rather different sources of criticism.

First, challenges to feminist knowledge claims have come from dominant approaches to science, reason, progress and truth, and the situation of this thought in relation to women’s experience (and to other ways of thinking, colonial and imperial history, and the uneven development of global capitalism). Feminists have been criticized for failing to produce adequately rational, scientific or unbiased knowledge (on the understanding that their critics use methodologies that are adequate in these respects). As academic feminist research developed, feminists came under increasing pressure from the wider academic community to justify their knowledge in terms of, for example, rationality, validity, rules of method, control of subjectivity and political bias. Feminist thought has been treated in many academic institutions as marginal, or as intellectually inferior to existing modes of thought (Arpad 1986; Stanley 1997). When feminists judge gender relations to be unjust and want to change them, they are implying that they have knowledge of what social relations between women and men actually are, and are expected to provide acceptable grounds for claiming that others should take this knowledge seriously. By being openly politically committed, feminists are charged with failing the test of producing generally valid and authoritative knowledge.

Second, challenges come from women’s varied experiences of cultural differences, social divisions and power relations. For example, claims that patriarchal power, sexuality or reproduction are key mechanisms in the oppression of women ignore other factors (such as racism, systems of production, nationalism, heterosexism, ablebodiedism, and the complex relations between them) that shape women’s lives in differing ways, and complicate relations between women (Brah 1992; Moraga and Anzaldúa 1983). Western feminists have been extensively criticized for relying on an undifferentiated category of ‘women’, in what Audre Lorde (1983: 99) terms the ‘pathetic pretence’ that differences between women do not exist.² These criticisms signal variations in personal experiences of the complex interrelations of power between women. They target the intellectual and ethical implications of producing knowledge of gender as if ‘women’ were a unified category of being throughout history and all over the world. They also question whether it is possible to produce knowledge of gender when gendered power relations are only one aspect of people’s lives. Issues of difference fracture, politicize and personalize all approaches to understanding gender.

A third challenge has shifted English-language feminism from a long period of engagement with scientific method, liberalism and Marxism (Jaggar 1983; Maynard 1995) to close encounters with aspects of postmodern and poststructuralist thought that question the foundations of feminist knowledge and methodology (Hekman 1992; Nicholson 1990). Feminist knowledge claims are tangled in tensions between knowledge of gender relations that take the existence of women for granted, and theories that take apart the grounds of feminist claims to knowledge, and treat ‘women’ and ‘gender’ as products of ideas rather than of embodiment, patriarchy or social construction. Poststructural and postmodern thought abandons any notion of methodology as able to produce knowledge that describes actual reality.

These three sources of challenge have thrown divided feminist researchers further into dispute. Feminists are constantly rewriting feminism and its histories with some common elements, but no general consensus (see, for example, James and Busia 1993; Kumar 1989; Mohammed 1998). We consider that disentangling the resulting methodological confusion is important, both in order to clarify how knowledge of gendered lives is produced, and because different methodological challenges and responses have different epistemological, political and ethical implications. The decisions that feminist researchers make matter.

Since feminists agree on so little, and their many critics tend to oversimplify and unify diverse feminist positions, we take the rest of this chapter to sketch some points of definition that outline our concerns.

What is gender?

Feminism provides theory, language and politics for making sense of gendered lives, but no orderly position on pinning down the contradictions of ‘gender’. This term can cover both how specific people experience sexuality and reproduction, masculinity and femininity, and the boundaries and interstices between them, and also variable cultural categories for conceptualizing what is lived and thought. In feminist theory, there has been considerable debate about the nature and interrelationships of sex, reproduction, identity, gender and power. We argue that sexuality, reproduction, subjectivity and gender can be taken to be interrelated – not wholly independent of embodiment, but also socially and politically constituted. Since what gets constituted and interrelated varies, gender cannot be known in general, or prior to investigation. There are considerable differences, however, between thinking about gender in terms of: (1) what people (and their bodies) are; (2) what people do; (3) what relationships and inequalities they make; (4) what meanings all these are given; (5) what social effects ideas of gender can produce. There are also differences in conceptualizing how gender is interrelated with other ways of identifying and categorizing people, for example in racialized relationships and categories of analysis. Rather than any agreed feminist position, there are deeply felt disputes.

For the purposes of this book, we discuss feminist methodology with reference to social research on gendered lives (rather than, say, ‘women’, ‘sex/gender’ or ‘sexual difference’). We take gender to include: sexuality and reproduction; sexual difference, embodiment, the social constitution of male, female, intersexual, other; masculinity and femininity; ideas, discourses, practices, subjectivities and social relationships. While gender can be analysed from differing perspectives and with differing assumptions, we argue that feminist knowledge of gender should include practical social investigation of gendered lives, experiences, relationships and inequalities. We see the investigation of the similarities and differences across the diversity of gendered lives as a potentially radical and emancipatory project that the term ‘gender’ can serve.

What is feminism in the twenty-first century?

Feminism covers a diversity of beliefs, practices and politics, and these overlap and interact with other beliefs, practices and politics. For every generalization that one can make about feminism it is possible to find ‘feminists’ who do not fit, or who do not want to fit. By the end of the nineteenth century, the term ‘feminism’ in the English-speaking world generally indicated the advocacy of women’s rights. In the UK and the USA, by the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, women were actively campaigning around education, political representation, working conditions, health, sexuality, motherhood and legal rights, as well as on more specific local issues. But these were not necessarily campaigns for all women (for example, in the UK, there were campaigns to gain access to the professions for middle-class women and access to contraception for working-class, married mothers). These and other campaigns were also marked by various forms of radical feminist consciousness that targeted male power over women’s minds, bodies, sexuality or labour, but this was not generally respectable or politically acceptable (Bland 1995). Other countries produced diverse campaigns around both general and specific interests and concerns, often connected with struggles for national independence, civil rights, democracy and modernization.

By the end of the twentieth century, feminism referred both more specifically and more generally to theories of male dominance that took relations between women and men to be political, and feminist struggles to be political activity on behalf of women in general. Feminism, therefore, entails some theory of power relations. Feminist conceptions of gendered power have been a critical factor in developing distinctive feminist theories and practices, but there is no unified theory of power, and feminists have drawn on a variety of ways of thinking about how to conceptualize power, the exercise and effects of power, and what can be done to change specific power relations and practices. As our concern here is with methodology, rather than the range of theory, we have not pursued variations in feminist conceptions of power. What these theories have in common is a concern that different knowledges of gender relations have different political and ethical implications. In these theories, any claim that all women are similarly subordinated, and so can and should act collectively, rubs up against actual experiences of differences between women, and different ways of conceptualizing power (Sanday 1981).

The feminism that developed in the last 30 years or so still attracts criticisms for its supposedly powerful consensus, and its tyranny in imposing hatred of men and denying fun and femininity to women (Gill 1997).³ In practice, late twentieth-century feminism developed, alongside many other political movements and activities, as an unstable intellectual, political and practical activity grounded in a sense of women having some common political interests across their social divisions, and so having some potential interest in acting together to transform unjust gender relations. Feminist notions of liberation, emancipation and social transformation imply freedom from oppression and freedom to live differently, but this is a slippery area of debate, difference and disagreement, rather than one of agreed concepts, aims or strategies (Ahmed et al. 2000).

Feminist notions of social transformation are rooted in varied experiences of gender subordination, expressed in varied theories of gender and power, and incorporate a range of moral and political judgements on what constitutes injustice. If the subordination of women is taken to be unjust, then it is unjust wherever it occurs, and strategies for tackling particular injustices imply some general notion of justice. This gives feminism a problematic relationship to women-in-general. Feminism depends critic...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• 1 Introduction
• PART I FEMINISM’S ENLIGHTENMENT LEGACY AND ITS CONTRADICTIONS
• PART II FREEDOM, FRAGMENTATION AND RESISTANCE
• PART III MEETING CHALLENGES, MAKING CHOICES
• Glossary
• References
• Index