Feminist Epistemologies and the Social Relations of Housing Provision

Abstract

Is research that uses the concept of the social relations of housing provision implicitly centred on men and neglectful of women? In this paper, I look at why this might be the case because of the principles by which the social relations of provision are defined. I look at androcentric bias, referring to principles drawn from feminist epistemologies, and make particular use of some recent work in rural geography and sociology. I then look for evidence of androcentrism in my own work on the social relations of housing provision in rural Scotland. I find my work to have had no deliberate conscious focus on male experiences nor neglect of gendered relations and consider some epistemological and methodological implications of this judgement.