Doing Feminist Social Research after the Cultural Turn: Research with Practical Intention

Abstract

For those of us engaged in the feminist project of seeking to understand social relations, social formations and subjectivities, the cultural turn has posed radical challenges and opened up new ways of thinking. If the terrain that I am calling ‘feminist social research’ – a transdisciplinary space of theoretical and empirical inquiry into the contemporary and historical sphere of the social – rapidly expanded through the 1970s and 1980s, its development soon became ineluctably enmeshed with the deconstructive, post-structuralist questioning of modernist social science and the turn towards culture inaugurated by writers such as Roland Barthes (1972), Clifford Geertz (1975), Jacques Derrida (1976), Marshall Sahlins (1976), Raymond Williams (1977) and, perhaps most significantly, Michel Foucault (1967, 1970, 1972, 1973). Over the past 30 years, across much of the critically orientated social sciences there has been a fundamental epistemological reorientation, from an emphasis on explanation and causation to a focus on practices of interpretation, in which culture is placed centre stage, and social arrangements, events, material artefacts, belief systems, and research data about all of these, are treated as texts. A new emphasis on the entanglement of power and knowledge, the problematisation of the relationship between the researcher and the researched, and the fundamentally political issue of representation, of speaking for others, provoked a new self-reflexivity within disciplines and amongst individual researchers. In this context, Stuart Hall and the Birmingham School (e.g. Hall and Jefferson, 1976; Hall et al., 1978) initiated the new field of cultural studies, drawing on, but also transcending, its roots in Marxist theory and sociology. Alongside the expansion of cultural studies, across the Anglophone academy feminist, lesbian and gay, queer, post-colonial and critical race scholarship has proliferated, both forming the new ‘interdisciplines’ that cross the boundaries between the social sciences and the humanities, and impacting – to a greater or lesser extent – upon the traditional core disciplines of the social sciences. In each of these new areas, the study of culture has been seen as inextricably bound up with the analysis of the social, and the possibility of social explanation has been placed in question. A body of cultural theory that explores social, political, economic and psychic life, and their spatial and historical dimensions, through the lens of culture, has grown out of the new interdisciplines and across the transformed disciplines of the humanities and social sciences. As a result, the distinctive focus and task of critical social research has become profoundly uncertain.