Feminist Methods Research Articles

I poems: Evoking self.

This article argues for the value of I poems as a means to hear and understand the voices of individual women and girls. I poems are a feature of the Listening Guide (e.g., Brown & Gilligan, 1992). As a feminist method, the Listening Guide was developed to attend to the multiple and complex voices found in qualitative data, particularly when the subject of study is taboo or otherwise difficult to discuss. The creation of poems out of participant voices is one way to emotionally engage the reader or audience, and to resist the urge to turn a participant’s complex story into a single linear narrative. It is argued that I poems, when constructed with the guidelines set forth by the Listening Guide, are an evocative way to present participant data. To illustrate this, I poems constructed from interview data about women’s unwanted sexual experiences are included.

Consciousness-Raising: A Tool for Feminist Praxis in Research and Granting Voice

There is a long standing debate among researchers within the social sciences. Scholars argue the virtues of quantitative versus qualitative research, positivism versus subjectivity, and the use of mainstream/traditional methods of data collection versus constructionist, feminist, and multicultural methods of data collection. At the core of this debate is the quest for truth and an understanding of the social. From this debate emerged a number of new and innovative methods of data collection. Feminist researchers led the way in challenging mainstream, positivistic, quantitative approaches to research. That is not to say that feminist is limited to qualitative methods. Feminist researchers utilize existing methods and much more. They challenged the basic methodological assumptions of mainstream/traditional (ArdoviniBrooker 2001). Feminist researchers viewed, and still view, as a form of social activism. Research is done for praxis and not for the sake of research. Due to this new purpose of research, new and innovative methods developed along with the modification of the old ones. With this in mind, I must state that this paper can not do justice to all the methods used by feminist scholars. Therefore, I am only offering insight into a tool that may be utilized as a feminist form of praxis. This article explores the use of consciousness-raising as such a tool.Although there aren't any methods of that are specific to feminist research, there are some underlying elements that are consistent to feminist methodology. Basically, feminist methodology attempts to join the subject and the object by using reflexivity and rejecting positivism. Thus, feminist methods are performed by those who consider themselves as feminists. Feminist methods are also performed by researchers who reject old constraints, to make women and minorities aware of the conditions that limit their life choice, and to ensure that woman and minorities are no longer barred from access to high-level position (Reinharz 1992, p. 218).However, let us digress and address the importance of the Feminist Movement in the creation of feminist methodology. The Feminist Movement assisted in opening the door to feminist researchers, theorists and called for the challenging of the mainstream/traditional paradigm. Thus, feminist researchers challenged the methodological assumptions of past research. Many feminist researchers no longer viewed as research for sake. Research was now viewed as praxis oriented. The person now became political.As noted earlier, one method that best lends itself to this new perspective is consciousness-raising. Consciousness-raising is a unique tool used by feminist methodologists as well as qualitative methodologists. It embodies principles of enabling women and minorities to discuss and understand their experiences from their own viewpoint (Reinharz 1992: 220). Consciousness-raising assists in uncovering the reality of those that are marginalized, rather then regurgitate a reality that is constructed for them.Since consciousness-raising explores the unexplored, there is an issue that is raised by feminist methodologists. This issue is concerned with the domination of grand narratives in mainstream research. In other words, feminist methodologies are mostly reflective, they speak to multiple truths. Therefore, the methods used to conduct feminist research, as well as multicultural social theories, speak to multiple and different truths because there are many women and cultures with many different points of view that were and are silenced by mainstream methods and theories. For this reason, consciousness-raising may assist in discovering these many truths, instead of just one Truth.Since the subject of this article is consciousness-raising, a feminist method; it seems only logical to begin with a definition of feminism. The term feminism has many definitions, which include:1) A holistic theory concerned with the nature of global oppression of women and minorities;2) A sociopolitical theory and practice that aims to free all women and minorities from exploitation;3) A social movement encompassing strategic confrontations with the racist, sex-class system;4) An ideology that stands in dialectical opposition to all racist and misogynous ideologies and practices (Jary and Jaiy 1991:167). …

What is ‘Human’ in Human Capital Theory? Marking a transition from industrial to postindustrial education

AbstractThis article addresses educational practice as a site for the development of human capital theory. The article considers metaphysical constructions that are broadly typical of educational thought, and shows how they are amenable to economic analysis. Using different Marxist and feminist methods, it discusses pedagogy and the family as kinds of investment. The author questions the underlying assumptions about humanity on which both economics and education are predicated. If Western educators are certain of the historical ends to which modern Western education aims, do they also fully appreciate the implications of their own certainty and confidence for the future? As educators, are we equally confident that we question ourselves about why we uphold the value of education in the way each of us does? To engage educators in a debate about these values, the article employs poststructuralist critique to place words and concepts central to education and economics, e.g. the market, under erasure. It quest...

Considering The Impact of Amicus Curiae Participation on Feminist Litigation Strategy

Amici curiae participation plays an important role in litigation and judicial decisionmaking. The public interest nature of these participations has become particularly important in representing the point of view of those who might be affected by a judgment which could influence the outcome of a decision. Employing amicus curiae participation as specific litigation strategy is of importance in promoting litigation from a feminist and gendered viewpoint allowing feminist method to be employed in constructing effective legal arguments.

Feminist Evaluation and Research: Theory and Practice Brisolara Sharon (Eds) Feminist Evaluation and Research: Theory and Practice £28.85 368pp Guildford Press 9781462515202 1462515207

AS AN overview of feminist theory and research strategies, this outstanding book offers insights into the contribution of feminist methods to research and evaluation projects.

Incandescence, Melancholy, and Feminist Bad Vibes: A Response to Ziarek’s Feminist Aesthetics and the Politics of Modernism

Building on Ewa Ziarek’s account of “potentiality” and “incandescence” as feminist counter-modernisms, this essay argues that these aesthetic and political strategies have been co-opted by neoliberalism and domesticated into resilience discourse. This argument is made, in part, through a reading of singer Katy Perry’s 2012 song “Firework.” If resilience discourse is designed to automatically co-opt any and all transgression, deconstruction, critique, and opposition, how does one resist resilience? The second part of this article responds to that question, reworking Ziarek’s concept of melancholy and arguing that this updated concept is, if not an alternative to neoliberal resilience, then perhaps a feminist method of handling it. This melancholy isn’t the failure to get over a lack, but the failure to keep pace with accelerationism, the failure to overcome harder, better, faster, stronger. Melancholy is, in other words, radiance that’s either too fast or too slow: a bad vibe.

Epistemología, metodología y métodos. ¿Qué herramientas para qué feminismo? Reflexiones a partir del estudio del cuidado

En este trabajo pretendemos profundizar en los aspectos epistemológicos y en la práctica de la investigación social desde la perspectiva de los estudios de género. Partiendo de la complejidad de la metodología de la investigación y de la diversidad de enfoques feministas, se trabajará en la clarificación de algunos conceptos en torno a qué significa “investigación feminista” y se intentará dar respuesta a algunas de las cuestiones en ella implicadas. ¿Existe un método feminista? ¿Es posible considerar unos tipos de metodología más acordes con el feminismo que otros? Desde las investigaciones con un punto de vista de género se han planteado fuertes críticas a las epistemologías y metodologías tradicionales que, entre otros muchos aspectos cuestionables, servían a la pretensión de legitimar o justificar situaciones de subordinación, marginación o exclusión de las mujeres en determinados ámbitos. Eliminar los sesgos sexistas y androcéntricos que lastran el conocimiento desde tiempo inmemorial es un punto principal de los programas feministas de investigación, que cada vez más centran su atención en los métodos mediante los que se obtienen las “evidencias” sobre las que se construyen los diferentes saberes.

Mapping a Research Agenda Concerning Gender and Climate Change: A Review of the Literature

The collection of papers in this special issue marks the first attempt to bring together feminist philosophical work on the topic of climate change. In this literature review we seek to situate and enlarge upon this work by putting it in conversation with relevant work in climate ethics, in particular, and in feminist philosophy in general. Our goal is to catalyze a robust feminist philosophical research agenda on the pressing and uniquely complex practical problems posed by climate change. In the last decade a body of important empirical work informed by feminist attention to issues of intersectionality has begun to uncover the ways in which the impacts of climate change differentially affect individuals and communities in various locations as a result of gender, racial, and economic inequalities (see Denton 2002; Masika 2002; Dankelman 2010). Although feminist philosophical analyses have not been dominant in this empirical literature, one of our aims in this essay is to illustrate how feminist philosophical approaches can improve the study of the gendered and power-laden causes and differential impacts of climate change. In addition, feminist methods in areas such as moral theory, political theory, ontology, epistemology, philosophy of science, and environmental philosophy provide a much needed lens for analyzing how the moral, political, economic, and scientific frameworks for understanding and responding to climate change might be positively transformed. In this review, we highlight three thematic areas emerging in the feminist philosophical literature on climate change:

Informing sexuality education through youth-generated anonymous questions

This paper examines a comprehensive sexuality education programme, Health Education for Youth (HEY), which incorporates anonymous questions about sex and sexuality that participating youth generate into the curriculum. HEY utilises a social ecology framework, decolonising perspectives and feminist methods to inform the programme, its facilitation and the incorporation of participant questions into the curriculum. This paper describes the theoretical and methodological frameworks; curriculum content and use of anonymous questions; programme and participant characteristics; and types and content of questions asked by youth. Findings indicate that young people utilise their agency to ask important sexuality questions and are concerned about similar types and content of questions regardless of programme setting. The benefits of using a social ecology framework, decolonising perspectives and feminist methods to guide curriculum content and session facilitation are discussed along with the value of incorporating anonymous questions about sex to create sexuality education that is youth driven and youth relevant.

Women, Gender, Feminism: Marginalization at the Inception of the World Social Forum

The World Social Forum (WSF) is a biannualmeeting space for the globaljustice movement that facilitates the coordination of worldwide events andprotests around a variety of social justice issues. I argue that although theprinciples of the WSF are based on feminist methods of participation, theresearch presented here demonstrates that women, gender, and feminism weremarginalized in the program and content at the forum’s inception. Empiricallythe paper presents the structure of programming and a quantitative examinationof women’s and feminist groups’ participation of the first years of the WSFprocess. I consider the thematic development of the WSF and role ofinformation sharing and intersectionality as feminist principles wereincorporated into the WSF. I refer to various theoretical perspectives on genderincluding feminist political economy, postcolonialism,and queer theory tomake sense of feminist participation and marginalization at the World SocialForum.

Narrative analysis as a feminist method: The case of genetic ancestry tests

This article contributes to discussions of methodology in gender studies by examining narrative analysis as a feminist method. Using direct-to-consumer genetic ancestry services as a case study, the author discusses the potential of narrative analysis in interrogating complex cultural phenomena. The analysis focuses on the commercial website of the UK-based genetics company Oxford Ancestors, which the author situates at the intersection of the cultural narratives of commercialization, scientific advance and personal quest. By interrogating the mutual embeddedness of these narratives, the author demonstrates how narrative analysis moves across structure and context capturing the processes through which facts about gender come into being. The author suggests that this focus on the tension between the abstract and the specific in cultural phenomena is what makes narrative analysis a particularly effective tool for feminist cultural analysis.

Feminist Protest and Cultural Production at the Pine Gap Women's Peace Camp, Australia, 1983

This article reflects on the creative cultural production so politically integral to second-wave feminist protest and seeks to position it in the field of material culture. The commitment of the women's movement to transforming social conditions, and their representation, meant creating new cultures: of literature, sexuality, work, parliament and protest. The author uses examples of cultural production from a particular protest—the Pine Gap women's peace camp held in Australia in 1983—as emblematic of such cultural creativity through its politics, performativity and aesthetics. Reflecting on how such apparently ephemeral, spontaneous and site-specific productions might be remembered and represented, part of the politics of this article is to mobilize feminist methods that mimic the performative aspect of the protest and, at the same time, invest significance in such cultural production by theorizing it as material culture.

Gendered Casualties: Memoirs in Activism and the Problem of Representing Violence

Abstract Masculinity and nationalisms in Thailand during the 1970s served to enable gendered violence against activist women. Archival research and fieldwork reveal how feminist epistemologies and methods for studying memory are always gendered. Both conservative and leftist memories about the turbulent 1970s are rooted in a masculine notion of nationalism. Marginalizing the women's movement during the 1970s and forgetting the gendered violence against female activists during the October 6, 1976 massacre enables masculine nationalism.

Islam, Feminism, and Islamic Feminism: Between Inadequacy and Inevitability

This essay argues for maintaining a critical space between two intellectual paradigms that inform Muslim women’s anticolonial equality struggles in the neocolonial present, Islam and feminism. Seedat distinguishes between scholarly trends that preclude the convergence of Islam and feminism, that argue for a necessary convergence, and finally, those that make no argument for or against the convergence but “take Islam for granted” using feminist methods suited to various reform aspirations. The last group may consider their work the natural continuation of historical Muslim consciousness of the treatment of women or as redress for the historical absence of sex equality in Islam. This article argues that Islamic feminism may appear to be the inevitable result of the convergence of Islam and feminism yet it is also inadequate to concerns for sex equality in Islam. Not only do some scholars resist the naming but, as an analytic construct, Islamic feminism also precludes new understandings of sex difference originating in non-Western and anticolonial cultural paradigms.

Feminizing Human Rights Adjudication: Feminist Method and the Proportionality Principle

Proportionality is one of the most important adjudicatory tools, in human rights decision-making, primarily employed to balance rights and interests. Despite this there is very little feminist analysis of its use by the courts. This article discusses the doctrine of proportionality and considers its amenability to feminist legal methods. It relies on theories of deliberative democracy to argue that the proportionality test can be applied in a manner that facilitates a more “interactive universalism”, allows for greater participation in decision-making and enables the courts to be more attentive to the disadvantaged. The commonalities between proportionality and feminist theory are examined, and its contribution to developing and reconstituting a more relational and contextual concept of rights is explored.

How Art and Research Inform One Another, or Choose Your Own Adventure

Conventional artist statements and scholarly method statements can be inadequate for representing the intersections and overlaps of art practice and research. This essay employs autobiography to narrate relationships between the author’s art practice and scholarly research, and draws on feminist methods and histories of technology to assess the usefulness of this exercise. In contrast to modes of writing in the arts and humanities that emphasize clear outcomes and the production of single-authored works, the author documents how ideas and projects are collectively shaped, and how failures and socially-situated turning points inform the trajectory of any given work.

Researching Trafficked Women

This article exposes methodological barriers we encountered in a small research project on women trafficked for the purpose of sexual exploitation and our attempts, drawing on feminist and emergent methods, to resolve them. It critically assesses the role of institutional gatekeepers and the practical challenges faced in obtaining data directly from trafficking victims. Such difficulties, it suggests, spring at least in part from lingering disagreements within the feminist academic, legal, and advocacy communities regarding the nature, extent, and definition of trafficking. They also reveal concerns from policy makers and practitioners over the relevance and utility of academic research. Although feminist researchers have focused on building trust with vulnerable research participants, there has been far less discussion about how to persuade institutional elites to cooperate. Our experiences in this project, we suggest, reveal limitations in the emphasis on reflexivity in feminist methods, and point to the need for more strategic engagement with policy makers about the utility of academic research in general.

Impossible Bodies, Invisible Battles: Feminist Perspectives on the Psychological Research on and Treatment of Eating Disorders in Queer Women

Queer women have not been adequately represented in the literature on eating disorders, and as such, ideas about eating disorders in queer women are often rooted in stereotypes. This article aims to synthesize the research on eating disorders in queer women, with an emphasis on existing shortcomings and necessary future directions. A critique of current literature and existing findings related to eating and body image problems in queer women are presented, followed by a discussion of the current disjuncture between cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) treatment for eating disorders and culturally competent modifications of CBT for queer clients. Recommendations for the integration of feminist methods in research and practice are made, with the emphasis that improved understanding of sexually diverse women's experiences with eating disorders will create more accurate research findings, better treatment options for such clients, and a richer and more nuanced understanding of eating disorders in general.

About Home and Giving Voice to Experiences of Marginalization: a feminist reading of the 1970s social report-books about migration policy in Sweden

This article explores and analyses narratives in social report-books in the context of structural rationalization during the 1960s and 1970s in Sweden, which entailed large movements of people both in Sweden and Finland (as it did in other countries of Western Europe). The characteristics of the report-books are that they claim to depict the truth and to give voices to marginalized people with the aim to contribute to social change. The analysis dwells not only on the content of the books, but also on the narrative techniques employed. It is discussed how the authors were tied to their political context and the general discourse of social critique in their rendering of voices. The main questions of this article are: whose voices were paid attention to and how was home narrated and represented? One kind of narrative content links home attachment to roots in a rural context, where home centres on reproduction of families, territorial claims and nature hugging. It is established through rhetoric of nature and timelessness, fathers passing inheritance on to their sons and a desire for a non-alienated existence in an archaic landscape. The narrative techniques used are based on an invisible narrator and on a travel narration with questions and answers. It is mainly male voices that are paid attention to. Female voices are to some extent heard but marginalized. Female bodily practices and habits are connected to positions as wives and daughters. The fisherman, the hunter, the woodlander and the farmer, are (re)presented as threatened male positions and therefore male bodies will in a near future be out of place. These narratives are framed by a patriarchal discourse where bodies are naturalized and made straight. Quite another kind of narrative content is forward-looking, dealing with voices in a suburban context. The montage as a narrative technique is systematically used there, combining text and image. The didactic montage is intended to be educational, to enlighten people with the aid of pointers. This calls for activity on the part of the reader/observer, who is supposed to be given the impression of having interpreted the meanings independently. It is based on consciousness-raising as a feminist method for change. This narrative of home is about societal participation and resenting and resisting patriarchal distinctions such as public/private. It is framed by a feminist discourse where bodies are denaturalized and orientated at finding space for the displaced body to expand.

Cracking Foundations as Feminist Method

In her essay Prof. Bartlett uses feminist Martha Fineman's lecture on dependency to explore what makes a scholar, or her work, feminist. Bartlett seeks to probe aspects of feminist method, including its relation to the content of feminist analysis, using Fineman as a focus.