Feminist Methodological Approach Research Articles

Voices of the career delayed: Korean millennial women's underemployed experience

South Korean Millennials have exceptional educational, cultural, and professional backgrounds compared to other generations, but they are overqualified and underemployed in the country's competitive job market. Moreover, Korean Millennial women face more complex forms of discrimination than Korean men. Thus far, most empirical studies have illuminated the problem of unemployment rather than that of underemployment, and studies of women in underemployment are even rarer still. This study employed a feminist methodological approach, conducting qualitative interviews in order to reveal well-educated Korean Millennial women's job experiences and how living in a male-dominated society and patriarchal system affects them. This study used thematic analysis to examine ten underemployed Korean Millennial women's job experiences. Through feminist qualitative interviews, the ten women not only revealed their experiences of being subjugated as women employees at work, they also highlighted both the negative and positive sides of being underemployed.

Towards a critical media ecology: Gender and media ecology

As a purposefully enacted form of praxis, this article represents a feminist methodological approach guided by the author’s personal introduction into choice works of feminist scholarship. By employing feminist epistemologies, this article demonstrates that each of our realities of understanding is made possible by our own differing subjective situations and our resonance towards difference. Throughout the piece, multiple parallel philosophical and ontological orientations are suggested in efforts to theoretically connect a broad array of feminist theories and praxis with canonic tenants of media ecology (such as language play, creation of counter-environments and breakdowns as breakthroughs). Written prior to the ‘Gender and Media Ecology’ invited Special Issue of EME, Dr. bird provides their own survey of ‘Gender and Media Ecology’, suggesting foundational means of future critical pursuits. The ultimate aim of this work is to invite future, even more expansive critical media ecological scholarship to continue similar efforts, which would provide even more holistically intersectional and invaluable means of challenging taken-for-granted institutional and societal norms inside the field of media ecology and beyond.

Discursos políticos de activistas disidentes de la discapacidad en Chile

The present study is part of a microsociological research conducted between 2016 and 2019 in the context of the emergence of new social movements triggered in post-dictatorship Chile. Specifically, it deals with the emergence of the sociopolitical discourses of people labeled as disabled. The intention is to present the construction of the political discourses of dissident disability activists living in Chile. For this purpose, we value these discourses as counter-hegemonic or from the margins; that is, they do not follow the approaches of dominant medical and citizen interpretations. We used a qualitative and feminist methodological approach on the bodily itineraries of eleven activists. This allowed us to further explore the group’s life trajectories, social discourses, and political praxis. The political discourses of dissident disability activists living in Chile are part of the claims of non-standard corporealities to access the public and cultural scene. It is imperative to generate counter-hegemonic discourses incorporating diverse knowledge in order to advocate for the rights of people who relate to difference and to make visible the structural inequalities that affect subaltern collectives. The article incorporates a situated, feminist, and Latin American perspective to address a phenomenon of growing interest in the social sciences, and presents reflections that contribute to both academia and activism.

What gender legislative reforms have meant for women in South Africa

South Africa is a much better place to live in today than before 1994. Having witnessed a largely peaceful transition from a pariah apartheid State to a democratic State where equality is guaranteed before the law, the country offers rights and justice for all. The Constitution of the Republic of South Africa , 1996 set out to rectify the injustices of the past and eliminate the various forms of discrimination that were the hallmarks of an apartheid State. Gender equality was a focal point in the reforms introduced in legislation and government programmes in a new democratic society. In this article I explore what these gendered legislative reforms and measures have meant to South African women, and whether these measures have brought about a positive change in their lives. Framed within a feminist epistemological and methodological approach, I draw on the results of a qualitative study of South Africa women. The results form part of a larger mixed methods study employing both qualitative and quantitative components. Qualitative individual interviews as well as focus groups were conducted. For the majority of women interviewed, the promulgation of legislation was viewed as positive and progressive. Women are now recognised as full citizen, have access to various opportunities, and experience more autonomy and choice. However, participants raised numerous shortcomings in legislation, and challenges that they experienced in their daily lives. For some of the participants, the transformative changes anticipated in the social and economic spheres have not been realised.

Researching relationality: Reflections on the use of concept cards during in-depth interviews

This article reflects on the use of concept cards during in-depth interviews when researching reproductive decision-making in the context of neoliberalism and postfeminism. As existing literature has shown, card methods are valuable in centring participants’ individual experiences through increased control and inclusion during data collection, and attention has been drawn to their use as an ethically attentive method that can elicit richer, more complex narratives than interviews alone. While these strengths initially led me to consider the cards as an appropriate ‘fit’ with my feminist methodological approach, on reflection, the cards also illuminated the relationality of experiences that my research was concerned with. I view this as occurring in two ways. First, participants’ use of the cards helped to uncover the intertwining of their reproductive decisions with the social and political world, therefore complicating the neoliberal prioritization of the individual. Second, the cards brought the relation between myself and the participants, and between the participants, to the forefront. The reflections in this article therefore offer new insights into what concept cards can achieve, as not only validating individual accounts, but as enhancing the relationality of knowledge production.

PUBLIC SPEECH: LISTENING TO WOMEN IN THE VIDEOGAME INDUSTRY

Since the 1990s, conversations about the dearth of women working in the video game industry have centered on three topics: 1) ways to draw more women into the field, 2) the experiences of women working in the industry, and 3) the experiences of those who once worked in the industry but left (Cassell & Jenkins, 1998; Hepler, 2017; Kafai, Heeter, Denner & Sun, 2008). While there has been considerable research on the conditions and occupational identities of video game developers, less scholarly attention has been devoted to women in games work, the barriers/obstacles and challenges/opportunities they face, or how they talk about their experiences. Our study looked to see who among the group of women who work in the games industry has already invested her time and energy to tell a public story, whether that is in a blog posting, a book chapter, a televised talk, a radio interview, or other public media, thereby building the foundations of the study by focusing on that sub-group. This paper offers a feminist methodological approach that demonstrates how discourse focused on affect can be re-read as intimately related to silences about power, and how the rhetorical constraints that public speech imposes upon what can be said about “women in games” aids us in understanding what might remain unspoken, and why.

(Re)Producing and challenging gender in and through urban space: women bicyclists’ experiences in Chicago

This research, which uses an intersectional feminist methodological approach, explores the relationships and intersections among women, public urban space, and bicycling, and the gendered processes through which the use of space is claimed, negotiated, and constrained. It builds on the existing scholarship on the gendered nature of public space, and uniquely uses bicycling as the site of inquiry. Drawing primarily from interviews with women cyclists in Chicago, this article explores how gender and other social identities are constructed, challenged, and constituted through an interaction with public space, urban processes and structures, and societal expectations and attitudes. It brings to the forefront and centers these narratives and empirically contextualizes them by linking the scholarship on the gendered (and raced, classed, and sexualized) nature of public space with the scholarship on women’s participation rates and barriers to bicycling. This research examines, through the everyday lived experiences of bicyclists and their multiple subject positions and privileges, how the gendered nature of public space affects the participation and experiences of women cyclists; how public space is negotiated and constrained; and how gender can be both (re)produced and challenged in and through urban space via women bicyclists’ actions. In particular, the research findings explore how women bicyclists must demand and negotiate public space; how their movement and activities are constrained in public space; how gender roles and social reproduction issues intersect with bicycling; and how social, quasi-advocacy group bicycle rides are used as a strategy, with mixed results, to address barriers to women bicyclists’ mobility.

Investigating the organizational everyday: a critical feminist approach

ABSTRACTThis article considers the possibilities and limits of applying institutional ethnography, a feminist theoretical and methodological approach that contributes to collective projects of investigating and transforming social life. Elaborating on the approach, the article reports on an ethnographic exploration of visual artists’ experiences and struggles in Canada's art world – a project that started from the standpoint of practising visual artists, examined their work and relations, and explicated practices and logics of art and valued work conditioning their lives. Speaking back to formal or text-based investigations of particular institutions, the article grapples with how to engage in research that more fully reveals the ‘social,’ attending to everyday life, to the ‘life work’ that people do, and to social forms that are threaded through intersecting, localized intimate and institutional spheres.

What’s feminist about feminist economics?

ABSTRACTWhat’s feminist about feminist economics? Is it the employment of particular feminist methodological approaches, about ‘seeing’ women instead of assuming economic subjects are gender neutral or studying topics relevant for feminist politics? This paper analyses the research methodologies of articles published in the journal Feminist Economics from 1995 to 2015 in light of the prescriptions of feminist economic methodology using a tiered classification scheme. Although feminist economic methodology has emphasized the importance of contextual, reflexive and qualitative methods, articles published in the journal reflect a largely quantitative orientation. The research shows a heavy empirical tilt in the second decade driven by the use of econometrics with much less emphasis on theoretical issues and economic methodology. Past and present editors of the journal are interviewed to reflect on these findings. Feminist empiricism, institutional barriers to methodological pluralism, the background and training of researchers and professional pressures might be driving these shifts.

Vulnerable Writing as a Feminist Methodological Practice

This article discusses the possibility for vulnerable writing within feminist methodological approaches to research. Drawing upon a project that involved difficulties and tensions in conducting transnational research, including the documenting and telling of a partial narrative of an individual who set herself on fire, the article discusses what it might mean to focus more explicitly on explicating and recognising vulnerability in writing. In providing examples from working with a situated, localised analysis that engages feminist, postcolonial and queer theoretical approaches to attend to the particular and everyday, I address some of the hesitations and uncertainties in undertaking research and producing knowledge, and concerns with forms of reflexive practice. At the heart of the discussion is the question of a vulnerable ethics, of how it is possible for feminist methods to represent the lives of others, especially when stories fail in the telling, both in providing adequate explanations and in the ways that trauma and suffering can remain incommunicable. Included in this are concerns as to how we as researchers are affected within the production of research. As a form of receptivity and wounding, the article argues for vulnerable writing that challenges feminist methods to remain open and receptive to what will always resist sense-making, while continuing to respond to the demand that we do justice to the lives of others.

After Exegesis: Feminist Biblical Theology. Essays in Honor of Carol A. Newsom ed. by Patricia K. Tull and Jacqueline E. Lapsley

Reviewed by: After Exegesis: Feminist Biblical Theology. Essays in Honor of Carol A. Newsom ed. by Patricia K. Tull and Jacqueline E. Lapsley Christine Thomas patricia k. tull and jacqueline e. lapsley (eds.), After Exegesis: Feminist Biblical Theology. Essays in Honor of Carol A. Newsom (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2015). Pp. vi + 306. $49.95. Carol Newsom’s contributions to the field of biblical studies are rich and varied, comprising significant advancements in the study of texts from Qumran, provocative work on the Books of Job and Daniel, and the fostering of feminist biblical scholarship represented in the three successive editions of the Women’s Bible Commentary over the course of twenty years. As the editors of After Exegesis acknowledge, Newsom does not identify herself as a biblical theologian, but “her contributions to rethinking the problems and [End Page 734] possibilities of biblical theology are vast and fundamental” (p. 4). This collection takes up the spirit of Newsom’s contributions both in its methodological approach and in the mode of its production. Newsom has argued, in the editors’ words, for a vision of “dialogical, or polyphonic, truth capable of negotiating the compositional and ideological complexities of biblical texts” (p. 5). It is appropriate then to honor Newsom with a polyphony of feminist scholarship that puts biblical texts into dialogue in order to rethink and expand traditional approaches to biblical theology. Equally appropriate is the fact that this collection was brought into being with collaborative conversation among the contributors, carefully stewarded by the collection’s thoughtful editors. Each of the fifteen essays engages at least two biblical texts to explore an area of theological inquiry. Some reenvision familiar subjects of systematic theology, such as creation and salvation, while others add new areas of analysis, such as violence against women. The emphasis throughout is on texts from the Hebrew Bible. Each of the essays includes a bibliography for further reading. The volume is a valuable resource not only for specialists in biblical studies, constructive theology, and feminist scholarship but also for students and others seeking an introduction to these fields. Feminist methodological approaches create points of contact among the essays and allow for shared themes to be read across the collection. For instance, the essays that concern providence, hope, and divine judgment give rise to new conceptions of divine agency. Eunny P. Lee’s essay, “Women’s Doings in Ruth,” presents a feminist biblical theology of providence in which divine agency takes shape in the actions of women. In Lee’s reading, God acts “not by miraculous demonstrations of power but through human acts of boldness and kindness in the rhythmic flow of everyday life” (p. 42). Amy C. Merrill Willis’s essay, “Counterimagination in Isaiah 65 and Daniel 12,” places the differing depictions of salvation in these texts in dialogue with the work of feminist theologians Flora Keshgegian and Ivone Gebara. God’s redemptive work in Isaiah 65, which is immanent and grounded in human community, resonates with feminist constructions of hope and is in productive tension with the vision of divine transcendence in Daniel 12. In “Job and the Hidden Face of God,” Carleen Mandolfo brings the work of post-Holocaust thinker Melissa Raphael to bear on the patriarchal conception of a God who rewards and punishes through presence and absence. Mandolfo finds in the lament psalms and even more so in God’s response to Job texts that approach Raphael’s alternative conception of divine–human reciprocity. The essays on salvation, suffering, and praise intersect in their concern with embodiment. In “Embodiment in Isaiah 51–52 and Psalm 62,” Katie M. Heffelfinger considers the distinctive expressions of salvation in these texts, attending to the bodily imagery through which human and divine interaction is expressed. She argues that, while Isaiah 51–52 and Psalm 62 operate in differing emotional registers, they share the conviction that God alone can overcome human brokenness. The theological significance of embodied human suffering is the focal point of Amy C. Cottrill’s essay, “The Traumatized ‘I’ in Psalm 102.” In the lament psalms’ emphasis on “bodily intelligence” she finds resources for resilience in the midst of trauma (p. 184). On the other end of...

A Feminist Approach to Immigrant Admissions

Answers to the question of immigrant admissions (what policies governing the admission and exclusion of nonrefugee foreigners may states justly adopt?) have been debated extensively by political philosophers since the 1980s. A wide variety of normative approaches to the question have been taken, but very nearly zero have been expressly feminist. Generalizing from Alison Jaggar's articulation of a feminist methodological approach to the political morality of abortion, this article proposes a feminist methodological approach to immigrant admissions. This article does not defend a substantive view on what policies states ought to adopt, but it does describe several features of our social world that are salient for a feminist methodological approach to the assessment of the justice of states’ immigrant admissions policies.

Periscoping as a Feminist Methodological Approach for Researching the Seemingly Hidden

This article proposes the metaphor of the periscope to guide an innovative approach to researching topics obstructed from view or out of range of more traditional approaches. Periscoping, it suggests, combines a feminist focus on the everyday with the recognition that no space, even those intentionally obscured, can be fully contained. Drawing on research on U.S. immigration enforcement policies, the article explores how feminist geographers can think creatively about how to arrange the “prisms” and “mirrors” at their disposal to obtain an image of what was previously thought to be unknowable. It then explores potential problems inherent to a periscopic strategy alongside tools it offers to researchers.

Making the Invisible Visible: Lesbian Romance Comics for Women

Feminist Studies 41, no. 2. © 2015 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 293 Andrea Wood Making the Invisible Visible: Lesbian Romance Comics for Women In 2012, romance novels generated $1.35 billion in sales, making romance the top-grossing genre in the North American publishing industry.1 While clearly among the most successful of popular genres, it still remains one of the most reviled forms of literature. Feminist critics in the 1980s made significant strides in establishing the validity of the genre as a subject of academic inquiry while skillfully repudiating the historically masculine tendency to denigrate romance and its readership as silly and frivolous, part of a longer patriarchal tradition of dismissing women’s writing as lacking literary value and being unworthy of critical inquiry. However, despite their efforts to recoup romance as having something meaningful to say about women’s experiences in culture, early feminist studies nonetheless codified the genre and its readers as exclusively heterosexual. Although research on lesbian romance novels has emerged over the years, often attempting to redress the normativizing tendencies of previous scholars, broader studies of the genre have yet to integrate critical engagement with lesbian or other GBTQ romance texts. As a result, feminist research on romance literature reifies a resolutely heterosexual episteme and has not progressed significantly since 1. Deirdre Donahue, “Romance Genre Sweeps Readers Off Their Feet,” USA Today.com, July 28, 2010, http://www.usatoday.com/life/books/news/201007 -29-buzzplus29_ST_N.htm. 294 Andrea Wood the 1980s—in point of fact, Tania Modleski’s and Janice Radway’s 1980s studies on the genre remain the definitive texts in the field.2 While the work of Modleski and Radway is still significant, it cannot adequately account for changes occurring in the genre and among romance readers. Even Modleski has acknowledged that future romance research must take into account “the enormous changes that necessitate ever more sophisticated, challenging, and wide-ranging approaches to popular culture in the mass-mediated global economy.”3 Yet, as Modleski also notes, in the current feminist debates on romance, “thoughts about methodology have waned among certain relatively youthful portions of the population .”4 I would add to this the fact that queer theoretical concepts, which can offer productive intersections with feminist methodological approaches, have remained conspicuously absent from most studies of the genre as a whole, although Lisa Fletcher’s Historical Romance Fiction: Heterosexuality and Performativity is a notable exception.5 At the same time, feminist research on romance remains statically orthodox in its almost exclusive eye on the mass-market paperback as the epitomizing marker of the genre. Limiting critical considerations of romance to Harlequin Romance novels and their ilk imposes yet another exclusionary boundary that ignores how changing media practices and modes of consumption are affecting the genre and its readers today. I do not want to suggest that studying mass-market paperbacks (or even eBooks) is no longer relevant; however, I do argue that expanding our scope of assessment to adequately account for the protean nature of romance and its currently evolving multimedia dimensions is critically imperative. Consequently, this article engages with and builds upon feminist methodological approaches to popular romance to analyze the ways in which women artists use the medium of indie comics, defined here as comics published by independent or small presses, to 2. Tania Modleski, Loving with a Vengeance: Mass-Produced Fantasies for Women (Hamden, CT: Archon, 1982); Janice A. Radway, Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984). 3. Tania Modleski, Loving with a Vengeance: Mass-Produced Fantasies for Women, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2008), xii. 4. Ibid., xxi. 5. Lisa Fletcher, Historical Romance Fiction: Heterosexuality and Performativity (London: Ashgate, 2008). Andrea Wood 295 craft different visions of lesbian romance through a medium that intersects and overlaps the written and the visual. Like the work of Thierry Groensteen, my analysis of lesbian romance comics focuses on “the primacy of the image” and comics as “a predominantly visual narrative form” (italics in original).6 We live in a visual culture, which, as Nicholas Mirzoeff argues, “does not depend on pictures themselves but the modern tendency to picture or visualize existence.”7 Lesbian...

Re/thinking Narrative Productions as a feminist methodological approach: research experiences on romantic love

Drawing from our experience in a research project about young feminist women meanings and experiences on romantic love conducted with Narrative Productions, our aim in this article is to summarize some methodological considerations held on the process. First, we contextualize the research project where these questions emerge, considering aspects related to the topic of study and the methodological design. Secondly, we deepen over four elements that are key for both feminist epistemological discussion and our own research process: 1) reflexivity, 2) articulation, 3) power relationships and 4) social transformation. For each of them, we assess potentialities and boundaries in Narrative Production methodology, illustrating some specific tensions we found in our research practice.

‘I go to dance, right?’: representation/sensation on the gendered dance floor

This article explores a group of young adults’ experiences of social dancing in the Eastside of Vancouver, BC, Canada. Drawing from critical and feminist qualitative methodological approaches as well as dance studies, the ethnography research privileges participants’ embodied knowledge of dancing in particular nightlife settings--small alternative spaces, rather than the city’s more mainstream, big business dance clubs. Dance’s double-bind, as both embodied and representational practice is evidenced through participants’ expressed negotiations of sexuality on the dance floor. Women participants, in particular, stress that though there may be an (implied) audience that constitutes their performance, gender performances in their nightlife leisure spaces are not synonymous with a desire for heterosexual relationships.

Gender-equality as boundary: ‘Gender–nation frames’ in Norwegian EU campaign organizations

This article examines how women’s and gender-equality issues form part of social movement organizations’ ideological framing and discusses how this tendency is mirrored in discourses at European and nation-state levels. Focusing on one of Western Europe’s few non-EU member countries, the article compares how two Norwegian social movement organizations draw on gender issues in their argumentation. The analysis is empirically based on written material produced by the organizations and takes recourse in a feminist methodological approach rooted in the tradition of discourse analysis. The analysis suggests that gender-related issues discussed by the organizations are coloured by an implicit North–South hierarchy which frames some areas, nations and cultures as more gender-equal and women-friendly than others. By drawing on notions conceptualized by Nira Yuval-Davis, it is argued that social movement organizations’ tendency to frame women’s issues and gender-equality in a way that implicitly marks and maintains symbolic boundaries between North and South is coloured by a ‘politics of belonging’ at the macro-level. The final discussion suggests some of the ways in which it may be problematic to see Nordic gender-equality traditions and current EU initiatives as universal solutions that fit all women living in Europe.

INTERVIEWING WOMEN OF HIGH “ECHELON”, IS IT CONTRADICTION IN TERMS?

This article deals with issues of narrative, subjectivity and experience concerning the life histories of the women of high “echelon”. Despite the fact that oral history gained a widespread legitimacy in academic field, oral account of the elites remains an unproblematicized matter which requires enquires with respect to potential methodological and theoretical contribution it may offer. Therefore, in the framework of possibilities provided with feminist analysis of social power and feminist methodological approaches, considering the oral account of women of high “echelon” has the potential for generating a comprehensive understanding related to gender. Besides, that provides the researchers with the opportunity to evaluate the use and the value of oral account in social sciences.

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Interviewing Fathers: Feminist Dilemmas in Fieldwork

This paper explores the dilemmas encountered carrying out empirical research using a feminist methodological approach. Specifically, I recount my experiences while undertaking qualitative research, in which I explored the experiences of employed mothers in the UK. At the beginning of my study, I adopted a feminist ‘position’. This paper explains how an initial decision to exclude men from the research sample proved more complex than anticipated, and was eventually reversed. The issue of equality between the researcher and participants is discussed and the question of whether the approach of the researcher should change, depending on the gender of the respondents, is considered. It is suggested that the experience of doing fieldwork may be different from the outcomes anticipated from the literature. In this case, the behaviour of male interviewees during the interview was very similar to that of female interviewees. Men were just as co-operative and articulate as women. This was not predicted on the basis of some of the existing literature on woman-to-man interviews. It is suggested that the application of epistemology in the field, especially in relation to woman-to-man interviewing, is complex, but that cross gender interviewing may be beneficial in terms of research outcomes.