Seen but Not Heard: The Racial Gap between Feminist Discourse and Practice

Abstract

The authors were participants in a fifteen-week seminar on epistemology and methodology at a university-based humanities research center. We had approached the seminar with expectations of refining our ideas about epistemology and methodology but, to our disappointment, instead began to question our place within women's studies. The following commentary reflects on our increasing frustration with the substance and direction of that seminar.' At the time of the seminar, Venetria Patton was a doctoral candidate in English completing her dissertation on nineteenth- and twentieth-century African American women writers; Kimberly Nettles was a doctoral candidate in sociology whose research focused on women's political mobilization in Guyana, South America.2 Although came from different disciplines, both thought the seminar would lead to new insights about our work; however, quickly became disillusioned. Rather than coming together to share as diverse scholars, found a closed circle that did not seem to have room for our ideas. According to the memo our research group sent to our invited guest speakers, our purpose was: to examine some of the many and diverse practices of knowledge production that currently constitute feminist research (with an eye towards mapping the shifting curricular terrain and identity of women's studies). Four areas of inquiry loosely structure our investigations: Feminist Jurisprudence, Art, Literature, and Popular Culture, Cultural Studies of Science, and New Ethnographies. Some of the very general questions with which had been wrestling include the following: What are the epistemological claims, assumptions, starting points, or locations of methods that might be regarded as distinctly feminist? What work do we want and expect inquiry to do? How are to proceed, methodologically, in an era of increasingly precise critical