P ss lecture 6

Editor's Notes

• #3: This week we will be learning about a feminist approach to social research, which links ontology, epistemology, methodology and methods, and is informed by a feminist understanding of the social world. This lecture will start by outlining what feminist research is and how it developed, before moving on to concentrate on three feminist approaches to research: feminist empiricism, feminist standpoint theory and feminist post-modernism. We will consider how each of these approaches conceptualises the social world and what we can know about it, and what this means for the way in which feminists do social research.
• #4: Broadly speaking, a feminist understanding is concerned with inequalities between men and women, and the overall subordination of women. Feminism is a political movement which works to achieve liberation for women from systems of male domination, and a feminist approach to research is connected to this struggle. Feminist research involves challenging the basic structures and ideologies that oppress women, with the explicit aim of empowerment and emancipation for women and other marginalised groups. Structures are social phenomena that stay relatively stable over time and can be seen to organise social reality. Ideologies are sets of ideas and beliefs based on an incomplete understanding of actual reality, and are usually deployed by a dominant group to secure some form of advantage over a subordinate group. Feminist research can be understood as praxis, that is, both a theory and a practice. While there are different feminist theories which disagree on the causes of male domination and how to achieve liberation for women, in some way, all feminist researchers apply their theoretical understand of the world to the way they carry out research. As Gayle Leatherby argues, ‘feminist researchers start with the political commitment to produce useful knowledge that will make a difference to women’s lives through social and individual change’. This involves challenging silences in mainstream, or what is sometimes called ‘malestream’ research, and highlighting that the choices made in research, including the choice of methodology, topic and population, are always political.
• #5: Although there were feminists in the late 19th and early 20th century who campaigned for women’s legal rights and were known as the first wave of the feminist movement, it wasn’t until the second wave of the feminist movement in the 1960s and 1970s that feminists started to think critically about mainstream social research. Feminist research originated within the context of this movement, as female scholars became aware of contradictions between their lived experience as women and mainstream research. They recognised the omission of women across research samples, and that research questions did not take women’s activities and experiences into account. For example, studies within the sociology of work and industry, social mobility and deviance in the 1960s and 1970s focused exclusively on samples of men and explaining male behaviour. Early feminist social research in the 1970s, such as Anne Oakley’s The Sociology of Housework, drew attention to aspects of women’s lives that had not been considered by male researchers. Oakley was trying to challenge male-oriented, functionalist sociology which treated housework as part of women’s role in marriage and necessary for maintaining a stable social order. Her approach was to show how looking at housework from women’s perspectives challenged some of the implicit assumptions of research that described housework as separately from ‘the world of work’. By interviewing 40 London housewives, she was able to conclude that housework was experienced as work, analogous to any other kind of work in modern society.
• #6: In relation to the concepts of ontology and epistemology, feminist research argues for making connections between ways of understanding the nature of the social world, what we can know about it and the implications for the way we do research. As we have previously discussed, ontology can be understood as a theory of the nature of things, while epistemology is a theory of knowledge concerned with what can be known about the world as we understand it. A feminist ontology recognises that women are oppressed, drawing on a concept of patriarchy, or systematic oppression of women within society on the grounds of gender. Feminists also recognise the differences between women, and argue that the nature of the oppression women experience differs depending on relations with other factors such as ethnicity, social class, sexuality and age. Different feminist approaches to epistemology are concerned with the status and privilege accorded to different knowledge claims. Within society, dominant groups have greater influence over the cultural outlook, and can legitimise their own position while subordinating and excluding the perspectives of others. Feminists argue that within patriarchal societies, men have used their position of power to define what are the important issues in terms of research, structure the language used to talk about the social world and develop the theories used to explain social phenomena, all of which promote male interests (in particular the interests of the most dominant men in society, that is white, middle-class, heterosexual, able-bodied men). Thus a feminist epistemology involves critiquing the production of knowledge, and the systems and institutions where this takes place, such as universities.
• #7: It has become conventional to distinguish three approaches to feminism and epistemology: feminist empiricism, feminist standpoint theory and feminist post-modernism. These approaches are not mutually exclusive, as many feminists have sympathies with aspects of each approach. They are useful because they describe three important ways of challenging mainstream positions.
• #8: Feminist empiricism is characteristically the position of those feminists working within scientific research, who broadly agree with the positivist norms of what science should be, but criticise the ways in which scientific methods have been used. They seek to use ‘traditional’ methods more ‘appropriately’, challenging the way methods are used rather than challenging the methods themselves or the ultimate scientific goal.   Feminist empiricism is based on the principles found in the modernist, Enlightenment tradition, which advocates a single and universal social world where the truth exists independently of the knower. Feminist empiricists are trying to present a better understanding of this world, and suggest that research that uncritically focuses on men, and takes the centrality of a male experience for granted, is ‘bad science’. They argue that feminists are more likely to achieve ‘good science’ because they can recognise the sexist assumptions of mainstream research. The strength of feminist empiricism is that it is respectable to mainstream academics, because there are only minimal challenges to the dominant philosophies of science. This can be seen as replicating mainstream research with women ‘added in’. However, this is criticised by others because it does not fundamentally challenge a positivist understanding of the social world. This is seen as a problem because this approach is therefore based on the same gendered assumptions as all other mainstream social science research.
• #10: Feminist standpoint theory also argues for a ‘successor science’, in which experience should be the starting point of knowledge production and social scientists need to investigate the social world from the perspective of women. Unlike feminist empiricists, they question the fundamental ideas of positivism around the nature of social reality. This involves highlighting the ‘false dichotomies’ of positivist science, such as a split between the research and researched. In this approach, the researcher is privileged as knowing more than the researched about the nature of social reality, which is understood as a truth ‘out there’ that can be discovered through research. Feminist standpoint theorists have argued for an alternative way of thinking which emphasises the specific experiences and situated perspectives of human beings, including both researchers and research subjects, as a tool for building knowledge. However, feminist standpoint theorists have not always been sensitive to issues of difference beyond gender, and have talked about women’s perspectives as if women were one oppressed group with shared experiences. More recently feminist standpoint theories have developed to account for gender as an attribute that directly intersects with other socially constructed categories that together comprise one’s standpoint as a researcher or researched.
• #12: Research can be understood as including both the context of discovery, where researchers develop research questions, and the context of justification, where research questions are tested. However, feminist standpoint theorists criticise positivists for only applying objectivity to the context of justification; researchers explain how they studied their topic, but not why. Feminist standpoint theory is committed to the achievement of ‘objective’ research findings, but theorists such as Sandra Harding have challenged a conventional understanding of objectivity within traditional positivist research because it fails to take women’s lives and experiences into account when developing research. While positivist research can claim to be objective and value-neutral in the way research is conducted, it is shaped by implicit androcentric assumptions, which means the practice of placing men at the centre of one’s world view. So a positivist researcher can conduct a project on work in a value-neutral way, but this is not objective if the research questions they are trying to answer are based on a male-centred view of what work involves. Sandra Harding argued that the experiences and voices of marginalised others, including women, should serve as a starting point for building knowledge. She claimed that because no researcher starts from value neutrality, researchers could aim towards ‘strong objectivity’ or ‘more truthful’ accounts by including women’s perspectives in their research studies. The findings from this research can then be applied to the elimination of oppression.
• #14: Doing feminist research involves addressing the question of how research should be done. A methodology can be understood as a framework for approaching social research, and feminist methodologies build on feminist ontologies and epistemologies. For example, feminist research that starts from a position of recognising women’s oppression within patriarchal society and a theory that understanding society means starting from women’s perspectives, might choose a topic on the basis of its relevance to a particular group of women. In terms of designing the research, this might involve reviewing a wider range of literature in order to develop research questions, selecting a wider sample of men and women, and using different tools to conduct research. For example, research on housework could involve focusing on interpretations (such as how women, and men, explain the division of housework in heterosexual couples and what interpretations of the social world are involved), or explaining the social trend for heterosexual women to do more routine housework than their male partners by testing a particular theory, such as the importance of how much time each partner has available or their gender ideologies. It is important that methodology follows from ontology and epistemology, but there is no particular feminist method. Feminist research can be qualitative, quantitative or involve mixed methods, and can be defined as feminist as long as the methods are chosen to best answer research questions which are developed from a feminist perspective.
• #15: For many theorists within all these epistemological traditions, feminist research involves being a ‘reflexive’ researcher. This means taking a critical look inward and reflecting on one’s own lived reality and experiences in order to better understand the research process. Feminist researchers locate themselves within the research process in order to highlight that research is carried out by an actual person or people, and to draw attention to the way in which they may have shaped the way research is carried out, by understanding how their own social background and assumptions can intervene in the process. This means asking yourself questions about the biases you bring into your research, and whether your values, attitudes and beliefs enter the research process. Feminist interviewers such as Marjorie DeVault highlight the importance of listening to the language participants use to express their reality, and where they find it difficult to express an idea. This can point to ways in which language is ‘man-made’, when the words and concepts don’t exist to express women’s experiences (and members of other non-dominant social groups may have similar experiences). Reflexivity means being mindful of your agenda in conducting a piece of research, and being open to hearing things that might challenge the recognised way of making sense of somebody’s behaviour, or a particular situation
• #17: This lecture has explained the concept of feminist research, and how it developed in the 1960s as part of a feminist movement concerned with women’s liberation. Feminist research involves challenging the silences and assumptions in mainstream research which centres on men’s experiences. We have looked at the way in which feminist research involves thinking ontologically, epistemologically and methodologically, and focused on three feminist epistemologies: feminist empiricism, feminist standpoint theory and feminist postmodernism to show how feminists approach social research.
• #19: Reading is available at the Information Commons at the University of Sheffield Library; some are also available as e-books or online journal articles