Feminist Research

Feminist research developed as a response to two perceived related failings in western social sciences. The first was the relative invisibility of women and a lack of concern with the gender-specific issues that influenced their lives. The second concerned the practices of social research and the processes through which knowledge was constructed. It was argued that the social world had been studied from the perspective of male interests and concerns, and in ignorance of the different picture that emerged when focusing on women’s lives and ways of seeing. Knowledge, which was presented as neutral, objective, and value-free, was, instead, partial and gendered. The purpose of feminist research was to bring women’s experiences more fully into view. This necessitated challenging conventional research practices, as well as radically reviewing many of the taken-for-granted assumptions about the nature of social science. The overall aim was to understand better the nature of gender inequalities.

It is not the focus on women, gender, or gendered lives per se, however, that makes a research project feminist. At first, feminist research was defined as such if it was seen to be about, by, and for women. More recently, however, it has been suggested that feminist approaches to research can be identified through their framing by theories of gender and power, their normative frameworks and notions of justice (however conceived), their focus on transformation and social change, and ideas about ethics and accountability (Ramazanoglu, 2002). Views about these issues are not held uniformly, and identification of when research [Page 379]might be feminist is never an open-and-shutcase. There is also overlap between the defining features of feminist work and other approaches to social investigation.

Early on in their discussions about doing social research, feminists distinguished between method, methodology, and EPISTEMOLOGY (Harding, 1987). Method was used to refer to the techniques and tools used in conducting research. Methodology was concerned with how those methods were actually operationalized and put into practice. Epistemology focused on the philosophical arguments for deciding what kinds of knowledge are possible and how to ensure that they are adequate and legitimate. Feminists have continually refined their ideas about these issues, and there has been extensive debate in relation to them.