Feminist Ethnography

Defining Ethnography

The ethnographic method originated in anthropology in the mid-19th century and developed into its most characteristic form during the 20th century, when sociologists joined anthropologists in adopting it. Essentially, ethnography involves immersion in a social context with the purpose of collecting, and then recounting in an intelligible way, descriptive data concerning the world of the people being studied. Ethnography is a relational experience, and fieldworkers aim to understand the social setting from the perspective of those with whom they spend time. The method of data collection is often called “participant observation”: The researcher observes the life of the group under investigation by participating in it. In the process, the researcher comes to understand the group's underlying beliefs and assumptions and must negotiate a position as both outsider and insider. The term ethnography refers to both process (the act of doing research) and product (the written account of the research that is produced when fieldwork is complete). Anthropologists have generally carried out ethnographic research in non-Western settings, and sociologists have adopted the method for use in the West. Subsequently, other subject areas including nursing studies, geography, communication studies, and religious studies have embraced ethnographic methods. Ethnography has also diversified, with contemporary forms including cyber-ethnography, photographic ethnography, and the autobiographical form autoethnography.

Overview

Notwithstanding some antecedents, feminist ethnographic research originates principally from the contributions of the women's movement of the 1960s and 1970s. In anthropology, feminist ethnography operates both as a new area of research and as a critique of the discipline's tendency to exclude women from field analyses or to present them in reductive ways. Feminist ethnography is part of the larger challenge that feminism posed to positivist social research, in which researchers approach the setting logically, objectively, and with predetermined criteria for measurement. Feminists instead tended to advocate analyses that were detailed, flexible, and subjective, arguing that they would be more conducive to representing women's experiences in a patriarchal society.

In its earlier days, feminist ethnography was chiefly concerned with women. Like other feminist research, feminist ethnography was about, by, and for women. It involved giving voice to marginalized women whose experiences had rarely been represented or understood. In this way, feminist academic ethnographers saw themselves as giving a voice to the voiceless. The critical focus on gender that most feminist ethnographers took involved questioning com-monsense assumptions about men and women, masculinity and femininity. If, as social science contended, gender was socially constructed, the task of ethnography was to discover exactly how this construction took place in different social contexts. With this critical focus, a more general concern with gender rather than just women arose: The construction of gender identities and relations in the field became important questions. As the interdisciplinary field of men's studies developed during the 1980s and 1990s, feminist ethnographers began to study men and masculinity. Often these investigations were attentive to issues of gendered power: By “studying up”—the term for research on more powerful men—researchers could find out how power dynamics operated. More recently, the postmodern turn in the field of feminist ethnography has resulted in the questioning of many earlier assumptions. The focus of ethnographies has turned to narrative, deconstruction, and representation. The earlier interest in discovering the authentic gendered experiences of men and women as they are materially and economically structured has been replaced by attention to diversity, representation, and the symbolic realm.

...