Feminist Methodologies

Feminist methodology connotes a way of analyzing and theorizing research methods, principles, and knowledge production from a feminist perspective. In particular, it seeks to render visible the power relations of everyday life and of academic scholarship. Reflexivity and situated knowledge undergird this methodology. Scholars in human geography subdisciplines tend to deploy this methodology and often relate qualitative and quantitative methods. Research strategies driven by a feminist methodology usually hold political and social change as necessary motivations for and outcomes of academic study. By design, this research is frequently multiscalar and attuned to contextual variability.

Much like poststructuralism and postmodernism, the designation of a specifically feminist methodology emerged during the cultural turn. Geographers began to engage more closely with feminist views of knowledge production in the 1990s, and feminist methodology has continued to gain traction and application within the field since then. Notable contributions of feminist methodology to geography include making explicit unspoken or hidden perspectives, legitimizing research into such areas, and examining processes at multiple and fine scales.

Initially, feminist research about women and the category of Woman pioneered the use and development of a feminist methodology. Over time, feminist research broadened its purview and began to unpack meanings and representations of femininity and masculinity. Shifts within the intellectual landscape subsequently led feminists to investigate gender relations and gendered spaces and places. Feminist methodology commanded an important position in many of these research endeavors. In contemporary scholarship, feminist methodology considers myriad power relations, including but not limited to gender. A feminist methodology does not present power as static and passive. Instead, it highlights the relationality of power at all research stages. This emphasis works to disrupt essentialized perceptions of people, places, identities, or experiences. Rather than reproducing singular [Page 1099]or reified representations, a feminist methodology helps scholars foreground micronarratives and dynamic social processes. The joining of feminist methodology and feminist empirical topics throughout the years has led to a greater focus on underexamined geographic scales, especially the household and the body.

Studies informed by feminist methodology draw on a range of research techniques, such as interviewing, focus groups, archival work, participant observation, statistical analysis, and geographic information systems and science. Although feminist methodology has been linked most closely with qualitative methods, current research projects incorporate quantitative and mixed-method approaches as well. What ties these disparate methods together under the heading of feminist methodology is a shared sensibility about how research unfolds and what needs to be accounted for throughout the research process. In short, feminist methodology foregrounds power relations, compels scholars to consider their own roles in all phases of data collection and analysis, and accents the partial and situated nature of knowledge production.

Awareness of the researcher's influential presence in and relationship to knowledge production constitutes reflexivity. Feminist methodology uses reflexivity to make visible the power relations weaving through a study and everyday life. Reflexively considering the gendered, classed, and raced aspects of research, for example, prompts different questions from alleging the perspective of the separate, and purportedly all-knowing, observer. Reflexivity as a process helps illustrate how both researcher and research subjects jointly produce knowledge within and through numerous and unequal power relations.

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