28 Feminist Methodology in Sociological Research

Ritu Sen Chaudhuri

Objective

In this module you will learn how feminist praxis and theory pose challenges to the dominant trends of social/sociological research methodology. Being aware of the hierarchies inherent in research, feminists tend to go beyond such constrains.

Introduction

The feminist sociologists, using the tools of the very discipline, bring up a forceful critique. They tend to address women’s everyday experiences and concerns, reveal the gender-based stereotypes and biases, and retrieve the subjugated knowledge forms. They draw attention to the hegemonic trends inherent in the basic structures and ideologies of the ma(in)le stream social research processes. Feminist methodology involves an overlapping multi-disciplinary approach. They remain unified not by shared solutions, but by mutual commitments to the problems. Feminist research aims at the emancipation of the women and other marginalized groups from patriarchal domination.

Methodology: an epistemological question

Let us begin with three inter-related concepts: method, methodology and epistemology referring to three different aspects of the research process. Research methods are the tools or techniques (ways of proceeding) of bringing together facts, information, data, evidences, suggestions, silences and hushes which constitute the social. Methods of inquiry include observing, examining texts (written, audio-visual) and interviewing or administering questionnaires of various kinds. A researcher could arrange these methods either/both in qualitative and/or quantitative means as per the demands of her/his research question. Methodology, on the other hand, addresses the theoretical questions about a particular research. “A methodology is a theory and analysis of how research does and should proceed…” (Harding 1987: 3). It deals with how a specific research question could be looked at – from which theoretical perspective(s) or concepts. Research involves a sensible synchronization, not a blind application, of methods. The same method, for instance, interview, can be used diversely while addressing different research problems from different theoretical structures. Methodology outlines the rationale as well as the orientation of the research methods. Epistemology is simplistically the “theory of knowledge” that outlines a set of presumptions about the social world involving institutions, interactions and discourses. It is about: who can be a ‘knower’ or who has the authority to know? What can be ‘known’ or what are the parameters of knowledge? Who decides what is to be known? How, on what basis is this decision taken? Based on these assumptions an individual researcher has to decide upon what s/he can/not study, and how s/he can/not conduct the study. Methodology, addressing ‘how’ we produce knowledge, or the ‘terms’ of knowledge production, thus, remains an epistemological question. The epistemological-methodological question of knowledge production is inevitably a political one.

Methodology: a political question

There are at least three ways in which epistemology-methodology invokes politics. First, the conditions for the production of knowledge reflect social hierarchies of power and privilege. It is the system of hegemony/authority which determines who can participate in the knowledge producing processes and whose views on knowledge have the potential to gain broader acceptance. Second, a specific body of knowledge mirrors the social location of the particular ‘knower’. The socio-political identity of the knower bears a substantive weight on the knowledge they produce. Third, a body of knowledge often results in approving or disapproving certain kinds of voices and may legitimise or delegitimize given discursive hierarchies and arrangements of speaking. These three possibilities can mutually coexist, in any given combination. There is a wealth of work that has explored such political effects on epistemology. One of Karl Marx’s significant theoretical contributions is to initiate this critique of philosophy. He emphasizes that the capitalist conditions develop ‘positivist’ knowledge (denying the influence of socio-political factors on conceptual frameworks) reifying it as absolute. The whole group of Frankfurt School theorists (Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer) and the theorists of sociology of knowledge (Karl Manheim, Max Scheler, and Robert K. Merton) make similar observations.

The feminist theorists have a different point of intervention. The feminist thinkers point at how the dominant knowledge practices disadvantage women by: (1) excluding them from inquiry, (2) denying them of epistemic authority – denigrating ‘feminine’ cognitive styles and modes of knowledge, (3) representing women as inferior, deviant or important only as the tool to attain patriarchal goals, (4) rendering women’s activities and interests, or gendered power relations, invisible, and (5) producing knowledge (science and technology) that is not useful for people in subordinate positions, or that reinforces gender and other social hierarchies. Feminist epistemologists trace these flawed conceptions of knowledge, knowers, objectivity, and scientific methodology.

The Origin of Feminist Research

Celebrated feminist thinkers like Mary Wollstonecraft (English, 1759-1797), Virginia Woolf (English, 1882-1941), Simone de Beauvoir (French, 1908-1986), Betty Friedan (American, 1921-2006) and many others – over a long stretch of time – have been speaking on the exclusion of women from the dominant forms of knowledge. The epistemic import, experiential richness, emancipatory concerns of the ‘woman’ remain invalidated by the hegemonic processes of knowledge production. Feminist theory and praxis contests the hegemonic body of knowledge that assumes the generic term ‘man’ as inclusive of ‘woman’. What is true for the dominant groups also holds for women and other oppressed groups. The feminist questioning of the epistemological and methodological tenets of main-stream research draws much from the insights of the feminist thinkers. Though one can make a conceptual distinction between feminist research and feminist methodology, the categories are overtly inter-related. Feminist research is a broader category including any empirical/theoretical study concerning feminism. Feminist methodology, on the other hand, is explicitly involved in the methodological discussion that emerges from the feminist critique.

Feminist research originated in the backdrop of the second wave feminist movement (1960s and 1970s). ‘Consciousness raising’ is one of the core events of the second wave movement. In different locations, small groups of women, from different walks of life, would interact with each other. Carol Hanisch states “One of the first things we discover in these groups is that personal problems are political problems. There are no personal solutions at this time” (1969/1979: 204-5). The personal is thus political. All relationships between men and women are institutionalized relationship of power; it reveals how male power is exercised and reinforced through the personalized spaces like that of childrearing, love, marriage, sexual practices from rape through prostitution to consenting sexual intercourse. Women’s oppression springs from the control of their sexualities and reproduction: mandatory motherhood and compulsory heterosexualities. The assumption that these institutions and practices are natural or purely individual concerns, as Hanisch notes, conceals the reality of women’s systematic oppression. The personal concerns have structural causes and therefore needed to be addressed in political terms (not on an individual basis). Women’s movements should aim at politicizing these personal issues. Kate Millet argues that “… sex is a status category with political implications” (2000: 24); hence, the patriarchal power is ubiquitous. There involves a deeply entrenched politics of sexuality, beginning with the reproduction of patriarchy through psychological conditioning in the family, which operates in all economic and social structures. Sexual politics is a paradigm of social power, and like all social power, sexual power controls individual both through ideological indoctrination and violence.

‘Consciousness raising’ provided the women with a systematic empirical mode of analysis. Challenging the existing knowledge forms, it allowed women to learn more from one another (Allen 1973, Combahee River Collective 1982). They could now generate a catalogue of ways in which – what people know or think they know, can be influenced by their own gender (roles, norms, traits, performance, identities), other people’s gender or by ideas about gender (symbolism). Research efforts eliciting information through personal contact, between the researchers and the research subjects, raise the question of how findings might be influenced by gender relations. Each mode of gendered knowledge raises new questions for epistemology. For example, male and female inquirers have differential access to information about the different facets of a society. Researchers may remain subjected to gender based right of entry to different social spaces. Even when allowed in the same social spaces, the gendered presence of the researcher has different effects on those being observed. Physical objects do not behave differently depending on whether a man or a woman is observing them. But human beings do behave differently according to their beliefs about the gender of who is observing them.

The ‘consciousness-raising’ groups, Dorothy Smith observes in a seminal book published in 1987, developed increasing consciousness about the stark incongruities between their lived experiences as ‘women’ and the ma(in)le stream discourses on theory and research. The focus on methodology gained momentum with the publication of this interdisciplinary anthology edited by Sandra Harding (1987). Though the women’s movement mostly began outside the university, feminists in nearly every discipline – sociology, psychology, philosophy, history, education, and anthropology, as well as the fields of law, medicine, language, and communication – soon began to relate its methods to their context and work.

Perspectives like feminist empiricism, standpoint theories, postmodernism and post-colonialism – embarking on a collective project of critique and transformation – work on the epistemological and methodological significance of subjugated knowledge forms. Scholars have developed feminist approaches in their adaptations of a wide variety of techniques, as has been enlisted by Marjorie L. DeVault in her 1996 essay, including survey and experimental methods (Eichler 1988), interview research (Oakley 1981), inductive fieldwork (Reinharz 1983), Marxist and ethno-methodological approaches (Smith 1987, Stanley & Wise 1983/93), phenomenology (Levesque-Lopman 1988), action/participatory research (Mies 1983, Maguire 1987), oral history (Personal Narratives Group 1989, Gluck & Patai 1991) and others. More recent additions to the list include feminist versions of experimental ethnography, and methods based on poststructuralist insights (Lather 1991, Game 1991, Ingraham 1994). Subverting the conventional modes of knowing, feminist research ends to produce newer meanings. It works “… right at the limits of several categories and approaches” where “one is neither entirely inside or outside… incurring constantly the risk of falling off one side or the other side of the limit while undoing, redoing, modifying this limit (Trinh T. Minh-ha 1991: 218).

Self-Check Exercise -1

Q 1. How is method, methodology and epistemology interrelated?

Method, methodology and epistemology are interrelated aspects of the research process. Research methods are the tools or techniques of collecting information and evidences, suggestions and silences about any social event. Observation, interviews, questionnaires are some basic methods of social research. Methodology involves the logical-theoretical orientation of the methods applied to a research process. It includes the theoretical analysis of the methods and principles linked to a specific or a field of study. Epistemology is the study of knowledge. It deals with the sources, conditions, structures and limits of knowledge. Methodology addressing the terms of knowledge production is thus an epistemological question.

Q 2. Do you think methodology is a political question? Why?

Methodology is implicated in politics.The macro-micro structural conditions of social-scientific knowledge invoke the questions of social stratification and power: determining its legitimate producers and consumers. There is an impact of the political processes and cultural discourses on the sociologists’ sense of the plausibility of different ways of thinking about the social. For example, in America the Fordist mode of economic and social regulation, sustains a particular epistemological/methodological orientation called ‘‘American positivism’’ (causally oriented, universalist and empiricist). Again the social location of an individual sociologist would determine the acceptability of her/his research. For example, the sociological knowledge produced by an upper class-caste, educated, male elite would be more acceptable in a class-caste based patriarchal society like contemporary India.

Q 3.What is the relationship between feminist research and feminist methodology?

Feminist research and feminist methodology remain intricately linked to each other. Feminist methodology draws largely from the arguments of the feminist theories. Yet, the categories can be conceptually distinguished. The wider category of feminist research includes all empirical and theoretical studies relating to feminism. Feminist methodology, on the other hand, specifically deals with the methodological arguments that arise from the feminist critique.

Feminist methodology

Feminist methodology is not to be defined in fixed terms. It is rather open and provisional. Feminist methodology is a cumulative discourse, always receptive to newer insights, emanating from activist and academic efforts. There are many possible approaches to feminist methodology as there are multiple strands of feminism (Tong 2009). Without conforming to any one of such approaches one can think of some basic issues raised by the feminist methodologists. Feminists seek a methodology that will support research of value to women, leading to social change or action beneficial to women and other marginal categories as well. One can speak on feminist methodology from various angles. In this module, we would talk about two major critiques, of positivism and post-modernism, worked out by the feminist theorists. The basic arguments of feminist methodology in the context of these critiques will be posed.

6.1 Feminist Critique of Positivism

i) The critique of objectivity

Feminist theorists make a strong critique of positivism, one of the dominant paradigms in social sciences developed out of the rationalist and empiricist movements in the late 1800s Europe. The positivists affirm the existence of an objective reality leading to pure, invariable, and universal knowledge or truth. They hold that applying specific scientific methods (following the natural sciences), the objective reality can be captured accurately. For the classical sociologist like Emile Durkheim, a celebrated figure of the positivistic tradition, facts lying “outside of the human mind,” having an “independent existence outside of the individual consciousness,” (Durkheim 1938/1965: 20) should be differentiated from values emanating from individual consciousness. In The Rules of Sociological Method, Durkheim (1938/1965) offers a set of methods to ascertain “social facts” through objective research. Feminist thinkers hold that the hegemony of the positivist paradigm springs not merely from its claim to objectivity or universality. The dominance emanates from the privileged position positivism holds within a range of power relations (including patriarchy).

The feminist way out

Without repudiating ‘objectivity’, the feminists tend to give it a different spin. “Strong objectivity”

(Harding 1987), grounded on strong political commitments, does not call for value neutrality. The starting point for knowledge production, as per strong objectivity, is the ‘excluded’ experiences and ‘silenced’ voices of marginalized others (including women).

Alison Jaggar (1997) identifies emotion as a constitutive element of epistemology. She thinks it is naïve to think that values and feelings do not emerge in the research procedures. The emotional elements determine the choice of research question and the methodological orientation of the researchers. The rational and the emotional binary, governing the positivistic discourse, thus stands erroneous. “Values and emotions enter into the science of the past and the present not only on the level of scientific practice but also on the metascientific level, as answers to various questions: What is Science? How should it be practiced? And what is the status of scientific investigation versus non-scientific modes of enquiry?” (Jaggar1997: 393)

ii) Critique of the binary mode of knowledge

Positivistic (and all other dominant modes of) sociological theorization rests on paired concepts – opposed to each other – like knower-known, subject-object, reason-emotion, science-humanity, science-nature, culture-nature, public-private, occident-orient, self-other, masculine-feminine and so on. Most often, the first of each pair is considered to be the superior and powerful. Such dichotomies work to maintain the dominance of the hegemonizer over the hegemonized. Conceding knowledge as a political process (Ramazanoglu 1992), feminists argue that there is a primacy of the man-woman distinction in the very act of knowing through binaries. Dichotomies are grounded on the division between male/subject and female/object (Stanley and Wise 1983/93).

The feminist way out

The binary mode of production of knowledge hegemonizes the object of knowledge. It forgets that the ‘known’ are also ‘potential knowers’, the research objects are also ‘doing subjects’. Objective research thus involves a set of intellectual practices that separate people from the knowledge of their own subjectivity (Stanley 1990). Feminist sociologists reject the binaries of theory and practice, object and subject, and researcher and researched. Contemporary sociologists without overt feminist concerns have also pointed out the problems of research, which works through a separation of the knower and the known. In his book New Rules of Sociological Method: A Positive Critique of Interpretative Sociologies, Anthony Giddens (1993) insists on an idea that the constitution of this world as ‘meaningful’, ‘accountable’, or ‘intelligible’ depends upon language, which is not merely a system of signs or symbols but a medium of practical activity. The social scientist draws upon the same sorts of skills as those whose conduct s/he seeks to analyse. The description of social conduct involves a hermeneutic task of penetrating the frames of meaning which the actors themselves draw upon as they constantly re-constitute the social world.

iii) Critique of the qualitative – quantitative binary

Traditional positivistic sociological research methodology typifies sociological research endeavour into qualitative or quantitative methods. Quantitative research is about the collection and analysis of numerical data. Some typical methods are associated with each of the two research processes. Qualitative research strategies traditionally include ethnographies, fieldwork, participant observation, content analysis, and analysis of text, unstructured interviews and oral histories. Quantitative methods typically include structured interviews questionnaires, surveys, studying rates and percentages, variables and relationships between social factors. Qualitative research is considered to value subjective, personal meaning and definition. In contrast, quantitative research is constructed in terms of testing theories and making predictions in an objective way where the researcher is detached from both the participants and the research process. One chooses research methods on the basis of what one seeks to understand.

The feminist way out

While many feminist sociologists seem to favour qualitative research (Mies 1991, Cancian 1992, Kasper 1994), feminist policy researchers require a feminist standpoint as well as the conventional tools such as cost-benefit analysis (Spalter-Roth & Hartmann 1991). Uma Narayan (1989), while doing research in a non-western setting like India, observes that many non-positivistic ‘traditional frameworks’ like religion and culture, are more politically oppressive than positivism. Here positivist science can work as a force for liberation (and this seems true for western societies as well). “We must fight”, she writes, “not frameworks that assert the separation of fact and value but frameworks that are pervaded by values to which we, as feminists, find ourselves opposed” (ibid.: 260).

Sandra Harding (1987) argues that it is not the method that makes feminist research different from what she terms ‘male stream’ research, but (a) the alternative origin of the problems, which concern women rather than men, (b) the alternative hypotheses and evidence used, (c) the purpose of the inquiry, which is to understand a woman’s view of the world and assist in the emancipation of women, and (d) the nature of the relationship between the researcher and the so-called ‘subjects’ of her inquiry.

It is to remember that the overall goal of both the qualitative and quantitative social science research is to capture and convey universal truth, be it in terms of statistics or signification. A claim to truth is inextricably linked to power. The power that produces a regime of truth expels and obliterates everything that it considers to be untrue. Unless and until the universal notion of truth is problematised, it is impossible to comprehend that both qualitative and quantitative research could remain essentially partial in their definitions and depictions of social reality. Both the methods could equally remain ignorant in attending the questions of class, race, ethnicity and gender. Both could be biased and androcentric. So the debate of feminist research versus male stream research crosses paths with the debates on qualitative versus quantitative research.

6.2 Feminist Critique of Post-modernism

Feminist methodology tries to work beyond the binary mode of truth seeking male stream positivistic research and ‘absolute’ relativism of certain postmodern theorizations insisting on multiple truths. How could a knowing subject occupying specific class, gender, ethnic, racial, caste position produce universal truth? They ask. Feminists also tend to question the politics of multiple realities that fails to discriminate between the oppressive and the resistant positions. Postmodern theorizations could as well remain gender-blind, as many such theorists have always been.

Critical theory, poststructuralist, and postmodernist strands of thought hold that knowledge is tentative, fragmented, multifaceted and so not necessarily rational. Socially constructed knowledge is contextual rather than waiting “out there” to be discovered. Knowledge can shift as quickly as the texts, contexts, and locations shift. Postmodernism rejects the view that there is a singular universal voice (e.g. Lyotard’s (1984) critique of the grand meta-narratives of western reason) of knowledge. Rather the argument is for a different reality for each group (or individual) of knower. There being multiple groups of knowers and multiple modes of knowing what constitutes the real, there could be multiple realities existing at the same time.

The critique of relativism

‘Multiple realities’ (if we can straighten the dense and difficult polemic of what is ‘real’ to get a flat category like that) is not always a feminist category. Postmodernism offers feminism some useful methodological re-conceptualisations, particularly in terms of a caution against the generalisations that transcend the boundaries of culture and region (Nicholson 1990). But relativism (which could be counted as a marker of the post-modern turn) is not always quite supportive to the feminist cause. Relativism as a problem could as well emerge from the dominant groups’ attempt to pacify the non-dominant ‘other’ voices. In the process of knowing, the subject’s view is not a view from nowhere but always from some specific location. This makes it possible to think of knowledge being dominant or dominated and also makes it possible, the feminists argue, to think of a politics of knowledge where one takes the standpoint of the dominated.

The feminist way out

“Standpoint theory, along with postmodernist and some postcolonial approaches, can seem to share this debilitating relativism because it, too, acknowledges that all knowledge claims are socially situated. Worse, standpoint approaches argue that some kinds of social values can advance the growth of knowledge” (Harding 2004:11). Yet, standpoint theory is neither an advocate of nor is it “doomed” to relativism. Feminism needs to resist relativism. For relativism “…is a way of being nowhere while claiming to be everywhere equally. The “equality” of positioning is a denial of responsibility and critical enquiry” (Haraway 2004: 89).

Self-Check Exercise – 2

Q 1.What is feminist methodology?

There are several approaches to feminist methodology as there are many versions of feminism. The approaches, though disparate, shares some common concerns. Feminist methodology tends to disrupt the reproduction of power relationships that subordinate women as objects of research. Instead, it considers women as contributors in a joint research work. Feminist methodology tends to produce a collective ‘culture’ for the respectful sharing of women’s experience. Rather than ascertaining something as an indisputable truth, it tries to contextualise veracity.

Feminist researchers deploy research techniques as per their conception of ‘feminism’. While some researchers use standard surveys, gather numerical information and carry out statistical computations, others take on secondary analysis of documentary material or policy papers. Yet, others may consider the stories of women (recording oral narratives) using in-depth interviews or ethnographies. Feminist methodology can even involve various groups of women for self-directed research. Diverse methodologies remain subject to internal debates about the ways they may inadvertently continue or come to interrupt the patterns of oppression of women.

Q 2. Write a note on the feminist critique of positivistic methodology.

Before talking about the feminist critique of positivistic methodology one has to recall the basic tenets of positivism. Anthony Giddens (1974) refers to three presuppositions that identify a “positivist attitude”: a) sociology and the natural sciences use the same method; b) the objective of sociological analysis is to formulate knowledge about the social in the form of “laws”; and c) sociology, as do the natural sciences, has a technical character and works with an instrumental reasoning, both of which are “neutral” in relation to values. Feminist researchers critique the positivistic tendency toward dualisms—between rationality and emotion, quantitative and qualitative research, and the subject and object of research. Sandra Harding or Alison Jaggar argue, for example, that by establishing the subject-object binary, whereby the value-neutral researcher is disconnected from the research process, positivistic research processes endorse a researcher-researched hierarchy that mimic patriarchy. They also resist the positivist prohibition of emotions from the research procedures and call for an assimilation of quantitative and qualitative techniques.

Q 3. Write a note on the feminist critique of ‘post-modern relativism’.

Postmodernism proposes the methodological tools to critique the generalizing trends of the social sciences which the feminist helpful. Yet, for a specific group of feminists the postmodern-turn to relativism is not very encouraging. They argue that ‘relativism’ can also work as the hegemonizer’s strategy of placating the hegemonized voices. As knowledge is always situated it can emanate from the dominant or the dominated positions. The politics of feminism values the standpoint of the dominated as it remains better equipped to conceptualize the social world.

Standpoint Theory

Standpoint feminism is a position taken by feminist theorists that places knowledge at the nucleus of research. It argues for an explicitly woman’s epistemological standpoint. Feminist standpoint epistemology is rooted in research concerning the everyday existence of women. It assumes that in a stratified society the social life is experienced from diverse standpoints. Following the Hegelian conception of the master/slave dialectic, Nancy Hartsock (1983), one of the key standpoint theorists, emphasizes women as a superior knower. Because of their experiences of oppression, women have a better understanding of life in general. Many sociologists have taken up a version of the standpoint approach (e.g. Reinharz 1983, Stanley & Wise 1983–1993, Smith 1987, and Collins 1990).

Dorothy Smith’s theorisation is possibly the most extensively known in the field of Sociology. Her work since the last two decades is grappling with the ‘male’ stream Sociology. Sociology emerged as a challenging new discipline keen to illuminate the inequities and stratifications at the core of various social formations (Karl Marx and Max Weber). Yet, it produced its own variety of hegemony by solely focusing on one specific facet of human social life—the male-controlled macro-level public sphere—at the cost of the ‘world of women’. Smith emphasizes that the standpoint of the men is consistently privileged as against that of the women. Moreover, the standpoint of the (white) male upper class encompasses and controls other worldviews which remain perennially undervalued. The discipline, outlined by the demands of the hegemonic class, is grounded on men’s concerns (Ramazanoglu 1989). Smith tends to unravel and posit women’s experience as the ‘starting point’ of the social research inquiry.

Stating that all social situations do not provide equally ‘effective’ resources for learning about the world, standpoint theory helps to identify one of the many problems of relativism. All social situations are not uniformly institutionalised and hegemonic so as to produce knowledge. For example, much of women’s knowing is marked as unstable, irrational, and pathological. They are often renounced as non-knowledge. Sometimes women’s experience is accommodated within the phallogocentric discourse in such a way that their specificity gets wiped out. So to take on a relativist position is to weaken what is not yet too strong. It rather is a ‘strong objectivity’ that the standpoint theorists would prefer. They think that “… some social situations are scientifically better than others as places from which to start off knowledge projects…” (Harding 2004: 31).

Standpoint theorists deem the lives of the marginalised as authentic entry points to critical questionings about the social order. Thoughts that begin from the lives of the dominant groups fail to go beyond the authoritative bias. To begin with, the lives of women, for example, as Harding writes, “will generate less partial and distorted accounts not only of women’s lives but also of men’s lives and of the whole social order” (Harding 2004: 128). They are nuanced enough to remember they are not seeking for a unitary model of woman’s life. “Instead, one must turn to all the lives that are marginalised in different ways by the operative systems of social stratification” (Harding 2004: 131).

They have more than one standpoint from which to produce their partial knowledge. “The alternative to relativism is partial, locatable, critical knowledge sustaining the possibility of webs of connections called solidarity in politics and shared conversation in epistemology” (Haraway 2004: 89). Pointing at the inseparability of knowledge and power, the standpoint theorists do not make authoritative truth claims. They try to remember the diverse nature of woman’s experiences varying in terms of space, time, class, and race and so on. Sandra Harding in her article Subjectivity, Experience and Knowledge: An Epistemology from/for Rainbow Coalition Politics states: “In so far as women, for example, live in oppositional race, class and sexuality relations to each other, the subject of feminist knowledge will be not just multiple, but also contradictory or ‘incoherent’” (2004: 175-6).

7.1 Limitations of the Standpoint Theories

It is an irony that feminist methodology hardly incorporates the standpoints of women from the ‘understated’ communities and nations (and their male associates). This happens in spite of the fact that consideration of the racial/ethnic dissimilarities and joint strategies for fighting racism remains a key theme of the second-wave (Anzaldua 1987, Bulkin, Pratt & Smith 1984). Patricia Hill Collins (1990) is one among a few acclaimed thinkers to work out an analysis of ‘knowledge making’, in terms of conversation-concern-responsibility, in African-American communities. She underscores that standpoints are always situated and partial. Knowledge that is concededly partial is more responsible than partial knowledge presented as ‘true’. Kum-Kum Bhavnani (2004) admits that though knowledge is both partial and situated, it is not disembodied. Feminist epistemologies, she points out, respect the differing standpoints women holds in different third world locations. Himani Bannerji (1995) argues for a responsible Marxist and feminist standpoint thinking through the simultaneity of gender, race/ethnicity, and nationality (the traditional accounts have tried to separate analytically). Chandra Talpade Mohanty’s works (1988, 1991, 1992, and 2003) problematise the hegemonic trends of Western feminism. Much like Bannerji (1995), she considers Dorothy Smith’s theorisations helpful to study the colonial and postcolonial social organisations.

Conceding its wide acceptance across the globe, one also needs to point at the philosophical impasses of the standpoint epistemology. It has to grapple with several queries. Some of them are: If knowledge ought to take off from the perspective of the oppressed, how can one decide who is more oppressed? Can only women understand women? Why do the peripheral communities/individuals have a less distorted perspective and in what way does it occur? However, standpoint theory, pregnant with a political charge, is not the only philosophical perspective of feminist research. For some contemporary feminists, postmodernism is attuned to the broader feminist task of addressing the question of ‘other’ in social research (Hesse-Biber, Leavy and Yaiser 2004). Adrien Katherine Wing (2000) invokes the idea of “multiple consciousness” to explicate the complex intersectionality, multiple locations of social hierarchy in multiple cultures, within a global context. Chela Sandoval (2000) also acknowledges the significance of multiple consciousness. Her ‘methodology of the oppressed’ talks about the ‘other’ in the ‘neo-colonizing post-modern global formations’.

The Post-Colonial Turn

There is an increasing awareness amongst the feminist researchers about the importance of women’s experiences in a global context with respect to issues of imperialism, colonialism, and national identity (Hesse-Biber 2011). Feminists doing international research, trying to voice “the other/s” in a global context, should remain responsive to the deep-seated undercurrents of power in the very process itself. While Western feminism and feminist methodology have done a commendable work of problematising several age-old gender binaries, what is remarkable is the continued existence and even valorisation of the dichotomy of the West and ‘the Rest’ in their discourses. This does not always mean a valorisation of the West, but that of the binary where the ‘Rest’ may also be valorised. Feminist theories, even if they claim to give ‘multicultural’ or ‘global’ perspectives on women, are dominated by Western debates and taxonomies. There is a kind of uniformity on what feminism means in the very diverse cultures of the global South. Diverse cartographies and histories are conflated until differences among women are lost. Multiple struggles of very different women, under very different conditions, are collapsed into one theoretical model. All women are not the same. They are different and so are their politics. Black feminisms, local (African, South Asian, etc.) feminisms, Third world feminisms, and various other forms need to be addressed in their specificities.

Invocation of third-world to feminism is to modify the universality of feminism by history and geography. Third world feminism again is not a homogenous category. There is nothing like a unitary notion of third-world woman. Just as western or white woman cannot be defined as coherent interest groups (Mohanty 2003), Third World woman also do not constitute any automatic or unitary group. Alliances and divisions of multiple axes of discriminations like class, religion, sexuality and history fracture each of these groups. There is no fixed nature of the third-world feminist politics. It remains dependent on a number of factors, contexts and contingencies. One ‘third world feminism’ is thus not interchangeable with another. In this module, we have talked about two feminist thinkers, rooted in India, who have strongly critiqued the epistemological-methodological renditions of the dominant western feminism.

8.1 Chandra Talpade Mohanty

Chandra Talpade Mohanty’s works have been widely accredited as a major challenge to the mainstream Western feminist thought. Mohanty’s seminal work, “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses” (originally published in 1986), condemns the inherent euro-centrism of the radical western feminist discourses. She deals with the problem of the ideological production of the cultural discourse of what is called the ‘third world’. This discourse, as reflected in the western feminist texts, produces the ‘third-world woman as a systematised and homogenised category, as a singular monolith’.

Mohanty states that the methodology which involves the production of this monolithic subject is that of generalisation, de-contextualisation and an assertion on the basis of number. In dominant discourses events are generalised on the basis of the number of their occurrences. For example, the larger the number of instances of wearing veil, the more universal is the (validation of) sexual control over Muslim women. The Western feminist writers fail to consider the varied and often contradictory significance of wearing veils in Islamic cultures. For them, Islam is a unified religion crystallized in a homogeneous empty time. It quite resembles the classical Orientalist (discursive) strategy of the construction of the ‘oriental other’. Without paying any heed to the geographical or historical contexts, the feminist texts grossly generalise the analytical concepts like gendered division of labour, family, marriage, household and patriarchy.

8.2 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, on the other hand, talks about the problems of representation of the third world/subaltern women. Can the subaltern speak? She asks (1994) and complicates the whole question of feminist methodology. One can relate her thesis to the knower-known divide we had been talking about. Research questions addressing the ‘other’ woman tend to forget and often efface her ability to ‘know’ or ‘speak’. There could at least be two possible modes of dealing with a ‘subaltern subject’. First, the researcher can think of her object of research as an autonomous ‘subject’. If the researcher thinks that a subaltern woman is an independent subject capable of free self-representation, s/he would outweigh the voice of the subaltern. Without being responsive to the specificities of the subaltern voice, the researcher would be speaking her own terms, on their behalf. Much of Western feminist concerns have hegemonised the third world woman aiming to speak for them. Second, the researcher might think that the subaltern woman is so ‘different’ that the universal/western feminist methodologies fail to reach her. The subaltern woman must be left alone to be ‘empowered’ on her own efforts. This is problematic as for the subaltern woman the basic requirements of life are at stake. It is rather unwise not to work for them from within the universal methodologies of feminist research. What Spivak intends to underline here, rather than a denial of the ability of the subaltern to speak out, is the risk inherent in the research efforts to conceptualise the subaltern as essentially distinct from the dominant discourses and institutions. The subaltern can actually speak, but they cannot be heard. Once they can speak they are not subalterns any more (Spivak 1990).

To address this theoretical/political impasse, Spivak proposes a tentative methodological way out: “strategic essentialism” (1987). The way out is tentative in two senses. First, strategic essentialism is logically tentative as it is just as strategy subject to constant alteration. Before the colonized/subaltern woman repudiates the dominant discourses and institutions, often the source of a basic/naïve benefaction, she has to see how the universalising discourse could be useful for her. She has to go on to see where that discourse meets its limits and the challenges it pose for her. It brings about a sort of provisional solidarity among different/contending groups agreeing temporarily upon an ‘essentialist’ stance to work together. Second, fundamentally concerned with heterogeneity, Spivak opts for a universal discourse as a tentative deconstructive strategy (of following the logic of the dominant and reaching at its limits). Interestingly, while other scholars keep working upon her concept of ‘strategic essentialism’ Spivak has, ever since, withdrawn from the use of this notion.

Self-Check Exercise – 3

Q 1. What is standpoint epistemology?

Feminist standpoint epistemology takes up the Marxist and Hegelian idea that the material and lived experiences of the people shape their comprehension of the social world. Feminist standpoint scholars argue that the woman’s place within society, structurally subjugated in relation to the dominant group or men, offers a better perception of the social. Dorothy Smith (1987), an early advocate of the standpoint perspective, emphasized the necessity of beginning research from the women’s experiences. Research should take into consideration women’s every day/night experiences discovering the gaps that crop up when the women attempt to accommodate their lives into the dominant mode of conceptualizing women’s situation.

Q 2. What is strong objectivity?

The notion of strong objectivity was first articulated by the feminist philosopher Sandra Harding. Strong objectivity argues for the academic, political and ethical significance of the experiences of those who have been excluded from the realm of knowledge. Harding (1986) states that knowledge created from the standpoint of the marginalized groups may put forward a ‘stronger objectivity’ due to the increased motivation for them to comprehend the views of those in positions of power. Strong objectivity tends to reveal the relations of power that remain concealed in main-stream processes of knowledge production.

Q 3. How do the feminists situated in the post-colonial spaces negotiate with the western feminist methodologies?

It is insincerity on the part of the western feminists that they fail to address the standpoints of the third-world or post/colonial women. Chandra Talpade Mohanty theorizes how the dominant feminist methodology – through the processes of generalisation, de-contextualisation and an assertion on the basis of number – constructs the ‘third-world’ woman as a monolithic subject. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, on the other hand, points out how the very research processes attending to the colonized woman fails to remember or even obliterate her capability of knowledge and speech.

Q 4. What is strategic essentialism?

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (1987) developed ‘strategic essentialism’ as a provisional deconstructive strategy of following the logic of the dominant and reaching at its limits. It is a subaltern mode of negotiating with the dominant discourses. Prior to the act of discarding the dominant forms of knowledge the subaltern woman needs to judge whether that is beneficial for her.

Summary

By the end of this module we get to know about a number of contending voices questioning the dominant modes of research methodology. What remains common in them is a feminist consciousness that tends to produce possibilities of intellectual and emotional articulations for all women. Feminism works ‘from the periphery to the core’ questioning the dominant forms of knowledge building that define, in fixed terms, who can be a knower and what can be known.

Web Links

http://ggsc.wnmu.edu/gap/wadsworth.htm

http://http-server.carleton.ca/~adoucet/pdfs/Doucet_Mauthner_Feminist_Methods_2006.pdf

www.catunescomujer.org/catunesco…/Gender_and_Methodology.doc

you can view video on Feminist Methodology in Sociological Research

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