Feminist Theory

Jo Ann Arinder

Feminist theory falls under the umbrella of critical theory, which in general have the purpose of destabilizing systems of power and oppression. Feminist theory will be discussed here as a theory with a lower case ‘t’, however this is not meant to imply that it is not a Theory or cannot be used as one, only to acknowledge that for some it may be a sub-genre of Critical Theory, while for others it stands alone. According to Egbert and Sanden (2020), some scholars see critical paradigms as extensions of the interpretivist, but there is also an emphasis on oppression and lived experience grounded in subjectivist epistemology.

The purpose of using a feminist lens is to enable the discovery of how people interact within systems and possibly offer solutions to confront and eradicate oppressive systems and structures. Feminist theory considers the lived experience of any person/people, not just women, with an emphasis on oppression.  While there may not be a consensus on where feminist theory fits as a theory or paradigm, disruption of oppression is a core tenant of feminist work. As hooks (2000) states, “Simply put, feminism is a movement to end sexism, sexist exploitation and oppression. I liked this definition because it does not imply that men were the enemy” (p. viii).

Previous Studies

Marxism and socialism are key components in the heritage.of feminist theory. The origins of feminist theory can be found in the 18th century with growth in the 1970s’ and 1980s’ equality movements. According to Burton (2014), feminist theory has its roots in Marxism but specifically looks to Engles’ (1884) work as one possible starting point. Burton (2014) notes that, “Origin of the Family and commentaries on it were central texts to the feminist movement in its early years because of the felt need to understand the origins and subsequent development of the subordination of the female sex” (p. 2). Work in feminist theory, including research regarding gender equality, is ongoing.

Gender equality continues to be an issue today, and research into gender equality in education is still moving feminist theory forward. For example, Pincock’s (2017) study discusses the impact of repressive norms on the education of girls in Tanzania. The author states that, “…considerations of what empowerment looks like in relation to one’s sexuality are particularly important in relation to schooling for teenage girls as a route to expanding their agency” (p. 909). This consideration can be extended to any oppressed group within an educational setting and is not an area of inquiry relegated to the oppression of only female students. For example, non-binary students face oppression within educational systems and even male students can face barriers, and students are often still led towards what are considered “gender appropriate” studies. This creates a system of oppression that requires active work to disrupt.

Looking at representation in the literature used in education is another area of inquiry in feminist research. For example, Earles (2017) focused on physical educational settings to explore relationships “between gendered literary characters and stories and the normative and marginal responses produced by children” (p. 369). In this research, Earles found evidence to support that a contradiction between the literature and children’s lived experiences exists. The author suggests that educators can help to continue the reduction of oppressive gender norms through careful selection of literature and spaces to allow learners opportunities for appropriate discussions about these inconsistencies.

In another study, Mackie (1999) explored incorporating feminist theory into evaluation research. Mackie was evaluating curriculum created for English language learners that recognized the dual realities of some students, also known as the intersectionality of identity, and concluded that this recognition empowered students. Mackie noted that valuing experience and identity created a potential for change on an individual and community level and “Feminist and other types of critical teaching and research provide needed balance to TESL and applied linguistics” (p. 571).Further, Bierema and Cseh (2003) used a feminist research framework to examine previously ignored structural inequalities that affect the lives of women working in the field of human resources.

Model of Feminist Theory

Figure 1 presents a model of feminist theory that begins with the belief that systems exist that oppress and work against individuals. The model then shows that oppression is based on intersecting identities that can create discrimination and exclusion. The model indicates the idea that, through knowledge and action, oppressive systems can be disrupted to support change and understanding.

Model of Feminist Theory

The core concepts in feminist theory are sex, gender, race, discrimination, equality, difference, and choice. There are systems and structures in place that work against individuals based on these qualities and against equality and equity. Research in critical paradigms requires the belief that, through the exploration of these existing conditions in the current social order, truths can be revealed. More important, however, this exploration can simultaneously build awareness of oppressive systems and create spaces for diverse voices to speak for themselves (Egbert & Sanden, 2019).

Constructs 

Feminism is concerned with the constructs of intersectionality, dimensions of social life, social inequality, and social transformation. Through feminist research, lasting contributions have been made to understanding the complexities and changes in the gendered division of labor. Men and women should be politically, economically, and socially equal and this theory does not subscribe to differences or similarities between men, nor does it refer to excluding men or only furthering women’s causes. Feminist theory works to support change and understanding through acknowledging and disrupting power and oppression.

Proposition 

Feminist theory proposes that when power and oppression are acknowledged and disrupted, understanding, advocacy, and change can occur.

Using the Model

There are many potential ways to utilize this model in research and practice. First, teachers and students can consider what systems of power exist in their classroom, school, or district. They can question how these systems are working to create discrimination and exclusion. By considering existing social structures, they can acknowledge barriers and issues inherit to the system. Once these issues are acknowledged, they can be disrupted so that change and understanding can begin. This may manifest, for example, as considering how past colonialism has oppressed learners of English as a second or foreign language.

The use of feminist theory in the classroom can ensure that the classroom is created, in advance, to consider barriers to learning faced by learners due to sex, gender, difference, race, or ability. This can help to reduce oppression created by systemic issues. In the case of the English language classroom, learners may be facing oppression based on their native language or country of origin. Facing these barriers in and out of the classroom can affect learners’ access to education. Considering these barriers in planning and including efforts to mitigate the issues and barriers faced by learners is a use of feminist theory.

Feminist research is interested in disrupting systems of oppression or barriers created from these systems with a goal of creating change. All research can include feminist theory when the research adds to efforts to work against and advocate to eliminate the power and oppression that exists within systems or structures that, in particular, oppress women. An examination of education in general could be useful since education is a field typically dominated by women; however, women are not often in leadership roles in the field. In the same way, using feminist theory for an examination into the lack of people of color and male teachers represented in education might also be useful. Action research is another area that can use feminist theory. Action research is often conducted in the pursuit of establishing changes that are discovered during a project. Feminism and action research are both concerned with creating change, which makes them a natural pairing.

Pre-existing beliefs about what feminism means can make including it in classroom practice or research challenging. Understanding that feminism is about reducing oppression for everyone and sharing that definition can reduce this challenge. hooks (2000) said that, “A male who has divested of male privilege, who has embraced feminist politics, is a worthy comrade in struggle, in no way a threat to feminism, whereas a female who remains wedded to sexist thinking and behavior infiltrating feminist movement is a dangerous threat”(p. 12). As Angela Davis noted during a speech at Western Washington University in 2017, “Everything is a feminist issue.” Feminist theory is about questioning existing structures and whether they are creating barriers for anyone. An interest in the reduction of barriers is feminist. Anyone can believe in the need to eliminate oppression and work as teachers or researchers to actively to disrupt systems of oppression.

Bierema, L. L., & Cseh, M. (2003). Evaluating AHRD research using a feminist research framework.  Human Resource Development Quarterly ,  14 (1), 5–26.

Burton, C. (2014).   Subordination: Feminism and social theory . Routledge.

Earles, J. (2017). Reading gender: A feminist, queer approach to children’s literature and children’s discursive agency.  Gender and Education, 29 (3), 369–388.

Egbert, J., & Sanden, S. (2019).  Foundations of education research: Understanding theoretical components . Taylor & Francis.

Hooks, B. (2000). Feminism is for everybody: Passionate politics . South End Press.

Mackie, A. (1999). Possibilities for feminism in ESL education and research.  TESOL  Quarterly, 33 (3), 566-573.

Pincock, K. (2018). School, sexuality and problematic girlhoods: Reframing ‘empowerment’ discourse.  Third World Quarterly, 39 (5), 906-919.

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Feminist Theory by Jennifer Carlson , Raka Ray LAST REVIEWED: 01 July 2020 LAST MODIFIED: 27 July 2011 DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199756384-0020

Feminist theory explores both inequality in gender relations and the constitution of gender. It is best understood as both an intellectual and a normative project. What is commonly understood as feminist theory accompanied the feminist movement in the mid-seventies, though there are key texts from the 19th and early- to mid-20th centuries that represent early feminist thought. Whereas feminist theories first began as an attempt to explain women’s oppression globally, following a grand theoretical approach akin to Marxism, the questions and emphases in the field have undergone some major shifts. Two primary shifts have been (1) from universalizing to particularizing and contextualizing women’s experiences and (2) from conceptualizing men and women as categories and focusing on the category “women” to questioning the content of that category, and moving to the exploration of gendered practices. Thus, while many theorists do focus on the question of how gender inequality manifests in institutions such as the workplace, home, armed forces, economy, or public sphere, others explore the range of practices that have come to be defined as masculine or feminine and how gender is constituted in relation to other social relations. Feminist theories can thus be used to explain how institutions operate with normative gendered assumptions and selectively reward or punish gendered practices. Many contemporary feminists look beyond the United States to focus on the effects of transnational economic, political, and cultural linkages on shaping gender.

While Signs and Feminist Studies were the first journals dedicated to interdisciplinary feminist work, there are now several specialist journals across the social sciences. Feminism & Psychology is a leading journal in psychology and gender, while Feminist Media Studies focuses on media and communication studies. Gender & Society is the top journal in sociology of gender. While Hypatia and Feminist Theory mainly publish feminist philosophy, their articles draw heavily on works across the humanities and the social sciences.

Feminism & Psychology .

A leading journal in gender and psychology, Feminism & Psychology features empirical and theoretical studies in psychology targeting audiences of both practitioners and academics.

Feminist Media Studies .

A transnational, transdisciplinary journal, Feminist Media Studies presents original empirical work on gender in the field of media and communication studies.

Feminist Studies .

Feminist Studies is a leading journal in feminist thought and politics. First published in 1972, its origins are directly traceable to American feminist activism in the late 1960s and early 1970s. True to its beginnings, the journal’s articles aim to provide both scholarly and political insight.

Feminist Theory .

This British interdisciplinary journal features feminist thought from scholars in a variety of disciplines within the social sciences and humanities.

Gender & Society .

The leading journal in the sociology of gender, Gender & Society features empirical research that provides theoretically sophisticated insights into gender as a core social phenomenon in society. The journal publishes work in sociology as well as anthropology, economics, history, political science, and social psychology.

Hypatia is a highly readable, engaging, and interdisciplinary journal of feminist philosophy that features cutting-edge work from feminist thinkers. First published in the 1980s, Hypatia ’s readership includes women studies scholars and philosophers.

First published in 1975, Signs has become a leading journal in feminist theory and gender studies. Its list of pathbreaking publications include work from Adrienne Rich, Evelyn Nakano Glenn, Raewyn Connell, Heidi Hartmann, Nancy Fraser, and Iris Marion Young, among others.

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Handbook of Feminist Research: Theory and Praxis

  • Edited by: Sharlene Nagy Hesse-Biber
  • Publisher: SAGE Publications, Inc.
  • Publication year: 2012
  • Online pub date: December 22, 2014
  • Discipline: Anthropology
  • Methods: Feminism , Feminist research , Survey research
  • DOI: https:// doi. org/10.4135/9781483384740
  • Keywords: feminist theories , feminist theory , knowledge , race , social justice , standpoint , women's studies Show all Show less
  • Print ISBN: 9781412980593
  • Online ISBN: 9781483384740
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Subject index

This Handbook presents both a theoretical and practical approach to conducting social science research on, for, and about women. It develops an understanding of feminist research by introducing a range of feminist epistemologies, methodologies, and emergent methods that have had a significant impact on feminist research practice and women's studies scholarship. Contributors to the Second Edition continue to highlight the close link between feminist research and social change and transformation.

The new edition expands the base of scholarship into new areas, with 12 entirely new chapters on topics such as the natural sciences, social work, the health sciences, and environmental studies. It extends discussion of the intersections of race, class, gender, and globalization, as well as transgender, transsexualism and the queering of gender identities. All 22 chapters retained from the first edition are updated with the most current scholarship, including a focus on the role that new technologies play in the feminist research process.

Discover the latest news from Author Sharlene Nagy Hesse-Biber:

Visit http://www.fordham.edu/Campus_Resources/eNewsroom/topstories_2397.asp

Front Matter

  • Acknowledgments
  • About the Editor
  • About the Contributors
  • Chapter 1 | Feminist Research: Exploring, Interrogating, and Transforming the Interconnections of Epistemology, Methodology, and Method
  • Chapter 2 | Feminist Empiricism
  • Chapter 3 | Feminist Standpoints
  • Chapter 4 | Postmodern, Post-Structural, and Critical Theories
  • Chapter 5 | Truth and Truths in Feminist Knowledge Production
  • Chapter 6 | Critical Perspectives on Feminist Epistemology
  • Chapter 7 | Interconnections and Configurations: Toward a Global Feminist Ethnography
  • Chapter 8 | Intersectionality: A Transformative Paradigm in Feminist Theory and Social Justice
  • Chapter 9 | The Synergistic Practice of Theory and Method
  • Chapter 10 | Feminist Ethnography: Histories, Challenges, and Possibilities
  • Chapter 11 | Feminist Qualitative Interviewing: Experience, Talk, and Knowledge
  • Chapter 12 | Using Survey Research as a Quantitative Method for Feminist Social Change
  • Chapter 13 | The Link Between Feminist Theory and Methods in Experimental Research
  • Chapter 14 | Feminist Evaluation Research
  • Chapter 15 | Feminist Approaches to Inquiry in the Natural Sciences: Practices for the Lab
  • Chapter 16 | Participatory Action Research and Feminisms: Social Inequalities and Transformative Praxis
  • Chapter 17 | Narratives and Numbers: Feminist Multiple Methods Research
  • Chapter 18 | Feminism, Grounded Theory, and Situational Analysis Revisited
  • Chapter 19 | Feminist Perspectives on Social Movement Research
  • Chapter 20 | Feminist Research and Activism to Promote Health Equity
  • Chapter 21 | Joining the Conversation: Social Work Contributions to Feminist Research
  • Chapter 22 | Writing Feminist Research
  • Chapter 23 | Putting Feminist Research Principles into Practice
  • Chapter 24 | Challenges and Strategies in Feminist Knowledge Building, Pedagogy, and Praxis
  • Chapter 25 | Authority and Representation in Feminist Research
  • Chapter 26 | The Feminism Question in Science: What Does It Mean to “Do Social Science as a Feminist”?
  • Chapter 27 | The Feminist Practice of Holistic Reflexivity
  • Chapter 28 | Feminist Research Ethics
  • Chapter 29 | Transgender, Transsexualism, and the Queering of Gender Identities: Debates for Feminist Research
  • Chapter 30 | Future Directions in Difference Research: Recognizing and Responding to Difference in the Research Process
  • Chapter 31 | Feminizing Global Research/Globalizing Feminist Research: Methods and Practice Under Globalization
  • Chapter 32 | From Course to Dis-Course: Mainstreaming Feminist Pedagogical, Methodological, and Theoretical Perspectives
  • Chapter 33 | Feminist Pedagogy Reconsidered
  • Chapter 34 | Teaching, Techniques, and Technologies of Feminist Methodology: Online and on the Ground

Back Matter

  • Author Index

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The Oxford Handbook of Qualitative Research

A newer edition of this book is available.

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8 Feminist Qualitative Research: Toward Transformation of Science and Society

Maureen C. McHugh, Department of Psychology, Indiana University of Pennsylvania

  • Published: 04 August 2014
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Feminist research is described in terms of its purposes of knowledge about women’s lives, advocacy for women, analysis of gender oppression, and transformation of society. Feminist critiques of social science research are reviewed in relation to the development of methodological and epistemological positions. Feminist research is viewed as contributing to the transformation of science from empiricism to postmodernism. Reflexivity, collaboration, power analysis, and advocacy are discussed as common practices of feminist qualitative research. Several qualitative approaches to research are described in relation to feminist research goals, with illustrations of feminist research included. Validity and voice are identified as particular challenges in the conduct of feminist qualitative research. Intersectionality and double consciousness are reviewed as feminist contributions to transformation of science. Some emerging and innovative forms of feminist qualitative research are highlighted in relation to potential future directions.

What Is Feminist Research?

A starting principle of feminist research is that psychology should, at minimum, be nonsexist. Feminist scholars have identified numerous sexist biases in the existing psychological literature; psychological research is sexist to the extent that it incorporates stereotypic thinking about women or gender ( McHugh, Koeske, & Frieze, 1986 ). Sexist bias also refers to theories or research that do not have equal relevance to individuals of both sexes and to research in which greater attention or value is given to the life experiences of one sex ( McHugh et al., 1986 ). Research practices and methods that produce, promote, or privilege sex/gender inequalities are sexist and unacceptable.

Feminist research is research that is not only nonsexist, but also works actively for the benefit and advancement of women ( McHugh et al., 1986 ) and puts gender at the center of one’s inquiry. Specifically, feminist research examines the gendered context of women’s lives, exposes gender inequalities, empowers women, advocates for social change, and/or improves the status or material reality of women’s lives ( McHugh & Cosgrove, 1998 ; 2002 ). According to Letherby (2003) , feminist researchers have a “political commitment to produce useful knowledge that will make a difference in women’s lives through social and individual change” (p. 4). Feminist research is not research about women, but research for women; it is knowledge to be used in the transformation of sexist society ( Cook & Fonow, 1990 ; McHugh & Cosgrove, 1998 ).

Feminist research cannot be fully identified by its focus on women or its focus on gender disparity, as sexist research may entail a similar focus. Furthermore, feminist research cannot be specified by any single approach to the discovery or creation of knowledge, and feminist research is not defined by any orthodox substantive position ( Jaggar, 2008a ; McHugh & Cosgrove, 2002 ). However, feminist researchers share common perspectives. Hesse-Biber and Leavy (2008) identified three shared concerns: giving voice to women’s lives and experiences, overcoming gender inequities at the personal and social level, and improving women’s opportunities and the quality of women’s lives. Hawkesworth (2006) argues for three similar commitments of feminist research: “to struggle against coercive hierarchies linked to gender (and other statuses); to revolt against practices, values and knowledge systems that subordinate and denigrate women; and to promote women’s freedom and empowerment” (p. 7). Jaggar (2008a) described feminist research as distinguished by its dedication to the value of gender justice and its “commitment to producing knowledge useful in opposing the many varieties of gender injustice” (p. ix). According to Jaggar (2008a) , feminist research can be uniquely identified by its dedication to the value of gender justice in knowledge and in the world. And the feminist commitment to women’s emancipation requires knowing the situations and circumstances of women’s lives; to determine what needs to be “criticized, challenged or changed,” feminists need valid knowledge of the oppressions and marginalization of women ( Code, 1995 , p. 20). Feminist research is an approach to research that seeks knowledge for the liberation and equality of women.

To what extent can research, qualitative or otherwise, contribute to feminist goals of transforming society toward gender equality? Some feminists have questioned the liberation potential of research and especially the possibility of traditional (i.e., experimental, quantitative, and objective) research to produce knowledge that will alleviate gender inequity and oppression (e.g., Hollway, 1989 ). Keller (1982) viewed feminism and science as in conflict, but argued that the exploration of the conflict between feminism and science could be both productive and transformative. Some feminists have specifically called for the transformation of science to incorporate feminist values (e.g., Wiley Okrulik, Thielen-Wilson, & Morton, 1989 ). Feminist researchers, in their quest to transform society, have argued for and contributed to the transformation of (social) science research. In this chapter, I identify the dimensions and characteristics of feminist research and examine research practices and methodological and epistemological positions in relation to feminist tenets. Feminist research is not viewed as a static entity, but as a transforming and transformative practice.

(Trained as a social psychologist, I identify as a feminist psychologist. I studied at the University of Pittsburgh, working with Dr. Irene Frieze. My first research study, conducted as an undergraduate student at Chatham College, a woman’s college in Pittsburgh, examined problem-solving performance of women students as impacted by context; students completed a series of mathematical word problems in an all-female or a mixed-sex group. Women students performed better in a single-sex context in what today might be considered a study of stereotype threat. I pursued an interest in sex differences in graduate school, and my doctoral dissertation examined the intrinsic motivation of women and men as a function of task feedback. Over the course of my career, I became increasingly critical of both the experimental method of research and the study of sex differences. My own epistemological and methodological path parallels the progression of feminist research as described here.)

Feminist Research as Corrective

Feminists challenged the neglect of women’s lives and experiences in existing social science research (e.g., Wallston, 1981 ; Weisstein, 2006. Feminists have criticized psychology (and other disciplines) both for not studying the lives and experiences of women and for the development of sexist research theory and practice ( McHugh et al., 1986 ). One contribution of feminist research has been to offer a corrective to traditional research that either neglected women or presented a stereotypic or biased view of women. For example, early feminist research identified experiences of women including widespread gender discrimination and violence against women ( Chrisler & McHugh, 2011 ; Jaggar, 2008a ). As a corrective to research that neglects the study of women’s lives, feminist research has transformed the content of research in most disciplines. The expansion of feminist research over the past four decades has transformed knowledge in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences ( Hawkesworth, 2006 ). The transformation of psychological science was examined by a task force of the Society of Women in Psychology ( Eagly, Eaton, Rose, Riger, & McHugh, 2012 ). Eagly and the task force members documented the growth of published research on women and gender in the psychological literature and its movement from the periphery of the discipline toward its center. They concluded that research on women is now situated as a methodologically and theoretically diverse content area within contemporary psychological science. Yet, by their broad definition, psychology of women and gender articles accounted for few (4.0 percent from 1960 to 2009 and 4.3 percent from 2000 to 2009) of the articles in the prominent journals of psychology. And for most of the research that Eagly and her colleagues documented, researchers did not label their research as feminist nor did the research explicitly address feminist goals of gender equality or advocacy for women.

A second important contribution of feminist researchers and theorists has been their critical analysis of research and the production of knowledge. Feminists have criticized research that characterizes women as having deficits and critically examined asymmetrical and inequitable constructions of the cultural masculine over the cultural feminine ( Jaggar, 2008a ). Similarly, Geiger (1990) characterizes feminist research as challenging the androcentric (male-centered) construction of women’s lives, and Wiley (2000) notes that feminists question androcentric or sexist frameworks or assumptions that had been unchallenged. Pushing against that which is taken for granted, feminist inquiry probes absences, silences, omissions, and distortions and challenges commonsense understandings that are based on inadequate research. For example, feminists challenge conclusions about human behavior based on evidence taken from narrow (e.g., male, European-American, educated, and middle-class) samples of human populations ( Hawkesworth, 2006 ). Furthermore, feminists exposed the (gender) power dynamics that operate in many aspects of women’s lives, including in research, and have challenged existing explanatory accounts of women’s experiences ( Hawkesworth, 2006 ). One goal of feminist research then is to attend to the power dynamics in the conduct of research, to expose invisible or concealed power dynamics. The demonstration that gender and other contextual variables can create bias in the scientific research of individuals, and that such bias exists in the science accepted as valid by scientific community, is an important contribution of feminism to science ( Rosser, 2008 ). Thus, one function of feminist research has been to call for the transformation/correction of science as a series of sexist and stereotypic depictions of women and of research that devalues women. Hawkesworth (2006) acknowledges the transformational character of feminist research as “interrogating accepted beliefs, challenging shared assumptions and reframing research questions” (p. 4).

(In 1975, I began teaching Psychology of Women, and I was keenly aware that there was very little research published on the experiences or concerns of women. As a member of Alice Eagly’s Task Force on the Feminist Transformation of Psychology, I agreed that there has been an explosion of research on women and gender over the past four decades, which Eagly et al. effectively document. However, I am ambivalent about the degree to which most of that research has improved the status or lives of women.)

Challenging Traditional Methods

The experimental approach has been critiqued as inauthentic, reductionistic, and removed from the social context in which behavior is embedded ( Bohan, 1993 ; Sherif, 1979 ). Others have exposed the laboratory experiment as a social context in which the (male) experimenter controls the situation, manipulates the independent variable, observes women as the “objects” of study, and evaluates and interprets their behavior based on his own perspective ( McHugh et al., 1986 ). From this critical perspective, the traditional psychological experiment is a replication of the power dynamics that operate in other social and institutional settings. The interests and concerns of the research subjects are subordinated to the interests of those of the researcher and theorist ( Unger, 1983 ). Feminists have argued that the controlled and artificial research situation may elicit more conventional behavior from participants, may inhibit self-disclosure, and may make the situation “unreal” to the participants ( McHugh et al., 1986 ). From this perspective, the experiment is not the preferred method of research.

Feminists challenged the pervasive androcentrism evidenced in empirical research. For example, in the 1980s, a task force of the Society for Women in Psychology examined the ways in which psychological research could be conducted in a nonsexist way ( McHugh et al., 1986 ). The task force’s guidelines ( McHugh et al., 1986 ) challenged traditional empirical psychology by examining the role that the values, biases, and assumptions of researchers have on all aspects of the research process. There is always a relationship of some kind between the scientist and the “object” of study since the scientist cannot absent himself from the world ( Hubbard, 1988 ). Selection of topics and questions, choice of methods, recruitment of participants, selection of audience, and the potential uses of research results all occur within a sociohistorical context that ultimately influences what we “know” about a topic or a group of people ( McHugh & Cosgrove, 2004 ). The realization of the operation of sexist bias in science/psychology led some feminist researchers to question the value of the scientific method and to more carefully consider issues of methods, methodology, and epistemology. The study of gender raised the issue of how context and values challenge traditional conceptions of objectivity ( Rosser, 2008 ). The feminist challenge to the possibility of impartial knowledge and the recognition of the operation of values in science impacted the research conducted in some of the sciences ( Rosser, 2008 ; Schiebinger, 1999 ).

Feminists, including Hollway (1989) and Hubbard (1988) , provided a critique of the “context-stripping” and alleged objectivity of scientific research. According to Hubbard, the illusion that the scientist can observe the “object” of his inquiry as if in a vacuum gives the scientist the authority to “make facts.” She observed that science is made by a self-perpetuating group of chosen people; scientists obtain the education and credentials required and then follow established procedures to “make” science. The illusion of objectivity gives the scientist the power to name, describe, and structure reality and experience. The pretense that science is objective obscures the politics of research and its role in supporting a certain construction of reality. By pretending to be neutral, scientists often support the status quo. “By claiming to be objective and neutral, scientists align themselves with the powerful against the powerless” ( Hubbard, 1988 , p. 13). In terms of gender, male scientists’ alleged objectivity has given scientific validity to their mistaken contentions about women’s inferiority.

Feminist Epistemology

Prior to conducting research designed to address feminist goals, Harding (1987) advised feminists to understand the distinctions among methods, methodology, and epistemology. Others have similarly called for feminists to be aware of their epistemological positions and biases (e.g., Cosgrove & McHugh, 2002 ; Unger, 1988 ). Methods are the concrete techniques for gathering evidence or data such as experiments, interviews, or surveys. Methodology is the study of methods, the philosophical position on how research should proceed. Epistemology is the most central issue for feminist research according to Harding (1987) , Stanley and Wise (1993) , and others. Epistemology involves the study of answers to the question: How can we know? Epistemology is a framework for specifying what constitutes knowledge and how we know it. An epistemological framework specifies not only what knowledge is and how to recognize it, but who are the knowers and by what means someone becomes a knower or expert ( McHugh & Cosgrove, 2002 ). Epistemological frameworks also outline the means by which competing knowledge claims are adjudicated ( Stanley & Wise, 1993 ). Harding (1986) identified three distinct feminist epistemological perspectives: empiricism, standpoint, and social construction. These epistemological perspectives are briefly reviewed here prior to a description of feminist qualitative research.

Feminist Empiricists

Feminist empiricism adopts the scientific method as the way to understand or know the world. Feminist empiricists believe in the scientific method for discovering reality; they assert that science is an approach that can provide value-neutral data and objective findings ( Chrisler & McHugh, 2011 ; McHugh & Cosgrove, 2004 ). Their position is consistent with the modernist perspective. The modernist perspective endorses adherence to a positivist-empiricist model, a model that privileges the scientific method of the natural sciences as the only valid route to knowledge ( Cosgrove & McHugh, 2008 ). From this perspective, there is a single reality that can be known through the application of the methods of science, including repeated objective observations. Objectivity refers to a dispassionate, impartial, and disengaged position and is valued. Bias is acknowledged as impacting scientific research but is viewed as a distortion that can be eliminated or corrected ( McHugh & Cosgrove, 2004 ). The Guidelines for Nonsexist Research provide examples of errors and biases in research that should be eliminated ( McHugh et al, 1986 ). Feminist empiricists attempt to produce a feminist science that, without androcentric bias, more accurately reflects the world ( McHugh et al., 1986 ). To varying degrees, many feminists continue to conduct empirical research based on approved scientific methods.

(As a graduate student, I co-chaired (with Irene Frieze) the Task Force to Establish Guidelines for Nonsexist Research in Psychology for Division 35 of the American Psychological Association (APA). We started the project as empiricists hoping to help eliminate sexist bias from psychological research, especially research on sex difference. This experience introduced me to the diverse positions taken by feminist scientists, and, in the process of addressing sexist bias in research, my own understanding of the limits of empirical research developed. I became increasingly critical of the scientific method even as I conducted a social psychological experiment involving some deception for my degree.)

Feminists have refuted “scientific” evidence that women are inherently different from and inferior to men. Feminist empiricists have employed the experimental methods of science to provide evidence for gender equality ( Deaux, 1984 ; McHugh & Cosgove, 2002 ). However, there is debate over the success of using science to refute sexism in science. Shields (1975) contended that research comparing men and women has never been value-free or neutral but rather has typically been used to justify the subordination of women. Alternatively, Deaux (1984) concluded that empirical evidence has been used to effectively change belief that differences between men and women are universal, stable, and significant, and Hyde (1986) endorsed the use of scientific and quantitative measures to debunk gender stereotypes. Eagly and her colleagues (2012) concluded that research on women and gender has transformed psychology over the past fifty years and has influenced public policy. However, McHugh and Cosgrove (2002) , among others, have questioned whether the tools of science are adequate for the feminist study of women and gender. Burman (1997) argued that by employing empirical methods, feminist empiricists help to maintain a commitment to existing methods that neglect, distort, or stereotype women.

The study of sex differences is central to feminist psychology ( McHugh & Cosgrove, 2002 ); arguments for the inclusion of women in social science research are based, in part, on the recognition that women have different experiences and perspectives. Critics, however, contend that research on sex differences typically leads to the devaluation and discrimination of women and confirms stereotypes (through biased methods) (e.g., Hare-Mustin & Maracek, 1990 ; 1994a ). MacKinnon (1990) argued that “A discourse of difference serves as ideology to neutralize, rationalize, and cover up disparities of power” (p. 213). Feminists have argued that interest in sex differences involves interest in justifying differential treatment of women and men and that there is a confirmation bias operating. Research that “finds” a sex difference is more likely to be published, publicized, and cited than is research refuting the existence of a difference between men and women (e.g., Epstein, 1988 ; Hyde, 1994 ; Kimball, 1995 ; Unger, 1998 ). Furthermore, research is often constructed to produce sex differences ( McHugh et al., 1986 ). For example, Kimball (1995) demonstrates how the research on sex differences in math ability has been carefully constructed to produce differences (i.e., the use of standardized tests administered to very large samples) and related research not demonstrating difference (i.e., classroom tests and research using smaller, more heterogeneous groups) is ignored.

Through the debate on the study of sex differences, feminists continued to recognize the politics of research. Increasingly, feminists recognized that research that supports the status quo and the view of women as less than men is more likely to be funded, conducted, published, and widely cited ( Epstein, 1988 ; McHugh & Cosgrove, 2002 ; Unger, 1998 ). Sexist bias not only impacts the design and conduct of research but is apparent in the interpretation and distribution of the research results. Differences between women and men were typically labeled “sex differences.” This label implies that the demonstrated differences are essential (i.e., reside inside men and women) and are related to biology. Feminists argued that differences that were found were frequently due to prior experiences, gender roles, and/or the context and not to biology ( Deaux, 1984 ; Hyde, 1986 ; Unger, 1998 ). Others argued that the behavior seen as characteristic of women is actually the behavior evidenced by people with low power and status ( Hare-Mustin & Maracek, 1994a ). Unger (1979) recommended that we use the term “gender” to avoid the biological connotation of the term “sex.” Despite this increasing sophistication in our understanding of gender as a function of context, roles, and power, gender differences continue to be constructed as essentialist ( Cosgrove, 2003 ; McHugh & Cosgrove, 2002 ). Also, the research findings, even when they were published, did not impact the beliefs held by professionals or the general public about women and men and their performance on tasks. For example, despite the pattern of results across many studies ( Frieze, McHugh & Hanusa, 1982 ; Frieze, Whitley, Hanusa, & McHugh, 1982 ), people continued to believe that women attributed their failures to lack of ability and their success as due to luck.

(Early in my career, I studied sex differences in response to task performance success and failure. I gave subjects ambiguous tasks that had no right or wrong answers and gave them false feedback about their performance. Some subjects were given success feedback; others were told that they had failed. I then asked them how they explained their performance and about their expectancies for future performance. I abandoned this line of research when I realized that the debriefing I gave might not have been successful in erasing their emotional response to failing the experimental task. Others documented that women’s response to novel tasks revealed low expectancies for success, thus biasing our understanding of women’s (lack of) confidence. I did not want to contribute to individuals’ feelings of failure, or to stereotypic and invalid characterizations of women.)

The realization that the questions asked by male theorists and researchers reflect their position in the world challenged the assumptions of logical positivism—including objectivity and value neutrality. Feminist research and theory has been criticized as political and biased, even as these critics continued to view research conducted by men as scientific and objective. Some feminist psychologists came to see the connection between individuals’ status and identity in the world, the questions they were interested in, and their approaches to research. Thus, many feminist psychologists recognized that unexamined androcentric biases at both the epistemological and methodological levels resulted in women’s experiences being devalued, distorted, marginalized, and pathologized (e.g., Cosgrove & McHugh, 2002 ; McHugh & Cosgrove, 2004 ).

Feminist Standpoint Perspective

The feminist criticism of science as biased led to a recognition of the importance of perspective or standpoint. Some critics have contended that individuals who are outsiders to a culture or group are more likely than insiders to recognize cultural or group assumptions (e.g., Mayo, 1982 ). Feminism provoked some feminist scholars to recognize male bias and to view aspects of male-dominated society, including the practice of research, through an alternative lens. The realization that women and men might view the world differently, ask different questions, and use different methods to answer those questions led some feminists to adopt a standpoint position. Hartstock (1983) argued that women’s lives offered them a privileged vantage point on patriarchy and that such an epistemological perspective had liberatory value.

In the feminist standpoint perspective, women’s ways of knowing are considered to be different from and potentially superior to men’s ways of knowing ( Belenky, Clinchy, Goldberger, & Tarule, 1986 ). As outsiders or marginalized individuals, women have a unique perspective on their own experience, on men, and on sociocultural patterns of domination and subordination ( Mayo, 1982 ; Westkoff, 1979 ). Like feminist empiricists, advocates of a feminist standpoint perspective typically accept the existence of a reality but recognize that one’s position within a social system impacts one’s understanding of that reality ( McHugh & Cosgrove, 2004 ). A standpoint epistemological perspective argues that there are important research questions that originate in women’s lives that do not occur to researchers operating from the dominant androcentric frameworks of the disciplines ( Harding, 2008 ). Furthermore, standpoint theory has allowed some of us to recognize that traditional research has typically served the purpose of the researcher rather than the researched ( Letherby, 2003 ); the experiences of marginalized people are not viewed as a source of interesting or important questions. For example, research on motherhood and women’s experience of embodiment was not conducted prior to feminist influence on social science ( Chrisler & McHugh, 2011 ).

Standpoint epistemology views the relationship between knowing and politics as central and examines how different types of sociopolitical arrangements impact the production of knowledge ( Harding, 2008 ). The answers to questions about women and other marginalized groups may originate in the lives of marginalized individuals but typically involve an analysis of the social and power relations of dominant and marginalized groups to answer. Feminist standpoint epistemology calls for a critical analysis of women’s experiences as described through women’s eyes ( Leavy, 2007 ). For example, DeVault (1990) documents the skills that women have developed from their work feeding their families, and Jaggar (2008b) examines women’s skills at reading emotion as having developed through their care-taking roles.

In an important contribution to feminist standpoint, Smith (1987) argued that social science knowledge systems are used as systems of control and that those who develop knowledge are typically separated from everyday life. She describes knowledge as controlled by an elite (i.e., racially and economically privileged men) who have no interest in or knowledge of the women who serve their needs. Smith (2008) notes that questions regarding women’s work originate in the consideration of women’s lives, which have historically not been examined. Consideration of women’s daily lives leads to the recognition that women are assigned the work that men do not want to complete and to the realization of the processes by which that work is devalued and trivialized. Such insights are not constructed by the elite and may have liberatory value for women.

In an early consideration of this perspective, Westkott (1979) recognized that feminist researchers were both insiders and outsiders to science and that this was a source of both insight and a form of self-criticism. Furthermore, Westkott argued that the concern with the relationship of scientist/observer to the target/object stereotypically represents the focus of women on relationships, whereas the detachment of the traditional researcher is consistent with a stereotypic masculine role. Similarly, Letherby (2003) commented that androcentric (male) epistemologies deny the importance of the personal and the experiential, whereas the feminist researcher often values the experiential, the personal, and the relational rather than the public and the abstract.

In feminist standpoint theory, knowledge is mediated by the individual’s particular position in a sociopolitical system at a particular point in time ( Hawkesworth, 2006 ). In feminist standpoint perspectives, an oppressed individual can see through the ideologies and obfuscations of the oppressor class and more correctly “know” the world ( Hawkesworth, 2006 ). Recognition of a feminist standpoint raises the possibility of other standpoints, and Fine (1992) argued that a single woman’s or feminist standpoint was not plausible. Thus, race and class and other identities within the sociocultural system impact the individual’s understanding of the world.

In particular, black feminist theorists (e.g., Collins, 1989 ) have articulated the existence of a black feminist standpoint, arguing that the position of black women allows them to recognize the operation of both racism and sexism in the sociopolitical system. According to Collins (1989) , black women have experienced oppression and have developed an analysis of their experience separate from that offered by formal knowledge structures. The knowledge of black women is transmitted through alternatives like storytelling. Such knowledge has been invalidated by epistemological gatekeepers. Thus, black feminist standpoint theorists contend that at least some women have an ability referred to as “double visions” or “double consciousness” ( Brooks, 2007 ). Smith (1990) similarly recognized in women the ability to attend to localized activities oriented to maintenance of the family and, at the same time, to understand the male world of the marketplace and rationality. The narrative of hooks (2000) as a black child in Kentucky reveals a double consciousness with regard to her own community and the white world across the tracks.

Postmodern Perspectives on Research

The third epistemological position, the postmodern approach, challenges traditional conceptions of truth and reality. Postmodernists view the world and our understanding of the world as socially constructed and therefore challenge the possibility of scientists producing value-neutral knowledge ( Cosgrove & McHugh, 2002 ; 2008 ). Postmodern scholars view attempts to discover the truth as an impossible project and equally reject grand narratives and the experimental method. From a postmodern perspective, life is multifaceted and fragmented, and a postmodern position challenges us to recognize that there are multiple meanings for an event and, especially, multiple perspectives on a person’s life. Postmodern approaches examine the social construction of concepts and theories and question whose interests are served by particular constructions ( Layton, 1998 ). Social constructionism requires a willingness to make explicit the implicit assumptions embedded in psychological concepts (e.g., identity, gender, objectivity, etc.). By doing so, social constructionists encourage researchers to recognize that the most dangerous assumptions are those we don’t know we’re making. From the postmodern position, all knowledge, including that derived from social science research, is socially produced and therefore can never be value free. Someone’s interests, however implicit, are always being served ( Cosgrove & McHugh, 2002 ).

The postmodern perspective emphasizes the relationship between knowledge and power. The postmodern perspective suggests that, rather than uncovering truths, the methods we use construct and produce knowledge and privilege certain views and discount or marginalize others ( Cosgrove & McHugh, 2002 ; Gergen, 2001 ; Hare-Musten & Maracek, 1994b). Social constructionists are less interested in the answer to research questions and more interested in the following: What are the questions? Who gets to asks the questions? Why are those methods used to examine those questions? Postmodern thought can open a new and more positive way of understanding and can contribute to the transformation of intellectual inquiry ( Gergen, 2001 ). Although some feminists have rejected the postmodern approach, Hare-Musten and Maracek (1994b) argued that interrogation of the tension between feminism and postmodern perspectives can be used to transform psychological research. The conduct of feminist research from within the postmodern approach involves conducting research in which women’s interests are served.

Postmodern feminists view empiricist and standpoint feminists as reverting to essentialist claims, viewing women as an identity. Cosgrove (2003) explains essentialism as viewing women as a group, as having a single point of view, or as sharing a trait (i.e., that women are caring). The standpoint position is that women have a shared perspective or a unique capacity (different from men’s) or voice; the standpoint position is viewed as problematic from a postmodern perspective. Brooks (2007) explains the problem of essentialism of feminist standpoint theory: “Beyond the difficulty of establishing that women, as a group, unlike men as a group, have a unique and exclusive capacity for accurately reading the complexities of social reality, it is equally problematic to reduce all women to a group” (p. 70). Thus, the essentialism inherent in empirical and standpoint positions does not acknowledge the diversity and complexity of women’s perspectives and voices and does not attend to the ways that gender is produced through socialization, context, roles, policies, and interactions. Cosgrove (2003) similarly explained that “the hegemony of the essentialist claim of women’s experience or voice has had the unfortunate effect of reinforcing normative gendered behavior” (p. 89). Essentialism that views gendered behaviors as universal, biological in origin, and/or residing within women as traits or inherent characteristics is essentially problematic.

Gergen (1988) explained the relationship of research methods to essentialism. The decontextualized approach to traditional research results in studying women apart from the circumstances of their lives. Social and cultural factors including discrimination, violence, sexism, and others’ stereotypes are eliminated from the view of the researcher. Subsequently, researchers are likely to attribute observed behavior as due to women’s traits or natural dispositions. Gergen concluded that research should be conducted without violating the social embeddedness of the participant.

(I met Lisa Cosgrove when I was a faculty member at Duquesne University in 1985, having recently completed my degree. She was completing her doctorate in clinical psychology at Duquesne; at Duquesne, she was trained in phenomenological psychology with a very strong background in philosophy of science. A few years after she had graduated and moved to Boston, we began collaborating. Both feminists, I had experience as an empiricist and she was trained as a clinician and a phenomenologist. We wrote a series of papers on feminist research, the study of gender and gender differences, and epistemological issues that are cited here and are the basis for this chapter. Discussions with Lisa led me to the adoption of a postmodern position in regards to feminist research.)

Implications for Feminist Qualitative Methods

I have briefly reviewed the feminist epistemological positions to illustrate alternative feminist positions and to trace transformations in the theory and conduct of feminist research and the development of feminist postmodernism. Equally important is the demonstration of how feminist criticism of logical positivist science relates to the development and use of qualitative research approaches. Feminist critiques of research led some psychologists to a loss of confidence in the scientific method; postmodern feminists object to the privileged status given to scientific researchers, especially the scientific method in the positivist tradition ( Chrisler & McHugh, 2011 ). Feminist critics argued that the experimental method, including its reductionism, the creation of an artificial context, the failure to understand the context of women’s lives, and the inherent inequality of psychological experiments is not a superior method for understanding the psychology of women. For example, McHugh, Koeske, and Frieze (1986) reviewed feminist arguments that context matters and that the methods of empiricism that decontextualize the individual may support oppressive status quo conditions. McHugh and her colleagues argued that the controlled and artificial research situation may elicit more conventional behavior from participants, may inhibit self-disclosure, and may make the situation “unreal” to the participants ( McHugh et al., 1986 ). The impetus for the adoption of alternative epistemological positions came, in part, from the criticism that the scientific method put the experimenter in the position of influencing, deceiving, manipulating, and/or interpreting “subjects.” Feminists working from a social constructionist perspective are interested in examining the implicit assumptions embedded in traditional psychological research and theory. For example, Unger (1979) acknowledged that our position regarding what constitutes knowledge is the basis for our choice of research methods and the usefulness of our research to advance women. Feminist researchers seek approaches to research that advance our understanding of women without committing essentialist errors or contributing to gender inequities.

The idea that women need to express themselves (i.e., find their own voice and speak for themselves), rather than have their experience interpreted, coded, or labeled by men, is consistent with feminist standpoint theory. Qualitative methods are preferred by many feminist psychologists because they allow marginalized groups, such as women of color, to have a voice and to impact the conduct of research. Feminists value the representation of marginalized groups and the use of subjective and qualitative approaches that allow such participants to speak about their own experiences. Postmodern feminists might argue that liberation or equality may be enacted or experienced when women resist patriarchal conceptualizations of their/our experience and grasp the power to speak for ourselves ( Chrisler & McHugh, 2011 ).

Values of Feminist Research

In contrast to traditional research, feminist research has paid special attention to the role that the values, biases, and assumptions of the researcher has on all aspects of the research process. Selection of topics and questions, choice of methods, recruitment of participants, selection of the audience, and the potential uses of the research results are choices made within a sociohistorical context that ultimately influence what we “know” about a topic or a group of people (cf. Bleir, 1984 ; Harding 1986 ; Keller, 1985 ; Sherif, 1979 ). Feminist research recognizes that, as a result of unexamined androcentric biases at both the epistemological and methodological levels, women’s experiences have been neglected, marginalized, and devalued. Feminist scholars, recognizing that values play a formative role in research, believe that values should be made explicit and critically examined ( Hawkesworth, 2006 ). Feminist research is explicit in its ethical and political stance; feminist research seeks epistemic truth and social justice and challenges social bias as existing in some existing knowledge claims ( Jaggar, 2008a ).

Feminist researchers have explicated their value systems, realizing that an unbiased, objective position is not possible. Feminists are aware that the product cannot be separated from the process ( Kelly, 1986 ) and strive to conduct research in an open, collaborative, and nonexploitative way. The voice of the participants is often the focus of the research, but the researchers themselves are encouraged to reflect on and report their own related experiences and point of view ( McHugh & Cosgrove, 2004 ; Morawski, 1994 ).

Reflexivity

Feminists have questioned the possibility of and the preference for value-free or neutral research and the value of the detached, disengaged researcher who is objective in the conduct of research. Not only do we all and always have some relation to the subject under study, but a connection to or experience with the phenomena may actually be an asset. As Brooks and Hesse-Biber (2007) suggest, “rather than dismissing human emotions and subjectivities, unique lived experiences, and world views as contaminants or barriers in the quest for knowledge, we might embrace these elements to gain new insight and understandings or, in other words, new knowledge” (p. 14). The feminist epistemological perspective pays attention to personal experience, position, emotions, and worldview as influencing the conduct of research ( Brooks & Hesse-Biber, 2007 ). In feminist research, there is a realization that such connections cannot be removed, bracketed, or erased, but we do consider it important to reveal them. The researcher is expected to acknowledge her situated perspective, to reflect on and share how her life experiences might have influenced her choice of topics and questions.

In a related vein, Reinharz (1992) recommended that valid listening to the voices of others requires self-reflection on “who we are, and who we are in relation to those we study” (p. 15). Feminist research has frequently engaged in this process of questioning, referred to as “reflexivity.” The reflexive stance may involve critically examining the research process in an attempt to explicate the assumptions about gender (and other oppressive) relations that may underlie the research project ( Maynard, 1992 ). Incorporating reflexivity is a complex and multidimensional project, one that necessitates a constant vigilance with regard to the epistemic commitments that ground our research ( Cosgrove & McHugh, 2002 ).

In feminist research, a commonly used reflective approach is one in which the researcher provides an “intellectual autobiography” ( Stanley & Wise, 1993 ) tracing her interest in relationship with and approach to the questions and to the research participants. Ussher (1991) for example, traces her interest in women’s madness to her mother’s “mental illness,” thus eliminating the illusion that she is a detached or disinterested knower. Hollway (1989) also offers such an extended reflexive stance by deliberately and thoroughly examining how she made decisions and interpretations throughout her research on heterosexual relationships. Fine (1992) offers multiple examples of reflections on the research process, arguing that we should demystify the ways in which we select, use, and exploit respondents’ voices. Letherby (2003) provides an extended examination and analysis of feminist research issues by describing her own history and her experience conducting individual and collaborative research interviewing women who experienced infertility and childlessness.

(In this chapter, I have included some of my own biography as a feminist psychologist. I hope to share part of my own journey, starting as an enthusiastic empiricist, then becoming a critic of biases in research, to the adoption of a view of research as political. Having traced that journey, I recognize the potential contribution and the potential risks that exist in any research undertaken, and I appreciate the diversity of feminist positions in research. Currently, I view myself as encouraging feminist researchers to recognize the problems identified by postmodern critics and to realize the potential for a postmodern perspective to resolve issues and dilemmas in feminist research.)

Feminist researchers are cognizant of the impact of power on the research process. Jaggar (2008a) described feminist research as concerned with the complex relationship between social power (and inequalities in social power) and the production of knowledge. Part of the feminist critique of traditional research includes the power and authority of the researcher to construct and control the research process and product. In traditional science, the power of the researcher is connected to his position as an objective expert “knower” in relation to the uninformed and ignorant subject of his inquiry ( Hubbard, 1988 ). Similarly Smith (1987) and Collins (1989) have examined the power of the educated elite to ignore and invalidate the experiences and knowledge of women and other marginalized groups. Feminist researchers challenge this oppressive status hierarchy in a number of ways. Feminists challenge both the objectivity and the expertise/knowledge of the scientist and view women (or men) participants as knowing about their own experiences. Feminists more than nonfeminists see power as a socially mediated process as opposed to a personal characteristic and recognize the role of power in efforts to transform science and society ( Unger, 1988 ). Thus, feminist research recognizes the power inherent in the process of research and attempts to use that power to transform society. If the purpose of feminist research is to challenge or dismantle hierarchies of oppression, then it is crucial that the research process not duplicate or include power differentials. Yet it is difficult to dismantle the competitive and hierarchical power relations present across most contexts of our lives, including the research context.

An identifying aspect of feminist research is the recognition of power dilemmas in the research process ( Hesse-Biber, 2007b ). Consistent with this perspective, feminist research is based on a respect for the participants as equals and agents rather than subjects. In an attempt to dismantle power hierarchies, the feminist researcher is concerned with the relationships among the research team; feminist research teams are ideally nonhierarchical collaborations (discussed later). Another dilemma is how to interpret or represent the voices of the women respondents; researchers are cautioned not to tell their story, but, in the postmodern perspective, one’s own position always as part of the research process.

Collaboration

Based on critiques of the experimental method, feminist research has emphasized the need for a collaborative (rather than objectifying) focus. Feminist research seeks to establish nonhierarchical relations between researcher and respondent and to respect the experience and perspective of the participants ( Worrell & Etaugh, 1994 ). Feminist psychologists challenge the regulatory practices of traditional research by developing more explicitly collaborative practices (cf. Marks, 1993 ). Collaboration necessitates an egalitarian context from the inception of the research process to the distribution of results. For example, instead of conducting an outcome assessment of a battered women’s shelter based on the preferred outcomes suggested by agencies, researchers, or shelter staff (i.e., how many women have left their abusive relationships?), Maguire (2008) conducted participatory research with battered women examining a question they raised. As Lather (1991) notes, empowerment and empirical rigor are best realized through collaborative and participatory efforts.

Often, relationships among researchers and respondents, although referred to in the literature as partnerships, collaborations, or otherwise egalitarian relations, may be better characterized as ambivalent, guarded, or conflicted ( McHugh & Cosgrove, 2004 ). Being committed to seeing things from the respondents’ position is a necessary aspect of feminist research, but it is also important to recognize our privileged position within our relationships with respondents and with co-workers. Often credentials and our status within the academy place us in a privileged position.

(Feminists idealize the collaborative approach, but I, like others, have experienced difficulties in some of my collaborations. Often, collaborations are not an experience of equality or sisterhood. Rather, differences in power, status, and experience can impact the collaborations, which may be more hierarchical than feminists might want. Feminist researchers may not recognize that they do not share the same epistemological perspectives. I also experienced differences in styles of working and writing as especially painful and problematic, in that class and worldview are incorporated in nonconscious ways.)

Research as Advocacy and Empowerment

Although I believe that feminist research should explicitly address issues of social injustice, the issue of doing research as advocacy is complex. It is impossible to know in advance how best to empower women and other marginalized groups. Indeed, many scholars have argued that researchers tend to position themselves as active emancipators and see participants as passive receivers of emancipation (e.g., Lather, 1991 ). Conducting and using research for advocacy requires the researcher to engage in critical reflection on his or her epistemic commitments. Feminists try to design studies that avoid objectifying participants and foster a particular kind of interaction. For example, participatory researchers work with communities to develop “knowledge” that can be useful in advocacy and provide the basis for system change. In terms of doing research with and for women, it is important to develop knowledge collaboratively and, whenever possible, share the knowledge with a wider audience. Often, empowerment is viewed as the process by which we allow or encourage respondents to speak for themselves or to find their voice. Certainly, teaching women to engage in speech or actions that are of our choosing is not empowering, but empowerment of other women is a complicated issue, as discussed below. Wilkinson and Kitzinger (1995) suggest that, in feminist research, we speak for ourselves and create conditions under which others will speak.

Challenges to Feminist Research

An important contribution made by feminist researchers has been giving voice to women’s experiences. Davis (1994) suggests that the notion of voice resonates with feminists who hope that women’s practices and ways of knowing may be a source of empowerment and that speaking represents an end to the silencing and suppression of women in patriarchal culture. Many theorists have addressed the silencing of women, the ways in which the construction of knowledge by “experts” resulted in women’s voices not being heard, not being taken seriously, or questioned as not trustworthy. “Women’s testimony, women’s reports of their experiences, is as often discredited... from their testifying about violence and sexual assault through their experiential accounts of maladies, to their demonstrations of the androcentricity of physics” ( Code, 1995 , p. 26).

At first thought, it might appear that the metaphor of voice and the methods designed around it (i.e., the qualitative analysis of women’s narratives) have allowed feminist psychology to articulate women’s experiences. However, closer examination of this metaphor and the research methods used to support it argue for a more critical examination of research that attempts to give women voice ( Alcoff, 2008 ). The position that women can and must speak for women and/or that women can listen to each other differently than men has been challenged. Substituting a woman’s standpoint for an androcentric position privileges women’s way of way of being, speaking, viewing the world, and knowing, but the idea of women’s voice also essentializes femininity and can reify the constructs of men and women. Feminist theorists have cautioned that in our attempts to correct psychology’s androcentric perspective, we must avoid a position that essentializes masculinity and femininity ( Bohan, 1993 ; Cosgrove, 2003 ; Hare-Mustin & Maracek, 1990 ) (i.e., one that views differences between men and women as universal and as originating or residing within men and women). Similarly, Davis (1994) questions whether the notion of voice is a useful one for feminist theory. Do women have voice (i.e., an “authentic” feminine self)? Does voice refer to “the psychological focus of femininity, the site of women’s subordination, or the authentic expression of what women really feel” (p. 355)? The use of the voice metaphor raises questions of essentialism. Is there such a thing as femininity, which can be discovered or uncovered?

Other feminists (e.g., Tavris, 1994 ) reminded us that women (and girls) do not speak the same in all situations, pointing out that there is more than a single “women’s voice” and that there is more than one way to hear the same story. Similarly, Gremmen (1994) questions whether authentic and false voices can be distinguished in the qualitative analysis of transcripts. Others have questioned whether women are speaking for themselves when their responses are reported, presented, organized, or otherwise produced by the researcher. The emancipatory potential of research is undermined when the researcher positions herself as an arbitrator of truth and knowledge or as a judge of what is or is not an authentic voice ( Cosgrove & McHugh, 2000 ).

There is great value in questioning who speaks for whom; indeed, who speaks may be more important than what is said (cf. Lather, 1991 ; 1992 ; Rappaport & Stewart, 1997 ). When we speak for women or about women’s experience, we may distort or silence women’s own voices ( Cosgrove & McHugh, 2000 ). Can we presume to know how to express the experiences of other women? The issues are further complicated when we attempt to “speak for others across the complexities of difference” ( Code, 1995 , p. 30); that is, speak for women who differ from us in terms of age, class, ethnicity, sexual orientation, region, and other dimensions ( Alcoff, 2008 ). As feminist researchers, we might recognize the degree to which we have positioned ourselves as “universalizing spokesperson” and abandon that role, choosing instead the role of “cultural workers who do what they can to lift the barriers which prevent people from speaking for themselves” ( Lather, 1991 , p. 47).

Relinquishing the role of “universalizing spokesperson” requires a shift in how we conduct our research and in how we analyze our data. Marks (1993) encouraged us to reflect on the institutional power we have as researchers in order to avoid buying into the illusion of empowerment or democracy. To ensure that our hypotheses and questions are relevant, meaningful, and helpful to participants, we might ask participants to comment on, modify, add to, or even change the questions developed by the researcher. Standard research practice might include conducting a needs assessment and obtaining pilot data on the appropriateness of the focus, structure, and design of the research. The research process might begin with an opportunity for participants to voice their concerns and collaborate in the development of the research questions. In addition, Cosgrove and McHugh (2000) suggest that researchers adopt a cautious and reflective approach when editing participants’ narrative accounts. We need to acknowledge and attend to the fact that editing changes the voice(s) heard. The way in which we frame and present quotes may involve implicit assumptions about our interpretive authority; when we are not including the entire narrative, we need to include a rationale for and a detailed description of our editing choices. The question of “who can/should speak for whom engages with issues of power and the politics of knowledge that are especially delicate in present day feminist and other postcolonial contexts” ( Code, 1995 , p. 26).

Struggles for the “power to name” are continually played out in politics, the media, and in the academy. Specific words are needed to describe concepts that are important to people; without those words, it is very difficult to think about—and nearly impossible to talk about—objects, ideas, and situations. Feminists have provided words and concepts to describe the previously unspoken experiences of women and girls ( Smith, Johnston-Robledo, McHugh & Chrisler, 2010 ) including stalking, date rape, coercive sex, and intimate partner violence. Yet, our constructions and operational definitions of the phenomenon under study can also introduce limitations and distortions in women’s understanding of their own experiences ( McHugh, Livingston, & Frieze, 2008 ). When we give a woman a label for her experience and outline for her the particulars of the phenomenon, we direct her attention and memory and impact her own construction of her experiences. In this way, science has claimed the power to name reality and has sometimes challenged the credibility of women to articulate and name their own experiences. Postmodern feminists are attentive to the power of words and examine how language or discourse is used to frame women’s experience.

Traditionally, objectivity has been equated with quantitative measurement and logical positivist approaches to science and is valued as the path to truth and knowledge. Qualitative research and research rooted in standpoint and postmodern epistemologies are frequently seen as subjective and are devalued as such. Feminist and other postmodern critics of logical positivism argue that objectivity is an illusion that has contributed (illegitimately) to the power of science and scientists to make knowledge claims (e.g., Hubbard, 1988 ). The position of a disengaged or impartial researcher who studies others as objects, without investing in their well-being, or the outcomes of the research, has been rejected. Objectivity in this sense is not seen as a superior way to understand the world or the people in it. From a postmodern perspective, all knowledge involves a position or perspective that results in partial or situated knowledge. Furthermore, postmodern positions reject claims of grand theories and discoveries of some truth that exists “out there.” Knowledge is viewed as co-created or constructed in social interactions. Developing a theory of human behavior based on the study of a limited sample of people is viewed as inappropriate and universalizing. Some have exposed the issue of scientific objectivity as an elitist effort to exclude others from making meaning, a system by which all who are not trained to participate are devaluated and objectified ( Hubbard, 1988 ; Schewan, 2008 ).

Feminist qualitative research as described here has not sought universal truths about women but has increasingly been focused on particular communities of women (people), and the research is “judged” as useful in terms of its contribution to the improvement of women’s lives or to the (re)solution of a locally defined problem. Yet, some feminist theorists have grappled with the issue of validity claims. Is every interpretation or conclusion based on qualitative “data” equally valid? How can we know or evaluate our research as valid, if not objective? Questions of validity and credibility (which are sometimes discussed in terms of objectivity) remain unanswered or contested in regards to feminist qualitative research.

Schewan (2008) addresses the question of objectivity, asking “What is it about objectivity that helps to make a claim acceptable?” She argues that we do want our claims to be acceptable to some broader constituency. What do we have to do to establish such credibility? Schewan’s (2008) answer to these questions revolves around questions of trustworthiness. Her argument for an epistemological trustworthiness involves multiple dimensions of credibility including, for example, research that is critical, contextual, committed, and co-responsible; and practical, political, pluralist, and participatory. Furthermore, Schewan contends that trust is ultimately a product of community, and a basic question we might ask about our own research is in which (and how broad a) community would we look for consensus on the validity of our research? In which context do want to articulate our claims, and how might we be evaluated in that context. In participatory action research, the researcher typically would have the participants in the project provide feedback as to the accuracy, validity, and usefulness of the project “data.”

Similarly, Collins (2008) views community and connectedness as essential to establishing the validity of black feminist theory. She observes that in the African-American community new knowledge claims are not worked out in isolation, but in dialogue. An example of the dialogue for assessing the validity of black women’s concerns is the call-and-response interaction in African-American communities, including churches. Ideas are tested and evaluated in one’s own community, which is also the context in which people become human and are empowered. Black feminist thought emerges in the context of subjugated individuals. Each idea or form of knowledge involves a specific location from which to examine points of connection; each group speaks from its own unique standpoint and shares its own partial and situated knowledge. There are no claims to universal truth. Collins also notes that this approach to validation is distinctly different from scientific objectivity in that this dialogue involves community rather than individualism, speaking from the heart, and the integration of reason and emotion.

The feminist scientist may question objectivity but continue to return to the concept when designing a feminist science ( Keller, 1985 ). Haraway (2008) and Harding (2008) are searching for a broader form of validation of claims; they articulate their ideas for a successor science and a feminist version of objectivity. Coming from the epistemology of standpoint theory, Harding (2008) anticipates the emergence of a successor science that offers an acknowledged better and richer account of the world. In response to questions of how to maintain validity and reliability in research when objectivity is challenged, Harding (1991) proposed the solution of strong objectivity . Her idea of strong objectivity is based on the outsider perspective ( Mayo, 1982 ) or the double consciousness attributed to African Americans ( Collins, 1990 ). In Harding’s approach to validity, individuals at the margins of the institutions of knowledge may provide an outsider perspective on the conceptualization not evident to the insiders at the center. Harding argued that outsiders can bring awareness of the ways in which values, interests, and practices impact the production of knowledge. Harding argued that including the perspectives of the outsider or marginalized perspectives can strengthen the objectivity of science while retaining validity ( Rosser, 2008 ).

Haraway (2008) offers her vision of a usable doctrine of objectivity, embodied vision . Consistent with Collins (2008) and Schewan (2008) , Haraway’s ideas about validity relate to conversation and community; situated knowledge is about communities not individuals. Haraway proposes that our capacity for knowing involves embodied vision; that is, we are limited to partial and situated knowledge because our vision is limited by our body in a physical location. She contrasts this idea of situated and partial knowledge with the omnipotence and omnipresence of a male (god); thus, her conception of objectivity relates to where we are located in the world, as opposed to an objectivity that comes from being above the fray. Haraway recommended that we share our knowledge with others who occupy a different space to help construct a larger vision. Haraway calls for objectivity as positioned rationality , rational and fuller knowledge as a process of ongoing critical interpretations among a community of interpreters and (de)coders. In her vision, feminist objectivity would make for both surprises and irony (since we are not in charge of the world). As indicated here, feminist researchers employing qualitative and post-positivist methods continue to contend with the issue of validity. Current approaches emphasize knowledge as partial and situated (as opposed to universal truth) and the validity of knowledge as established through dialogue with participant communities.

Forms of Feminist Qualitative Research

In this section, I introduce a number of qualitative forms of research and examine them in relation to feminist goals for research. All possible forms of qualitative research are not introduced or described; the selection represents in part my own areas of interest or expertise. The forms of research addressed here can be undertaken from any feminist epistemological positions, and each of these is consistent with a postmodern perspective.

In-Depth Interviews

Interviewing is a valued method for feminist researchers, allowing them to gain insight into the lives and experiences of their respondents and potentially helping others to understand a group of women. Feminists are often concerned with experiences that are hidden, for example, the lives of marginalized women ( Geiger, 1990) . When the goal of the research is in-depth understanding, a smaller sample is used since the interviewer is interested in the process and meanings and not in the generalization of the findings ( Hesse-Biber, 2007 a ). In more unstructured interviews, the researcher exerts very little control over the process, letting the interview flow where the respondent goes.

Interviewing as a feminist research strategy is designed to get at the lived experience of the respondent ( Nelson, 1989 ). Often, a goal of interviewing is to have women express their ideas, insights, or experiences in their own words. According to Letherby (2003) , the method chosen in a feminist project should allow the voices of the respondents to be distinct and discernible. Feminist interviewing is conscious of the relationship between the researcher and the researched and of the ways that power operates in the interview and in the product of the project. Letherby (2003) describes variation in how much two-way conversation she engaged in, and she also describes the relationship between the researcher and respondent as dynamic and changing over time.

One feminist perspective on interviewing is that the researcher and the respondent co-construct meaning. Oakley (1981) espoused a participatory model that involves the researcher sharing aspects of her own biography with the researched. A more conversational and sharing approach invites intimacy. Oakley also sees this as a way to break down the power hierarchy. As an example, Parr (1998) traced her own development from a positivist researcher to a more feminist and grounded approach in her interviews of mature women who returned to education. Parr (1998) started with a barriers framework that she eventually abandoned when the respondents’ stories did not fit this framework: the women did not perceive themselves as experiencing barriers. Her subsequent analysis was rooted in the data, and the respondents influenced the research process. Importantly and unexpectedly, her participants gave more personal reasons for their reentry, and more than one-half of the women reported serious incidents or traumatic experiences as linked to their return to education. Parr (1998) reported that listening closely and paying attention to the women’s nonverbal behaviors helped her to hear what they were telling her about the links between trauma and education “once she allowed the women’s voices to be heard” (p. 100).

Narratives as Research

The use of narratives as research is compatible with a postmodern or social constructionist perspective. Narratives are the stories people tell about their lives. Narrative research focuses on the ways in which individuals choose to tell their stories, in relation to the frameworks or master narratives provided by the culture for organizing and describing life experiences ( Sarbin, 1986 ). Master narratives refer to the cultural frameworks that limit and structure the way that stories are told in order to support the status quo and the dominant groups’ perspective on reality. Gergen (2010) described her analysis of how women’s narratives differed from the cultural heroic myths of male narratives; she argued that women’s narratives were more embodied, and that in women’s narratives, love and achievement themes were interwoven. Story telling can be used, however, to disrupt or challenge accepted perceptions and master narratives. Stories are used to communicate experience, but they can also articulate ideology and can move people to action ( Romero & Stewart, 1999 ).

A narrative approach can be employed to further feminist goals. Narratives have been discussed as an innovative feminist method ( Gergen, Chrisler, & LoCicero, 1999 ) designed to reveal cultural constructions. Recognizing, resisting, or deconstructing the master narratives that have been used to restrict or limit the experiences of women is one feminist form of narrative research ( Romero & Stewart, 1999 ). Other examples of feminist narrative research are presented in Franz and Stewart’s (1994) edited volume of narratives, in which they explore the way in which narratives “create” a psychology of women. Thus, storytelling can lead to “ideological transformations and to political mobilization” ( Romero & Stewart, 1999 , p. xii). Storytelling is seen as a way of including women’s experience, of breaking the silence of women, and as a way of giving women a voice for the expression and analysis of their own experiences ( Romero & Stewart, 1999 ). They argue that social transformative work is done through the telling of previously untold stories and through women’s naming and analyzing their own experience ( Romero & Stewart, 1999 ).

Narrative research reveals our desire to provide a unified and coherent story and to gloss over or ignore paradoxes, inconsistencies, and contradictions in women’s lives ( Cabello, 1999 ; Franz & Stewart, 1994 ). The challenge for feminist researchers is to find methods for including and representing dualities and contradictions present in women’s lives ( Cabello, 1999 ). Cabello (1999) describes the methodological challenge of including the incoherence and contradictions in narrative research. She also discusses the tensions between the researcher’s interpretation and the subject’s active participation in the telling and interpretation of her life story.

Discourse Analysis

The main goal of discourse analysis is to investigate how meanings are produced within narrative accounts (e.g., in conversations, newspapers, or interviews). Thus, the label discourse analysis does not describe a technique or a formula, but rather it describes a set of approaches that can be used when researchers work with texts ( Cosgrove & McHugh, 2008 ). Researchers who use a discourse analytic approach emphasize the constitutive function of language, and they address the ways in which power relations are reproduced in narrative accounts ( McHugh & Cosgrove, 2004 ). A discourse analytic approach is grounded in the belief that meaning and knowledge are created by discourse; discourse analysts views language/discourse as constituting our experience. Based on the belief that all forms of discourse serve a function and have particular effects, and the research focus is on “how talk is constructed and what it achieves” ( Potter & Wetherell, 1996 , p. 164). The researcher cannot, simply by virtue of switching from a quantitative to a qualitative approach, uncover an experience or identity that exists prior to and distinct from human interaction. There are no true, real, or inner experiences or identities that somehow reside underneath the words a woman uses to describe that experience or identity. The paradigm shift from analyzing interview data to analyzing discourse involves a different perspective on the goals of research and what we can know ( Cosgrove & McHugh, 2002 ). It encourages us to examine the practices, technologies, and ideologies that allow for the experiences that we are investigating. This shift may help us focus on structural rather than individual change strategies.

In the conduct of discourse analysis, the researcher is explicitly interested in the sociopolitical context that creates particular discourses and discourages other constructions and linguistic practices ( Wilkinson & Kitzinger, 1995 ). The implications of this epistemological shift for developing alternative methodologies can be seen in how interview-based data would be approached and analyzed. The researcher does not assume that she will discover some underlying truth about women’s essential nature or personality. Instead, the researcher is interested in identifying dominant and marginalized discourses and in addressing how women position themselves in the available discourses. As previously noted, rather than denying or trying to overcome the inconsistencies, contradictions, or ambivalence in women’s accounts of their experience, the researcher pursues these contradictions. This allows for a better understanding of how women might position themselves otherwise ( Burr, 1995 ; Hollway, 1989 ; Kitzinger, 1995 ; Potter & Wetherell, 1996 ). This social constructionist approach moves the researcher from the analysis of narratives as revealing inner subjectivity (i.e., of a woman’s story as revealing who she is) to an analysis of discourse as constituting subjectivity. Thus, the question shifts from “what does this account reveal about women’s underlying or true nature?” to “what does this account reveal about the dominant discourses to which women have been subjected?” and “what does this account reveal about discourses which have become marginalized?” The analysis of data is then carried out with a focus on the questions “when and how do women resist dominant discourses when those discourses cause them distress, and how might we allow for greater opportunities to position ourselves in alternative discourses?”

The implications for feminist research are dramatic and complex. If there is no method to “get to the bottom of things,” what does it mean to create a space for women to speak for themselves? A researcher using discourse analysis would understand meaning to be produced rather than revealed. An account of an individual’s experience is always located in a complex network of power relations ( Cosgrove & McHugh, 2008 ). Thus, in analyzing women’s accounts, a social constructionist approach applies an analysis of power. The interview, and analysis, is not about discovering “truths” but about identifying dominant and marginalized discourses. The analysis examines the degree and the ways in which individuals resist oppressive discourses. For example, a psychologist interested in the experience of motherhood would first recognize that the discourses of motherhood shape and confine one’s understanding of oneself as a mother and as not a mother ( Letherby, 2003 ). The analysis of the data on the experience of being a mother would be contextualized in terms of how discourses produce certain identities (e.g., “supermom,” mother as the primary care-giver, etc.) while marginalizing others ( Cosgrove, 1999 ).

Focus Groups

Wilkinson (1998) argues for the use of focus groups as a feminist method in that focus groups can meet the feminist goals of examining women’s behavior in naturalistic social contexts and in a way that shifts the power from the researcher to the participants. A focus group might be described as an informal discussion among a group of people, which is focused on a specific topic and is either observed or taped by the researcher ( Morgan & Krueger, 1993 ). Focus groups are typically facilitated by a trained moderator who fosters a comfortable environment. Kitzinger (1994) suggests that focus group interviews might be used as an effective method when gaining information from participants is difficult; that is, when people feel disenfranchised, unsafe, or reluctant to participate. Focus groups may be useful in mining subjugated knowledge or in giving a voice to members of marginalized groups or empowering clients ( Leavy, 2007 ; Morgan, 2004 ). Focus groups have been used to bridge a gap in perspective between the researcher and the informants ( Morgan, 2004 ). The communication in focus groups may be dynamic and create a sense of a “happening” ( Leavy, 2007 ). In successful focus groups, participants express or share some of their experiences with others using their own language and frameworks ( Leavy, 2007 ).

Focus groups avoid the artificiality of many psychological methods. Focus groups mimic the everyday experience of talking with friends, family, and others in our social networks. The focus group itself may be seen as a social context and, at the same time, as a parallel to the social context in which people typically operate. The group-based approach of nondirective interviewing allows the participants to identify, discuss, disagree about, and contextualize issues of importance to them ( Hennink, 2008 ). At times, the focus group may reveal the extent of consensus and diversity of opinion within groups ( Morgan, 2004 ). The group environment can provide rich data regarding complex behaviors and human interactions.

People establish and maintain relationships, engage in activities, and make decisions through daily interactions with other people. Focus groups may use these preexisting or naturally occurring groups, or may set up groups of people who do not know each other ( Wilkinson, 1998 ). For example, Press (1991) studied female friends talking about abortion by having them meet in one woman’s home to view and discuss an episode of a popular television show. The focus group can thus avoid artificiality by making naturalistic observations of the process of communication in everyday social interaction ( Wilkinson, 1998 ; 1999 ). More importantly, the focus group provides the opportunity to observe how people form opinions, influence each other, and generate meaning in the context of discussion with others ( Wilkinson, 1998 ; 1999 ). For feminists who see the self as relational or identity as constructed (e.g., Kitzinger, 1994 ), the focus group can be an ideal method. In focus groups, the influence of the researcher is minimized as women in the group speak for themselves and voice their own concerns and themes. Focus groups may also provide an opportunity to access the views of individuals who have been underrepresented in traditional methods ( Wilkinson, 1998 ). Focus groups may lead to consciousness raising or to the articulation of solutions to women’s problems ( Wilkinson, 1998 ; 1999 ). Focus groups may be a component of participatory action projects ( Morgan, 2004 ). The increased use of focus groups by social scientists over the past two decades argues for their usefulness as a qualitative method ( Morgan, 2004 ).

Feminist Phenomenological Approaches

A phenomenological approach emphasizes a (paradigm) shift from observed behaviors to the importance of an individual’s lived experience as the proper subject matter for psychology. Phenomenology is committed to the articulation of individuals’ experience as description and does not subscribe to hypothesis testing. Husserl (1970) argued that psychologists should use descriptive methods to try and capture the meaning of individuals’ experience; he emphasized the need for social scientists to investigate the personal, the life-world to capture the experiential nature of human experience. Criticizing psychology (and other social sciences) for its adherence to positivist methods, he challenged the subjective/objective distinction. ( Cosgrove & McHugh, 2008 ). Thus, a phenomenological approach is not just another method that might be employed by a feminist researcher, but an alternative approach to knowledge ( Cosgrove & McHugh, 2008 ). Phenomenological research uses a descriptive method that attempts to capture the experiential meaning of human experience ( Nelson, 1989 ). Phenomenologically informed researchers do not test hypotheses but generate theory from the data (i.e., individuals’ experiences). This approach does not distinguish between objective and subjective methods but does privilege description over measurement and quantification ( Cosgrove & McHugh, 2008 ). The phenomenological researcher does not subscribe to the goal of uncovering or discovering truths about the participants’ experience but has a commitment to articulating the lived experience of the participants and analyzing the sociopolitical context in which the experience occurs ( Cosgrove & McHugh, 2008 ). For example, a research team could investigate the lived experience of being “at home.” The descriptive differences in men and women’s lived experience might be described without essentializing or reifying gender.

According to Cosgrove and McHugh (2008) , phenomenology shares the feminist commitment to creating a space to hear (women’s) stories. In phenomenologically grounded research, the researcher may examine the ways in which gender (along with race, class, and culture) plays a key role in shaping women’s experiences. Phenomenologists also share the feminist commitment to test theory against experience. Both feminists and phenomenologists recognize the limits of laboratory-based research, emphasize the importance of listening to individuals’ experiences, and appreciate the possibilities of a descriptive science ( Nelson, 1989 ). Cosgrove and McHugh (2008) suggest that some feminists would agree with the phenomenological perspective that relying, epistemologically and methodologically, on quantification and measurement to the exclusion of life-world description is a limited approach that produces alienated rather than emancipatory knowledge.

Both feminists and phenomenologists view research as an interaction or dialogue between the researcher and the participant ( Garko, 1999 ). The phenomenological approach emphasizes connections among self, world, and others and allows the researcher to hear women’s experiences as contextualized within the larger social order. Consistent with feminist research, a phenomenological perspective demands that we hear, describe, and try to articulate the meaning of women’s experiences, including stories that have been marginalized and/or silenced ( Cosgrove & McHugh, 2008 ).

Participatory Action Research

“Participatory research offers a way to openly demonstrate solidarity with oppressed and disempowered people through our work as researchers” ( Maguire, 2008 , p. 417). Maguire (1987 ; 2008 ) described participatory action research as involving investigation, education, and action. By involving ordinary people in the process of posing problems and solving them, participatory research can create solidarity and social action designed to radically change social reality, as opposed to other methods that describe or interpret reality ( Maguire, 2008 ). Goals of feminist research, including self-determination, emancipation, and personal and social transformation, are approached by working with oppressed people, not studying them ( Maguire, 2008 ). When working with a community group to address a problem they define, the traditional distinctions between knower and participant and between knowledge and action are dissolved ( Hall, 1979) .

In contrast to the traditional valuation of theoretical and pure science over applied science, participatory action research challenges the dichotomous view of applied versus theoretical research. In action research, theory is political and action has theoretical implications ( Hoshmand & O’Byrne, 1996 ; Reinharz, 1992 ). Hoshmand and O’Byrne (1996) view action research as consistent with postmodern and post-positivist revisions of science; action research takes an explicitly contextual focus and thus action researchers may be less likely to commit the “errors” of essentialism and universalism ( Cosgrove & McHugh, 2002 ). Participatory research is built on the (feminist) critique of positivist science, and the androcentrism of much of traditional social science research ( Maguire, 2008 ) and the emancipatory impact of participatory research is dependent on feminist analysis. Researchers should explicitly consider gender and patriarchy as important components of the project ( Maguire, 1987 ). A challenge for feminist researchers is to consider the operation of class, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and other dimensions of oppression in the research agenda.

In addition to improving the lives of the participants, education and the development of critical consciousness is a component of participatory action research ( Maguire, 2008 ). The research process can assist the community members to develop skills in information gathering and use and in analysis. Perhaps more significantly, the community members may develop a critical understanding of social problems and underlying causes and possible ways to overcome them. By having ordinary people participate in the research, affirming and extending their knowledge about their own lives, participatory action research exposes and helps to dismantle the industry of knowledge production. Knowledge production and traditional research exclude ordinary people from meaningful participation in knowledge creation, intimidate marginalized groups through academic degrees and jargon, and dehumanize people as objects of research ( Maguire, 2008 ).

In this spirit of research designed to create critical consciousness (of the sexual double standard), McHugh and her students facilitated discussions in class and in focus groups of undergraduate students about their experience and observation of slut bashing and the walk of shame (McHugh, Sciarillo, Pearlson, & Watson, 2011; Sullivan & McHugh, 2009 ). Students shared their understanding and experience of who gets called a slut and why. In the discussion, many students recognized the operation of the sexual double standard and developed some understanding of how this impacted their own and other women’s expression of sexuality. This “research” emphasizes the students as experts on this topic, helps students develop critical consciousness, and documents the existence of the sexual double standard as common social practice, in contrast to quantitative research that does not confirm the existence of the sexual double standard ( Crawford & Popp, 2003 ).

In most social action research, the researchers design the research project to empower the individuals and communities with whom they work ( Cosgrove & McHugh, 2008 ). In participatory research, the shared agenda is set by the community; traditional research is based on the researcher’s agenda. The engagement and solidarity with participants is an important feature of participatory research, in contrast to the traditional objectivity and disengagement of the experimenter. For example, in contrast to traditional research (e.g., why battered women stay), Maguire (1987) reported on her participatory research with a group of battered women in Gallup, New Mexico. Maguire talked with former battered women in their kitchens, employing Freire’s (1970) concept of dialogue. The researcher and participants moved through a cycle of reflection and action; Maguire presented the women (in their own words) as they searched for how to move forward after living with violent men. These results are in contrast to the psychologizing and victim-blaming approaches often taken in research with women who experience intimate partner violence ( McHugh, 1993 ; McHugh, Livingston, & Frieze, 2008) . Fine (1992) also identified the victim-blaming interpretations made by researchers. In a critical examination of articles published in The Psychology of Women Quarterly, Fine documented that authors “psychologized the structural forces that construct women’s lives by offering internal explanations for social conditions, and through the promotion of individualistic change strategies, authors invited women to alter some aspect of self in order to transform social arrangements” (p. 6).

A variety of qualitative methods were described here with an emphasis on why and how each method might be used by feminist researchers. For each of the methods, feminist researchers with differing epistemological positions are likely to share certain concerns regarding the research: “attention to women’s voices, differences between and within groups of women, women’s contextual and concrete experiences, and researcher positionality” ( Leckenby & Hess-Biber, 2007 , p. 279). As feminist researchers, we might mine each approach for its liberatory potential.

Innovations in Feminist Research

Intersectionality.

Feminist analytic strategies have been used to challenge biological reductionism, demonstrating how race and gender hierarchies are produced and maintained ( Hawkesworth, 2006 , p. 207). Increasingly, feminists have realized that individuals’ experiences are influenced by both race and gender and by the intersection of various identities (intersectionality). Intersectionality is an innovative approach that applies an analytic lens to research on gender, racial, ethnic, class, age, sexual orientation, and other dimensions of disparities ( Dill & Zambrana, 2009 ). The approach of intersectionality analyzes the intersections of oppressions, recognizing that race, sexual orientation, social class, and other oppressed identities are socially constructed. Intersectionality challenges traditional approaches to the study of inequality that isolated each factor of oppression (e.g., race) and treated it as independent of other forms of oppression ( Dill & Zambrana 2009 ). Interpersonal interactions and institutional practices can create marginalization and subsequently constrain women of color and women marginalized by other identities. In response to such recognition, feminist scholars of color have coined the term “intersectionality” to refer to the complex interplay of social forces that produce particular women and men as members of particular classes, races, ethnicities, and nationalities ( Crenshaw, 1989 ). McCall (2005) has referred to intersectionality as the most important contribution of women’s studies; intersectionality challenges the dominant perspectives within multiple disciplines including psychology. Intersectionality recognizes the interrelatedness of racialization and gendering. The term “racing-gendering” highlights the interactions of racialization and gendering in the production of difference ( Hawkesworth, 2006 ). The identities of women of color result from an amalgam of practices that construct them as Other. Such practices include silencing, excluding, marginalizing, stereotyping, and patronizing.

For example, in a study of congresswomen (103rd Congress), Hawkesworth (2006) found the narratives of congresswomen of color to be markedly different from the interview responses of white congresswomen. African-American congresswomen, especially, related experiences of insults, humiliation, frustration, and anger. Hawkesworth (2006) provides a series of examples to demonstrate that Congress was/is a race-gendered institution, that race-specific constructions of acting as a man and a woman are intertwined in daily interactions in that setting. She further relates the experiences of invisibility and subordination of black congresswomen to congressional action on welfare reform and concludes that the data indicate ongoing race-gendering in the institutional practices of Congress and in the interpersonal interactions among members of Congress.

Developing Consciousness

Consciousness raising (CR) was an important method of the second wave of feminism in the United States ( Chrisler & McHugh, 2011 ). Through group discussions, women recognized commonalities in their experiences that they had previously believed to be personal problems ( Brodsky, 1973 ). Such discussions had the potential to reveal aspects of sexism and patriarchy and led to the realization that the personal is political; that is, that the power imbalance between women and men and the way that society was structured along gender lines contributed to women’s experiences of distress (Hanish, 1970). Undertaken as political action, CR groups were later facilitated by psychologists and became a model for therapeutic women’s groups ( Brodsky, 1973 ). Consciousness raising groups are a form of participatory action research. Consciousness raising is a method for understanding and experiencing women’s experiences, and for understanding and resisting patriarchy. Consciousness-raising is an important contribution of feminism.

Double Consciousness

In an elaboration of consciousness raising, some theorists have discussed women’s double consciousness in relation to feminist standpoint theory. In one version of double consciousness, women, as a result of their subordinated position, have an awareness of their own daily lives and work (which are invisible to members of the dominant group), but they also have an understanding of the lives of the dominant group (Nielsen, 1989. Or, women scientists, by participating in science and yet experiencing the subordinated position of women, have a unique perspective as both an insider and an “other,” to examine the operation of sexist bias in science ( Rosser, 2008 ). Most frequently, double consciousness refers to the position of black feminist theorists that black women hold a unique position that allows them to understand the operation of both sexism and racism ( Collins, 1990 ; 2008 ). Collins argues that such consciousness, based on lived experience, involves both knowledge and wisdom and that such consciousness is essential to black women’s survival. Black women share their truth by way of storytelling or narrative, and the black community values their stories. The consciousness of black women is thus forged in connection with community. Collins (2008) suggests “the significance of a Black feminist epistemology may lie in its ability to enrich our understanding of how subordinate groups create knowledge that fosters both empowerment and social justice” ( Collins, 2008 , p. 256).

In an elaboration of double consciousness, feminist standpoint approaches have developed into a method, as well as an epistemological position ( Hawkesworth, 2006 ; Sandoval, 2000 ). Feminist standpoint as a method begins with the “collection and interrogation of competing claims about a single phenomenon” ( Hawkesworth, 2006 , p. 178). The method involves the contrast and analysis of competing situated (theoretical and value-laden) claims to understand the role theoretical presuppositions play in cognition. The feminist standpoint analysis may suggest ways to resolve seemingly intractable conflicts ( Hawkesworth, 2006 ). Hawkesworth (2006) illustrates the method with an analysis of multiple feminist positions on Affirmative Action.

Oppositional Consciousness

Authors and theorists from varied backgrounds and geographies have described and theorized a form of consciousness referred to as “oppositional consciousness.” The recognition and development of “oppositional consciousness” is considered both a social movement and a method ( Sandoval, 2000 ). As a method, cultural theorists aim to specify and reinforce particular forms of resistance to the dominant social hierarchy. “The methodology of the oppressed is a set of processes, procedures and technologies for de-colonizing the imagination” ( Sandoval, 2000 , p. 68). The theory and method of oppositional consciousness is a consciousness developed within women of color feminism ( Sandoval, 2000 , p. 180), where it has been employed as a methodology of the oppressed. The methodology of oppositional consciousness, as theorized by a racially diverse (US) coalition of women of color, demonstrates the procedures for achieving affinity and alliance across difference ( Sandoval, 2000 ). Through a series of dialogues, processes, meaning-making, deconstructions, and consciousness, people in search of emancipation from oppression voice, interrogate, and theorize their experiences, recognize (resist) ideologies and practices of oppression, and transcend differences to achieve an alliance, a coalition of consciousness that opposes oppression and transcends difference ( Sandoval, 2000 ).

Trans/Feminist Methodology

In a related approach, Pryse (2000) argued that the interdisciplinarity of women’s studies can contribute to the development of a “trans/feminist methodology.” Pryse (2000) contends that there is a special opportunity in the study of women’s studies scholars; faculty and students from diverse disciplinary backgrounds collaborate over questions regarding gender and its interconnections with race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, ability, and culture. Envisioning a hybrid or “trans” methodology is the challenge of interdisciplinary collaborations ( Friedman, 1998 ; Pryse, 2000 ). She examines interdisciplinarity as involving intellectual flexibility and engagement in cross-cultural analyses, both of which can be conducive to cross-cultural insight and may enhance receptivity to difference. Pryse is hopeful that the work of interdisciplinary teams can develop the transversal political perspective described by Yuval-Davis (1997) . Transversal political perspectives are contrasted with identity politics in which women from different classes, regions, nations, races, or ethnicities recognize and emphasize the differences in their material and political realities. In a transversal political perspective, women could “enter into a dialogue concerning their material and political realities without being required to assert their collective identity politics in such a way that they cannot move outside their ideological positioning” ( Pryse, 2000 , p. 106). Yuval-Davis (1997) described interactions of Palestinian and Israeli women who engaged in a dialogue that could be indicative of transversalism. Each member of the interaction remained rooted in her own identity, but shifted to a position that allowed an exchange with a women with another identity. This dialogue, labeled transversalism was contrasted with universalism. In transversalism, a bridge that can cross borders or differences is constructed, whereas universalism assumes homogeneity among women. In her vision, Pryse sees transversalism as a methodology that can allow feminist researchers to construct questions that emerge from women’s lives without committing the error of universalizing women and by remaining specific about the differences among women. Furthermore, the transversal approach can help researchers transcend disciplinary boundaries and methods. A transversal approach is consistent with a postmodern perspective in that multiple realities and partial truths are recognized and essentialism is avoided ( Pryse, 2000 ). The transversal viewpoint allows both difference and similarity to be simultaneously recognized and appreciated as we study women’s lives. This can be seen as a form of dialectic thinking, as opposed to the traditional tendency to engage in dichotomous thinking.

Dialectic Thinking

In a similar approach, Kimball argued that “The major goal of practicing double visions is to resist the choice of either similarities or differences as more true or politically valid than the other” ( Kimball, 1995 , p. 12). Kimball (1995) called for a rejection of simplistic dichotomous thinking (about gender) and for the practice of double visions with regard to feminist theory and research on gender. Kimball’s reference to double visions originates in the postmodern position that we can only have partial knowledge and that partial knowledge is, by definition, not fully accurate. Accordingly, Kimball is suggesting that we are not forced to choose between one piece of partial knowledge and another. Thus, we do not have to choose between evidence that women are caring and evidence that women are aggressive. One might chose a particular position in a certain context or prefer a given perspective on gender, but, as Kimball has noted, practicing double visions means that neither alternative is foreclosed; feminist psychologists would recognize the partiality of any perspective and respect theoretical diversity. This means that we should actively resist making a choice and instead maintain a tension between/among the alternative positions. The way forward for feminist research, according to Tuana (1992) , is to avoid dichotomous thinking and either/or choices. In terms of the sex/gender difference debate, this could mean that we recognize that men and women are both alike and different or are alike in some settings and different in others ( McHugh & Cosgrove, 2002 ).

Double visions, or a dialectic approach to sex/gender, describes the movement between or among positions as a sophisticated and theoretically grounded practice. Previously, the perspective of individuals who vacillated between denying gender differences and focusing on the common experiences of women may have been labeled as contradictory, inconsistent, incoherent, or confused. This is similar to the problem of either focusing on the differences among women or examining the common experience of being a woman in a patriarchal society. Privileging the dialectic perspective legitimizes our current confusion, giving us permission to hold contradictory, paradoxical, and fragmented perspectives on gender and women’s experiences.

Applying a postmodern or dialectic approach can help to resolve epistemological and theoretical debates. For example, feminists and family researchers have been engaged in an ongoing debate about intimate partner violence as battering (of women by their male partners) or as family violence (equally perpetrated by men and women) ( McHugh, Livingston, & Ford, 2005 ). A postmodern or dialectic approach allows us to recognize how issues of method, sample, and conceptualization have contributed to the debate and to realize that, in a postmodern world, there is not a single truth, but multiple, complex, and fragmented perspectives. Thus, women may contribute to family violence, and battering may be perpetrated mostly by men against female intimates ( McHugh et al., 2005 ).

Ferguson (1991) and Haraway (1985) recommend irony as a way to resolve the dichotomous tensions created by two (seemingly opposing) projects or perspectives. In irony, laughter dissuades us from premature closure and exposes both the truth and the non-truth of each perspective. Ferguson (1991) describes irony as “a way to keep oneself within a situation that resists resolution in order to act politically without pretending that resolution has come” (p. 338). Similarly, Cosgrove and McHugh (2008) have encouraged the use of satire to expose and challenge the limitations of the scientific method; irony and satire can contribute to the transformation of both science and society.

Feminist scholars have taken issue with dominant disciplinary approaches to knowledge production. Feminist researchers have asked a range of questions, examined and adopted varied epistemological positions, and employed diverse methods. While employing varied methods, feminist researchers share a commitment to promote women’s freedom, to examine/expose oppression based on gender (and other subordinated statuses), and to revolt against institutions, practices, and values that subordinate and denigrate women.

Feminists have a long tradition of challenging the theories, methods, and “truths” that traditional social scientists believe to be real, objective, and value-free. Feminists have posed a serious challenge to the alleged value neutrality of positivistic social science. In an attempt to transform social science, feminists have developed innovative ideas, methods, and critiques, some of which were reviewed here. Classic and emergent qualitative methods have been deployed in a variety of contexts as feminist researchers critique traditional methods and assumptions and struggle to conduct research that empowers women or improves their lives. The current chapter represents an attempt to help researchers understand the methodological and epistemological underpinning of feminist research, to reflect on their own choice of methods, and to practice feminist research by engaging in a nonhierarchical and collaborative process that leads to an understanding of some aspect of women’s lives and contributes to the transformation of society. Hesse-Biber and Leavy (2007) have provided a guide to feminist research practice. In conclusion to their guide, Hesse-Biber (2007) characterized the research process as a “journey... where the personal and the political merge and multiple truths are discovered and voiced where there had been silence” (p. 348).

One possibility for the future is that increasing numbers of researchers will be exposed to the feminist critique of science and will contribute to the transformation of research by developing a postmodern or dialectical approach to research. According to a postmodern approach, the transformation of society begins with a transformation of our understanding of how and what we can know. Traditional approaches to knowledge constructed, confirmed, and constrained our understanding of gender and our ideas of what is possible. The postmodern position provides a powerful epistemological position for deconstructing rather than regulating gender ( Cosgrove, 2003 ). Thus, the transformation of science and research is an initial step toward the feminist transformation of gender and the dismantling of male dominance. Larner (1999) viewed the postmodern perspective as encouraging us to “think the unthought and ask questions unasked.”

However, changing the practices of science and social science so that we can better attend to issues of social injustice is neither an easy nor straightforward task. Hesse-Biber and Leavy (2008) note that quantitative methods continue to be privileged over qualitative in a variety of ways. In my own experience, despite the varied epistemological perspectives and the array of methodological approaches available, the majority of research reported in journals and textbooks continues to employ empirical and quantitative methods. When qualitative methods are employed, they tend to be the established classic approaches, like open-ended survey interview questions that are thematically coded. Furthermore, in a systematic review of the top undergraduate research methods texts of 2009, I observed that qualitative methods were not substantially described or discussed in most texts, and feminist critiques or research were not mentioned ( Eagly, Eaton, & McHugh, 2011 ). Hesse-Biber and Leavy (2008) cite research and university culture as supporting the status quo and limiting the use of innovative and emergent methods. Funding sources may contribute to conservativism in science, and gatekeepers, such as journal editors, may also limit researchers’ willingness to engage in innovative feminist research.

Although she was writing in 1988, Morawski could be talking about today when she suggests that a new (US) conservatism is indicated by recent losses in Affirmative Action, challenges to reproductive rights, and legislation that negatively affects large numbers of American women. She notes that feminist progress is transforming traditional social science but may easily become or remain mired in such a climate. In response to such a societal impasse, Morawski considers some possibilities for feminist deconstruction and reconstruction. She recommends that we continue to be critical and reflective and that we not commit the same errors that we have identified, for example, essentialism. She encourages us to develop a vision of emancipation, to use our imagination, creativity, and irony to overcome our current impasse.

Future Directions

Satire and irony represent one approach to the future of feminist research. “Through the resources of irony, we can think both about how we do feminist theory, and about which notions of reality and truth make our theories possible” ( Ferguson, 1991 , p. 339). Irony is also recognized by Shotter and Logan (1988) as a requisite for feminist research as it attempts to resist patriarchal thinking and practices even as it produces meaning within the current patriarchal context. They see the feminist research project as developing new practices while still making use of resources that are part of the old. Shotter and Logan argue for a feminist alternative that would “allow a conversation within which the creative, formative power of talk could be put to use in reformulating, redistributing and redeveloping both people’s knowledge of themselves and their immediate circumstances, and the nature of their practical-historical relations to one another” (p. 82). Moving forward toward an egalitarian community requires a reflection and understanding of our immediate practical relationships to one another, a consideration of “in what voices we allow to speak, and which voices we take seriously” (p. 83).

One form of irony, farce, involves exaggerated versions of a phenomena resulting in both laughter and sometimes a new understanding of the issues involved. Taking an ironic approach can lead to a richer and more complex picture and necessitates a re-visioning of the epistemological and methodological frameworks that underlie psychological research and feminist theory ( Cosgrove & McHugh, 2008 ; McHugh & Cosgrove, 2002 ). Although the empirical satiricism described by Cosgrove and McHugh (2008 ; McHugh & Cosgrove, 2002 ) is a quantitative method, qualitative methods based on irony and satire can certainly be developed within the participatory action or performative approaches.

(Whereas my younger colleagues may need to limit their research to methods that are acceptable to funding sources and journal editors, I realize that I am not limited by these factors. A decade preretirement, I am in a position to use emergent methods to conduct research that challenges existing ideas regarding women and gender or advocates for marginalized women. I am willing to rethink (again) my epistemological and ontological perspectives, to go beyond my disciplinary boundaries, and to engage in dialectic thinking and irony. Although I may not be successful in jumping publication hurdles, there are alternative methods for distributing or performing transformative knowledge. I hope to conduct participatory and performative research that is ironic, even farcical, to incite new knowledge).

Multidisciplinary collaborations can contribute to the adoption of new perspectives and methods that ignore or transgress boundaries set by traditional disciplines that have served to restrict or constrain our conceptions on how to conduct research. The interdisciplinary practice of women’s studies has contributed to innovations in feminist research practice. Through women’s studies and other multidisciplinary approaches, feminists from more conservative disciplines can be introduced to postmodern perspectives and other post-postmodern and emerging forms of research. Feminists can contribute to progress by affirming, approving, and applauding the attempts at methodological innovation employed by others.

For example, feminist psychology in the United States has not yet taken the “performative turn,” although feminist researchers from other disciplinary contexts have. Leavy (2008) characterized performance as an interdisciplinary methodological genre used in a variety of fields including sociology, health, and education. Performance can be viewed as a new epistemological stance that disrupts conventional ways of knowing ( Gray, 2003 ). In a performance, individuals act out, and the performance is experienced “in the moment.” Profound theoretical insight can occur to researcher and audience alike when we shift from the representation of reality in written records to the flow of performance. In performance, the actors and the audience help to make or co-create the meaning, and understanding involves an interaction among members of the cast and the audience ( Leavy, 2008 ). Audience members do not need special skills or training to understand or appreciate a performance, and different perspectives on the performance may result in different interpretations or insights. Thus, the knowing that results from a performance is different from the meaning constructed by the researcher in more traditional research. Leavy (2008) points out the relevance of performance to feminist perspectives that emphasize the embodied experience of women (e.g., Bardo, 1989 ). Leavy (2008) described arts-based methods as a hybrid of arts and science; she characterized performative methods as innovative, dynamic, holistic, creative, as involving reflection and problem solving.

An aspect of the performative turn is the emerging interest in research on the mundane, or the study of the everyday. Contemporary nonrepresentational theory calls us to study the flow of everyday practices in the present rather than constructing post hoc interpretations of past events. Profound theoretical insight and innovations in methods could result if we were to shift from the representation of reality to the flow of performance, if we were to take the mundane or everyday practices of women seriously ( Chrisler & McHugh, 2011 ). This philosophical position builds on the phenomenological approach, an approach Cosgrove and McHugh (2008) have recommended for integration into feminist methods. This approach is also consistent with the position taken by some feminists that women’s ways of being in the world (i.e., as emotional and connected beings) have validity and importance and should not be eliminated in the name of rationality and science.

As early as 1988, Aebischer marveled at the feminist transformation that social science had undergone, when it had become possible to intellectually study “aspects of everyday life and everyday people and to be taken seriously.” Even then, she recognized the study of personal experiences, intimate relationships, emotional reactions, and body experiences as a significant transition from one value system to another. Contemporary calls for the exploration of the everyday reveal the extent to which social science in the past had been focused on the unusual, the non-normative, or the pathological. Emphasis on the exceptional, on public domains, on cognition, and on achievements (of men) reflects the androcentric bias of social science. Furthermore, traditional approaches to research such as the experiment, the survey, and systematic observation are not conducive to the study of everyday routines and experiences. Women’s everyday experiences such as gossip ( McHugh & Hambaugh, 2010) , feeling at home ( McHugh, 1996 ), and street harassment ( Sullivan, Lord, & McHugh, 2010 ) have traditionally not been valued as significant topics. In some ways, the current emphasis on the study of everyday lives is a continuation or an extension of an angle of vision adopted primarily within sociology ( Scott, 2009 ). Perhaps what is more innovative is the development of new and emerging methods, including the performative, for the study of affect and the everyday.

The study of the everyday experiences and routines of women is just one example of the directions that future US feminist researchers may take as they shift away from the limitations of logical positivism and, with postmodern permission, strategically adopt multiple ontological, epistemological, and methodological perspectives. Removing the methodological shackles of positivism, modernism, and empiricism, we can exercise epistemological and methodological freedom and move toward feminist research that transforms science and society and liberates women.

(Writing this chapter has been challenging and has caused me to further reflect on myself as a feminist researcher. I have recognized the barriers that have impeded my research in the past decades. Some of these barriers are personal and others are more about the reception that I have received as a feminist researcher and a postmodern theorist. I have reaffirmed the importance to myself of intrinsic motivation and finding meaning in my work, as opposed to external recognition. Through writing this chapter, I have come to an appreciation of the value of research that I have conducted (for example, on the meaning of home and the positive aspects of gossip) and could continue to conduct that provides partial and situated knowledge and research that adopts an emergent research method. I am inspired to pursue more feminist research and to encourage my students to employ varied and more innovative feminist methods.)

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Book cover

Sourcebook of Family Theories and Methodologies pp 379–400 Cite as

Feminist Theories: Knowledge, Method, and Practice

  • Katherine R. Allen 5 ,
  • Abbie E. Goldberg 6 &
  • Ana L. Jaramillo-Sierra 7  
  • First Online: 08 November 2022

1629 Accesses

2 Citations

Feminist theorizing in family science is an intellectual and a political project, where feminist theorists engage the world through critical intersectional perspectives to know it (knowledge), understand it (method), and change it (practice). Feminist family theories offer a fierce and flexible framework that is contentious and political, encompassing a vast enterprise of intellectual scholarly work, collective engagement, and constant agitation for social change. In this chapter, we examine the history of feminist thinking in family science across four eras of academic and activist feminist movements. We define key feminist concepts, including the social construction of gender, intersectionality, patriarchy, privilege, power, praxis, and reflexivity. We consider feminist theorizing in relation to related, though not synonymous, ways of critically theorizing about inequality, power, and the need for social change, including intersectionality theory, queer theory, and global and transnational feminisms. We analyze tensions, controversies, and limitations of feminist theorizing, and offer empirical examples of feminist-informed family research. Finally, we address future directions for feminist theorizing about families.

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Allen, K.R., Goldberg, A.E., Jaramillo-Sierra, A.L. (2022). Feminist Theories: Knowledge, Method, and Practice. In: Adamsons, K., Few-Demo, A.L., Proulx, C., Roy, K. (eds) Sourcebook of Family Theories and Methodologies. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-92002-9_27

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Feminist Epistemology and Philosophy of Science

Feminist epistemology and philosophy of science studies the ways in which gender does and ought to influence our conceptions of knowledge, knowers, and practices of inquiry and justification. It identifies how dominant conceptions and practices of knowledge attribution, acquisition, and justification disadvantage women and other subordinated groups, and strives to reform them to serve the interests of these groups. Various feminist epistemologists and philosophers of science argue that dominant knowledge practices disadvantage women by (1) excluding them from inquiry, (2) denying them epistemic authority, (3) denigrating “feminine” cognitive styles, (4) producing theories of women that represent them as inferior, or significant only in the ways they serve male interests, (5) producing theories of social phenomena that render women’s activities and interests, or gendered power relations, invisible, and (6) producing knowledge that is not useful for people in subordinate positions, or that reinforces gender and other social hierarchies. Feminist epistemologists trace these failures to flawed conceptions of knowledge, knowers, objectivity, and scientific methodology. They offer diverse accounts of how to overcome these failures. They also aim to (1) explain why the entry of women and feminist scholars into different academic disciplines has generated new questions, theories, methods, and findings, (2) show how gender and feminist values and perspectives have played a causal role in these transformations, (3) promote theories that aid egalitarian and liberation movements, and (4) defend these developments as epistemic advances.

The central concept of feminist epistemology is of situated knowledge: knowledge that reflects the particular perspectives of the knower. Feminist philosophers explore how gender situates knowing subjects. They have articulated three main approaches to this question—feminist standpoint theory, feminist postmodernism, and feminist empiricism—which have converged over time. Conceptions of how gender situates knowers also inform feminist approaches to the central problems of the field: grounding feminist criticisms of science and feminist science, defining the proper roles of social and political values in inquiry, evaluating ideals of objectivity, and reforming practices of epistemic authority and epistemic virtue.

1. Situated Knowers

2. feminist standpoint theory, 3. feminist postmodernism, 4. feminist empiricism, 5. interactions of feminist standpoint theory, postmodernism, and empiricism, 6. feminist science criticism and feminist science, 7. feminist defenses of value-laden inquiry, 8. feminist critiques and conceptions of objectivity, 9. epistemic authority, epistemic injustice, epistemologies of ignorance, and virtue epistemology, 10. external criticisms of feminist epistemology, other internet resources, related entries.

Feminist epistemology conceives of knowers as situated in particular relations to what is known and to other knowers. What is known, and how it is known, reflects the situation and perspective of the knower. Here we are concerned with claims to know, temporarily bracketing the question of which claims are true or warranted.

Situated knowledge in general. People may understand the same object in different ways that reflect the distinct relations in which they stand to it. (1) Embodiment . People experience the world by using their bodies, which have different constitutions and are differently located in space and time. (2) First-person vs. third-person knowledge . Individuals have first-personal access to some of their own bodily and mental states, and knowledge about themselves, which differs from third-person knowledge about them. (3) Emotions, attitudes, interests, and values . People often represent objects in relation to their emotions, attitudes and interests, which differ from how others represent these objects. A thief represents a lock as a frustrating obstacle while its owner represents the lock as a comforting source of security. (4) Personal knowledge of others . Because people behave differently toward others, and others interpret their behavior differently, depending on their personal relationships, what others know of them depends on these relationships. (5) Know-how . People have different skills, which may also be a source of different propositional knowledge. (6) Cognitive Styles . People have different styles of investigation and representation (e.g. preferring lumping or splitting). (7) Background beliefs and worldviews . People form different beliefs about an object, in virtue of different background beliefs. Such differences may lead a patient to interpret his symptoms as signs of a heart attack, while his doctor diagnoses heartburn. Differences in global metaphysical or political worldviews may also generate different beliefs about particulars on a broader scale. (8) Relations to other inquirers . People may stand in different epistemic relations to other inquirers—for example, as informants, assistants, students—which affects their access to information and their ability to convey their beliefs to others.

Situatedness influences knowers’ access to information and the terms in which they represent what they know. They bear on the form of their knowledge (articulate/implicit, formal/informal, and so forth). They affect their attitudes toward their beliefs (certainty/doubt, dogmatic/open to revision), their standards of justification, and the authority with which they lay claim to their beliefs and offer them to others. They affect knowers’ assessment of which claims are significant or important.

Social situation. Feminist epistemology focuses on how the social location of the knower affects what and how she knows. It is thus a branch of social epistemology. Individuals’ social locations consist of their ascribed social identities (gender, race, sexual orientation, caste, class, kinship status, trans/cis etc.) and social relations, roles, and role-given interests, which are affected by these identities. Individuals are subject to different norms that prescribe different virtues, habits, emotions, and skills thought to be appropriate for their roles. They also have different subjective identities—identities incorporated into their self-understandings—, and attitudes toward their ascribed identities, such as affirmation, rejection, pride, and shame.

Gender as a mode of social situation. In feminist theory, “gender” refers to systems of meanings, social identities, roles, norms, and associated behaviors, traits and virtues, ascribed or prescribed to individuals on the basis of their real or imagined sexual characteristics (Haslanger 2000). It also includes individuals’ subjective identifications with and orientations to such meanings. Psychological traits are considered “masculine” and “feminine” if they dispose their bearers to comply with the gender norms assigned to men and women, respectively. From a performative perspective, masculinity and femininity are not fixed traits but contrasting styles of behavior that may be manifested by individuals of any ascribed or subjective gender identity in almost any role (West & Zimmerman 1987; Butler 1990). Finally, “gender symbolism” comprises metaphorical ascriptions of gendered ideas to animals and inanimate objects.

Gendered knowledge. By joining the account of situated knowledge with the account of gender as a social situation, we can generate a catalog 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 genders, or by ideas about gender (symbolism).

The phenomenology of gendered bodies . People’s bodies are both differently sexed and differently gendered. Early child socialization trains boys’ and girls’ bodies to different norms of bodily comportment. Once internalized, such norms profoundly affect the phenomenology of embodiment. They inform men’s and women’s distinct first-personal knowledge of what it is like to inhabit a body, to express capacities unique to one sex or another (e.g., breast feeding), and to have experiences that are manifested through different body parts in differently sexed bodies (e.g., orgasm). They also cause men’s and women’s experiences of gendered behaviors that both can perform to differ—in fluidity, self-consciousness, confidence, awkwardness, shame, and so forth. Some feminist epistemologists argue that dominant models of the world, especially of the relation between minds and bodies, have seemed compelling to mostly male philosophers because they conform to a male or masculine phenomenology (Bordo 1987; Young 1990).

Gendered first-personal knowledge . It is one thing to know what sexual harassment is in third-personal terms. It is another to recognize “ I have been sexually harassed.” Many women know that women in general are disadvantaged have difficulty recognizing themselves as sharing women’s predicament (Clayton & Crosby 1992). The problems of self-knowledge are pressing for feminist theory, because it is committed to theorizing in ways that women can use to improve their lives. This entails that women be able to recognize their lives in feminist accounts of women’s predicament. Feminist epistemology is therefore concerned with investigating the conditions of feminist self-understanding and the social settings in which it may arise (MacKinnon 1989).

Gendered attitudes, interests, and values . A representation is androcentric if it depicts the world in relation to male or masculine interests, attitudes or values. A “male” interest is an interest a man has, in virtue of the goals given to him by social roles designated as appropriate for men to occupy, or in virtue of his subjective gender identity. A “masculine” interest is an interest a man has in virtue of attitudes thought appropriate to men. Such attitudes and interests structure the cognition of those who have them. For instance, they may influence how heterosexual men classify women as, e.g., differently eligible for sexual intercourse with them. A representation is gynocentric if it depicts the world in relation to female or feminine interests, attitudes, or values. An interest, attitude, or value might also be symbolically gendered. For example, the ethics of care represents moral problems in terms of symbolically feminine values—values culturally associated with women’s gender roles (Gilligan 1982). It is a symbolically gynocentric perspective, even if men also adopt it. Feminist epistemology raises numerous questions about these phenomena. Can situated emotional responses to things be a valid source of knowledge about them (Jaggar 1989, Keller 1983, Pitts-Taylor 2013)? Do dominant practices and conceptions of science reflect an androcentric perspective, or a perspective that reflects other dominant positions, as of race and colonial rule (Merchant 1980; Harding 1986, 1991, 1993, 1998, 2006, 2008; Schiebinger 2007)? Do mainstream philosophical conceptions of objectivity, knowledge, and reason reflect an androcentric perspective (Bordo 1987; Code 1991; Flax 1983; Rooney 1991)? How would the conceptual frameworks of particular sciences change if they reflected the interests of women (Anderson 1995b, Rolin 2009)?

Knowledge of others in gendered relationships . Gender norms structure the social spaces to which people with different gender identities are admitted, as well as the presentation of self to others. Inquirers with different gender identities therefore have access to different information about others. Male and female ethnographers may be admitted to different social spaces, and have different effects on their informants. Research that elicits information about others through personal contact therefore raises the question of how findings might be influenced by gendered relations between researchers and subjects, and whether gender-inclusive research teams are in a better position to detect this (Bell et al 1993; Leacock 1981; Sherif 1987).

Gendered skills . Some skills are labeled masculine or feminine because men and women need them to perform their respective gender roles. To the extent that the skill is perceived by the agent or others as proper to someone with a different gender, performance of it, or social recognition of success in performance, may be impaired. These phenomena raise various epistemic questions. Does the “masculine” symbolism of certain scientific skills, such as of assuming an “objective” stance toward nature, interfere with the integration of women into science? Do actually or symbolically “feminine” skills aid the acquisition of scientific knowledge (Keller 1983, 1985a; Rose 1987; Ruetsche 2004)?

Gendered cognitive styles . Some theorists believe that men and women have different cognitive styles (Belenky et al 1986; Gilligan 1982). Whether or not this is true, cognitive styles are gender symbolized (Rooney 1991). Deductive, analytic, atomistic, acontextual, and quantitative cognitive styles are labeled “masculine,” while intuitive, synthetic, holistic, contextual and qualitative cognitive styles are labeled “feminine.” It is seen as masculine to make one’s point by argument, feminine to make one’s point by narrative. Argument is commonly cast as an adversarial mode of discourse, like war, while narrative is viewed as a seductive mode of discourse, like love. These phenomena raise epistemic questions: does the quest for “masculine” prestige by using “masculine” methods distort practices of knowledge acquisition (Addelson 1983; Moulton, 1983)? Are some kinds of research unfairly ignored because of their association with “feminine” cognitive styles (Keller 1983, 1985b)?

Gendered background beliefs and worldviews . Representational schemes that are functional for different gendered roles and attitudes make different information salient. The resulting differential background knowledge may lead differently gendered individuals to interpret commonly accessed information differently. A man might read a woman’s demure smile as a coy come-on, where another woman may interpret it as her polite and defensive reaction to unwanted attention. Such differences can spring from differential access to empathetic and phenomenological knowledge. These phenomena raise epistemological questions. Are there epistemic obstacles to legal institutions recognizing rape and sexual harassment, insofar as they confine their thinking within a “masculine” perspective (MacKinnon 1989)? Do sexist or androcentric background beliefs cause scientists to generate sexist theories about women, despite adhering to ostensibly objective scientific methods (Harding 1986; Harding & O’Barr, 1987)? How might the social practices of science be organized so that variations in background beliefs of inquirers function as epistemic resources (Longino 1990; Solomon 2001)?

Relations to other inquirers . Gender differences in knowledge can be reduced if differently gendered people participate in inquiry together. Each gender can take on testimony what the other can acquire through direct experience. Each may also learn how to exercise imaginative projection more effectively, and to take up the perspective of another gender. However, gender norms influence the terms on which men and women communicate (Kalbfleisch 1995). In some contexts, women are not allowed to speak, or their questions, comments, and challenges are ignored, interrupted, and systematically distorted, or they aren’t accepted as experts. Gendered norms of conversation and epistemic authority thus influence the ability of knowledge practices to incorporate the knowledge of men and women into their processes of inquiry. Feminist epistemologists explore how gender norms distort the dissemination of testimony and relations of cognitive authority among inquirers (Addelson 1983; Code 1991; Fricker 2007) and how the social relations of inquirers could be reformed, especially with regard to the allocation of epistemic authority, so as to enable more successful practices of inquiry (Jones 2002; Longino 1990; Nelson 1990, 1993).

Problems of and Approaches to Gendered Situated Knowledge. Mainstream epistemology takes as paradigms of knowledge simple propositional knowledge about matters in principle equally accessible to anyone with basic cognitive and sensory apparatus: “2+2=4”; “grass is green”; “water quenches thirst.” Feminist epistemology does not claim that such knowledge is gendered. Paying attention to gender-situated knowledge enables questions to be addressed that are difficult to frame in epistemologies that assume that gender and other social situations of the knower are irrelevant to knowledge. Are certain perspectives epistemically privileged? Can a more objective perspective be constructed from differently gendered perspectives?

Feminist epistemologists have considered situated knowledge within three traditions: standpoint theory, postmodernism, and empiricism. The next three sections explain how these three traditions were originally articulated, while section 5 discussion their interactions and convergence.

Standpoint Epistemology in General. Standpoint theories claim to represent the world from an epistemically advantaged socially situated perspective. A complete standpoint theory must specify (i) the social location of the advantaged perspective, (ii) its scope : the subject matters over which it claims advantage, (iii) the aspect of the social location that generates epistemic advantage: for example, social role, or subjective identity; (iv) the ground of its advantage: what justifies its claim to superiority; (v) the type of epistemic superiority it claims: for example, greater accuracy, or greater ability to represent fundamental truths; (vi) the other perspectives relative to which it claims advantage, and (vii) modes of access to that perspective: is occupying the social location necessary or sufficient for getting access to the perspective? Many limited claims to epistemic advantage on behalf of particular perspectives are uncontroversial. Auto mechanics are in a better position than auto consumers to know what is wrong with their cars. Practical experience in fulfilling the mechanic’s role grounds mechanics’ epistemic advantage, which claims superior reliability.

Standpoint theories usually claim that the perspectives of subordinated social groups have an epistemic advantage regarding politically contested topics related to their subordination, relative to the perspectives of the groups that dominate them. Classically , standpoint theory claims that the standpoint of the subordinated is advantaged (1) in revealing fundamental social regularities; (2) in exposing social arrangements as contingent and susceptible to change through concerted action; and (3) in representing the social world in relation to universal human interests. By contrast, dominant group standpoints represent only surface social regularities in relation to dominant group interests, and misrepresent them as necessary, natural, or universally advantageous.

Marxist Standpoint Theory. Marxism offers the classic model of standpoint theory, claiming an epistemic advantage over fundamental questions of social science and history, on behalf of the standpoint of the proletariat (Marx 1964, Lukács 1971). Workers attain this standpoint by gaining collective consciousness of their role in the capitalist system. In virtue of their oppression, they have an interest in the truth about whose interests capitalism serves. In virtue of their centrality, they have experiential access to the fundamental relations of capitalist production. In virtue of their practical productive activity, they represent it in terms of use values (labor values), which are the terms in which the fundamental laws of economics and history are expressed. In virtue of their standing as the agents for the universal class they will become under communism, they represent the social world in relation to universal human interests. (Capitalists, by contrast, represent the world ideologically in superficial (exchange value) and parochial (class interested) terms.) Finally, the collective self-consciousness of the workers involves, like all successful intentional action, a self-fulfilling prophecy. Workers’ collective insight into their common predicament and the need to overcome it through revolutionary action generates a self-understanding which, when acted upon, gets realized. The epistemic advantage of the standpoint of the proletariat is thus also grounded in the epistemic privilege that autonomous agents have over what they are consciously doing.

Grounds of Feminist Standpoint Theory. Feminist standpoint theory claims that the standpoint of women has an epistemic advantage over phenomena in which gender is implicated, relative to theories that make sexist or androcentric assumptions. Variants of feminist standpoint theory ground this epistemic advantage in different features of women’s social situation, by analogy with different strands of Marxist epistemology.

Centrality . Marxist feminists, such as Hartsock (1987) and Rose (1987) focus on women’s centrality to the system of reproduction—of childrearing and caring for bodies. Because women tend to the needs of everyone in the household, they are in a better position than men to see how patriarchy fails to meet people’s needs. Men, in virtue of their dominant position, can ignore how patriarchy undermines subordinates’ interests.

Collective self-consciousness . MacKinnon (1989) argues that men constitute women as women by sexually objectifying them, i.e., by representing their natures as essentially sexually subordinate to men and treating them accordingly. Women unmask these ideological misrepresentations by achieving and acting on a shared understanding of themselves as women—as a group unjustly constituted by sexual objectification. Through collective feminist actions in which women refuse to act as sexual objects—as in campaigns against sexual harassment and rape— women show that representations of women as sexual objects are not natural or necessary. Their privileged knowledge is collective agent self-knowledge, made true by being put into action in feminist campaigns.

Cognitive style . Some early versions of standpoint theory (Flax 1983, Hartsock 1987, Rose 1987) accept feminist object relations theory, which explains the development of gender identity in male and female children raised by female caregivers. Males acquire a masculine identity by distinguishing themselves from their mothers, through controlling and denigrating the feminine. Females acquire their gender identity through identification with their mothers, blurring boundaries between self and other. Males and females thereby acquire distinct cognitive styles. The masculine cognitive style is abstract, theoretical, emotionally detached, atomistic, and oriented toward control or domination. The feminine cognitive style is concrete, practical, emotionally engaged, relational, and oriented toward care. These cognitive styles are reinforced by the gendered division of labor—men having a near monopoly on positions of political, economic, and military power calling for detachment and control; and women being assigned to emotional care for others. The feminine cognitive style claims epistemic advantage because ways of knowing based on caring for everyone’s needs produce more valuable representations than ways of knowing based on domination (Hartsock 1987). Institutionalizing feminine ways of knowing requires overcoming the division of mental, manual, and caring labor that characterizes capitalist patriarchy (Rose 1987).

Oppression . Women have an interest in representing social phenomena in ways that reveal their oppression. They also have personal experience of sexist oppression, unlike men, whose power enables them to ignore how their actions affect women. If epistemic advantage is grounded in oppression, the multiply oppressed have additional epistemic authority. Thus, Collins (1990) grounds black feminist epistemology in black women’s personal experiences of racism and sexism. She uses this epistemology to supply black women with self-representations that enable them to resist demeaning racist and sexist images of black women, and to take pride in their identities. The epistemic advantage of the oppressed is sometimes founded on“bifurcated consciousness”: the ability to see both from the perspective of the dominant and from the perspective of the oppressed (Harding 1991, Collins 1990).

Access to the Feminist Standpoint. Every standpoint theory must explain how one gains access to it. Most standpoint theories represent the epistemically advantaged standpoint not as given, but as achieved through critical reflection on the power structures constituting group identities. If the group and its interests are defined objectively, the facts that constitute the group and its interests are publicly accessible. So anyone can theorize phenomena in relation to the interests of that group. However, if epistemic advantage lies in collective agent-knowledge, its site lies in the group defining itself as a collective agent. The privileged standpoint is not that of women, but of feminists (MacKinnon 1989). Men can participate in the feminist movement. But they cannot assume a dominant role in defining (hence knowing) its aims, given the feminist interest in overcoming male dominance.

Goals of Feminist Standpoint Theory. Feminist standpoint theory is a type of critical theory . Critical theories aim to empower the oppressed. To serve this aim, social theories must (a) represent the world in relation to the interests of the oppressed; (b) enable the oppressed to understand their problems; and (c) be usable by the oppressed to improve their condition. Claims of superiority for critical theories are thus fundamentally based on pragmatic virtues (Harding 1991, Hartsock 1996).

Criticisms of Feminist Standpoint Theory. Longino (1993b) argues that standpoint theory cannot provide a noncircular basis for deciding which standpoints have epistemic privilege. Crenshaw (1999) argues that it is implausible to hold that any group inequality is central to all the others; they intersect in complex ways. Hence, women cannot have privileged access to understanding their oppression, since this takes different forms for different women, depending on their race, sexual orientation, and other identities. This critique has been developed by feminist postmodernists, who question the possibility of a unified standpoint of women, and see, behind the assertion of a universal woman’s viewpoint, the perspective of relatively privileged white women (Lugones & Spelman 1983).

General Postmodernist Themes. Postmodernism draws inspiration from poststructuralist and postmodernist theorists, including Derrida, Foucault, Irigaray, Lacan, Lyotard, and Saussure. It questions attempts to transcend situatedness by appeal to such ideas as universality, necessity, objectivity, essence, and foundations. It stresses the locality, partiality, contingency, instability, uncertainty, ambiguity and essential contestability of any particular view of the world and the good. The postmodernist emphasis on revealing the situatedness and contestability of any claim or system serves both critical and liberatory functions. It delegitimizes ideas that dominate and exclude by undermining their claims to ultimate justification. And it opens up space for imagining alternative possibilities that were obscured by those claims.

Postmodernists claim that what we think of as reality is “discursively constructed.” According to Saussure, “the linguistic sign acts reflexively, not referentially” in a “discursive field.” This amounts to radical holism about meaning: signs get their meaning not from their reference to external things but from their relations to all the other signs in the discourse. Introducing new signs (or discarding old ones) thus changes the meanings of the signs already in use. Signs therefore lack a fixed meaning over time. These ideas support the rejection of what Lyotard calls “totalizing metanarratives.” There can be no complete, unified theory of the world that captures the whole truth. A discourse with different terms would contain meanings not available in the discursive field of the theory that claims completeness. The assertion of any particular theory is an exercise of “power”—to exclude certain possibilities from thought and authorize others. Postmodernist claims that objects are “discursively constructed” or “socially constructed” assert a kind of nominalism: that the world does not dictate the categories we use to describe it, that innumerable incompatible ways of classifying the world are available to us. The selection of any one theory is a choice that cannot be justified by appeal to “objective” truth or reality.

Social practices also function as linguistic signs. For example, the elevation of the judge’s bench metaphorically signifies the judge’s superior authority over others in the courtroom. As words get their meaning from their relations to other words, so do actions get their meaning from their relations to other actions, rather than from their relation to some pre-linguistic realm of human nature or natural law. Thus, the superior authority of judges consists in the conventions of deference others manifest toward them. It is not underwritten by an underlying normatively objective authority. The latter thought expresses an essentialist and objectivist power play, attempting to foreclose contests over practices by fixing them in a supposedly extra-discursive reality. The meanings of actions can be subverted by other actions that, in changing the context, changes their meanings. This is why postmodernists celebrate ironic, parodic, and campy renditions of conventional behaviors as politically liberating (Butler 1993).

The self is likewise constituted by signs. There is no unified self that underlies the play of a stream of signifiers. Although subjectivity is constituted through the production of signs, the self is entangled in a web of meanings not of its own creation: our identities are socially imposed. However, this does not foreclose agency, because we occupy multiple social identities (a woman might be a worker, a mother, lesbian, Mexican, etc.). Tensions among these identities open up spaces for disrupting the discursive systems that construct us.

Feminist Postmodernism. Feminist postmodernist ideas are deployed against theories that purport to justify sexist practices—notably, ideologies that claim that observed differences between men and women are natural and necessary, or that women have an essence that explains and justifies their subordination. The claim that gender is socially or discursively constructed—that it is an effect of social practices and systems of meaning that can be disrupted—finds a home in postmodernism (Butler 1990). However, postmodernism has figured more prominently in internal critiques of feminist theories. One of the most important trends in feminist thinking has been exposing and responding to exclusionary tendencies within feminism itself. Women of color and lesbian women have argued that mainstream feminist theories have ignored their problems and perspectives (Collins 1990; Hull, Scott, and Smith, 1982; Lorde 1984).

The critique of the concept “woman.” Feminist postmodernists have criticized many of the leading feminist theories of gender and patriarchy as essentialist (Butler 1990, Flax 1990, Spelman 1988). Essentialism here refers to any theory that postulates a universal, transhistorical, necessary cause or constitution of gender or patriarchy. Feminist postmodernists object that, in claiming that gender identity is one thing or has one cause, such theories convert discursively constructed facts into norms, difference into deviance. They either exclude women who don’t conform to the theory from the class of “women,” or represent them as inferior. Critiques of feminist theories by lesbian women and women of color reinforce skepticism about the unity of the category “woman” by highlighting intersectioning identities of gender, race, class, trans/cis, and sexual orientation. The faultlines for fragmentating the category “woman” are thus other identities along which social inequalities are constructed.

This critique of “woman” as a unified object of theorizing entails that “woman” also cannot constitute a unified subject of knowing (Lugones & Spelman 1983). The theories of universal gender identity under attack are ones in which the authors, white middle class heterosexual women, could see themselves. Critics claim that the authors fail to acknowledge their own situatedness and hence the ways they are implicated in and reproduce power relations—in this case, the presumption of white middle class heterosexual women to define “the standpoint of women”—to speak for all other women. Feminist standpoint theorists, who claim an epistemic privilege on behalf of their standpoint, thereby unjustifiably assert a race and class privilege over other women. This lesson applies to subaltern feminist standpoints as well. The assertion of a black feminist standpoint, for example, objectionably essentializes black women. Once the postmodernist critique of essentialism is granted, there is no logical stopping point in the proliferation of perspectives.

Perspective shifting . Feminist postmodernism envisions our epistemic situation as characterized by a shifting plurality of perspectives, none of which can claim objectivity—that is, transcendence of situatedness. This position rejects both objectivism and relativism for the ways they let knowers escape responsibility for the representations they construct (Haraway 1991). People are not epistemically trapped inside their cultures, their gender, or any other identity. They can think from other perspectives. Thus, although we will always have plural perspectives, their constitution is always shifting, without a stable correspondence between individuals and perspectives. Negotiating the array of situated knowledges involves two types of epistemic practice. One is acceptance of responsibility: acknowledging the choices of situation involved in constructing one’s representations (Haraway 1991), and considering how they affect the content of one’s representations (Harding 1993). The second is “world traveling” (Lugones 1987) or “mobile positioning”—trying to see things from many other perspectives. Mobile positioning can never be transparent or innocent. Imagining oneself in another’s situation is risky, requiring sensitive engagement with and sympathy for occupants of those positions. Both transform situated knowing into a critical and responsible practice.

Criticisms of Feminist Postmodernism. Both features of feminist postmodernism—the rejection of “woman” as a category of analysis, and the fragmentation of perspectives—are controversial. Wholesale opposition to broad generalizations about women may preclude critical analysis of large-scale social forces that affect women (Benhabib 1995). That women in different social positions experience sexism differently does not entail that they have nothing in common—they still suffer from sexism (MacKinnon 2000). Intersectionality may be accommodated through a structural analysis of gender that allows for racialized and other particularized modes of sexist oppression (Haslanger 2000). Postmodernist fragmentation threatens both the possibility of analytical focus and of politically effective coalition building among diverse women. Yet, virtually all feminists acknowledge that a plurality of situated knowledges appears to be an inescapable consequence of social differentiation and embodiment.

Relations of Feminist Empiricism to Empiricism in General. Empiricism is the view that experience provides the sole or primary justification for knowledge. Classical empiricists held that the content of experience could be described in fixed, basic, theory-neutral terms—such as in terms of sense-data. Most also supposed that philosophy could provide an external justification for scientific method. Quine revolutionized empiricism by rejecting these ideas. For Quine, observation is theory-laden. It is cast in terms of complex concepts not immediately given in experience, which are potentially subject to revision in light of further experience (Quine 1963). Moreover, epistemology is just another project within science, in which we empirically investigate our practices of inquiry (Quine 1969). Many feminist empiricists accept these views while rejecting Quine’s sharp division of facts from values, which they regard as inconsistent with naturalized empiricism. Feminist empiricists consider how feminist values can legitimately inform empirical inquiry, and how scientific methods can be improved in light of demonstrations of sex bias in science (Campbell 1998, Clough 2003, Nelson 1990). Quine also presupposes an individualist account of inquiry, while most feminist empiricists advocate a socialized epistemology, in which inquiry is treated as a social practice, and the subjects of knowledge may even be communities.

The Paradoxes of Bias and Social Construction. Two apparent paradoxes encapsulate the central problematics of feminist empiricism. First, much feminist science criticism consists in exposing androcentric and sexist biases in scientific research. This criticism seems to rest on the view that bias is epistemically bad. Yet, advocates of feminist science argue that science would improve if it allowed feminist values to inform scientific inquiry. This amounts to a recommendation that science adopt certain biases. This is the paradox of bias. Second, much feminist science criticism exposes the influence of social and political factors on science. Scientists advance androcentric and sexist theories because they are influenced by sexist values in the wider society. This might suggest adopting an individualist epistemology to eliminate these social biases. Yet most feminists urge that scientific practices should be open to different social influences. Call this the paradox of social construction.

Feminist empiricists dissolve these paradoxes by rejecting their underlying assumptions: that biases, political values, and social factors influence inquiry only by displacing the influence of evidence, logic, and other factors that lead to true or empirically adequate theories. Not all bias is epistemically bad (Antony 1993). There are three strategies for showing this: pragmatic, procedural, and moral realist. The pragmatic strategy stresses the uses to which knowledge will be put. Responsible inquiry respects a division of labor between the functions of evidence and social values—evidence helping inquirers track truths, social values helping inquirers construct representations from those truths that serve the practical aims of inquiry (Anderson 1995b). This view may be joined with a view of nature as complex. Different ways of classifying phenomena will reveal different patterns useful to different practical interests (Longino 2001). The procedural strategy argues that epistemically bad biases can be kept in check through an appropriate social organization of inquiry. A social organization that holds people with different biases accountable to one another will be able to weed out bad biases, even if no individual is free of bias (Longino 1990). This view may be joined with the idea that the subject of knowledge (Nelson 1993), epistemic rationality (Solomon 2001) or objectivity (Longino 1990, 2001) is the epistemic community. The moral realist strategy argues that moral, social and political value judgments have truth-values, and that feminist values are true. Inquiry informed by feminist values therefore does not displace attention to the evidence, because the evidence vindicates these values (Campbell 1998).

Feminist empiricists appeal to the pragmatist tradition to undermine the sharp dichotomy between fact and value (Antony 1993, Nelson 1993). They argue that the underdetermination of theory by evidence leads to a view of facts and values as mutually constituting. Whether any particular feminist, or sexist, theory is true will depend on empirical investigation informed by epistemic norms—norms which may be reformed in light of the merits of the theories they generate. This is the project of naturalized epistemology, whereby the vindication of norms of inquiry is sought within empirical investigation.

Criticisms of Feminist Empiricism. Feminist empiricists are criticized for naively holding that science will correct the errors and biases in its theories about women and other subordinated groups by itself, without the aid of feminist values or insights (Harding 1986, 1991). These criticisms apply to what Harding called “spontaneous feminist empiricism”—the view that elimination of sexist bias, without further modification of scientific methods as traditionally understood, is sufficient for feminist critique. However, the naturalized epistemology of most feminist empiricists views knowers as socially situated, empirical evidence as theory-laden and critically revisable in light of theoretical and normative reflection, and objective knowledge of human phenomena as requiring inclusion of feminist inquirers as equals in the social project of inquiry (Longino 1993a, 1993b). Hundleby (1997), a standpoint theorist, criticizes feminist empiricism for overlooking the role of feminist political activity, especially the development of oppositional consciousness, as a superior source of hypotheses and evidence for challenging sexist and androcentric theories.

Harding’s (1986) tripartite classification of feminist epistemologies cast them as three contrasting frameworks. In the last thirty years, feminist epistemologists have blurred the distinctions among these views, as Harding both predicted and promoted (1990, 1991, 1998). Early theorizing in feminist epistemology tended to explore global questions about gender and knowledge: are dominant conceptions or practices of science, objectivity, and knowledge masculine or androcentric? The field has evolved toward local investigations of the ways gender affects inquiry in specific investigations by particular communities using distinct methods. This turn to the local has facilitated the convergence of the three types of feminist epistemology.

Feminist standpoint theory . The postmodernist critique of standpoint theory, in conjunction with the proliferation of subaltern women’s standpoints (black, Latina, lesbian, postcolonial, etc.) has led most standpoint theorists to abandon the search for a single feminist standpoint. They acknowledge plural standpoints of intersecting marginalized groups (Harding 1991, 1998; Collins 1990). Inquiry that draws on their insights and starts from their predicaments is more fruitful than inquiry that draws only on the insights and starts from the predicaments of relatively privileged groups (Harding 1993, 1998). It also offers pragmatic advantages in enabling us to envision and realize more just social relations (Hartsock 1996). Standpoint theorists (Collins 1996; Harding 1996; Hartsock 1996) have shifted from claims of general epistemic privilege to claims of practical advantage in response to postmodernist critics such as Hekman (1996). Wylie (2003) argues that consensus has emerged among feminist epistemologists on two points: (1) rejection of essentialism (the idea that the social groups defining any standpoint have a necessary and fixed nature, or that their members do or ought to think alike) and (2) rejection of attempts to grant automatic epistemic privilege to any particular standpoint. Instead, the social situation of “insider-outsiders” (members of subordinated groups who need accurate knowledge of the worlds of the privileged to navigate them) sometimes affords a contingent epistemic advantage in solving particular problems. Standpoint theorists’ pluralism reflects a productive interaction with feminist postmodernism; their shift toward pragmatism and contingent epistemic advantages of the oppressed reflects convergence with feminist empiricism.

Theorists have devoted effort to specifying the contingent cognitive advantages claimed by a feminist standpoint with sufficient precision that these claims are empirically testable. Solomon (2009) suggests that the achievement of a feminist standpoint involves characteristics empirically associated with creative thinking. Ruetsche (2004) suggests that it could involve Aristotelian second-nature capacities to recognize certain kinds of evidence—for example, social interactions among primates—relevant for understanding primate social organization. Other standpoint theorists stress the cognitive advantages of a feminist standpoint for revealing and uncovering phenomena in domains of interest to feminists. Rolin (2009) points to the superior capacity of a feminist standpoint to reveal how power relations obscure their operations and effects, and enable inquirers to overcome these obstacles to understanding by empowering those subordinated by power relations. Scientists who have investigated the causes of women’s underrepresentation in the sciences from a feminist standpoint have produced more empirically adequate theories, using more normatively adequate conceptions of bias and discrimination, than nonfeminist researchers (Rolin 2006, Wylie 2009).

Feminist postmodernism . Haraway (1989) stands out among feminist postmodernists for the tributes she pays to the achievements of feminist scientists working within empiricist standards of evaluation. Fraser and Nicholson (1990) urge a reformulation of the lessons of postmodernism toward pragmatism, fallibilism, and contextualization of knowledge claims—all features compatible with naturalized feminist empiricism.

Feminist empiricism . While early feminist science criticism by working scientists may have presupposed a naive version of empiricism, feminist empiricists today stress the pervasiveness of situated knowledge, the interplay of facts and values, the absence of transcendent standpoints, and the plurality of theories. These themes converge with postmodernism. After thirty years of development, it is also getting harder to identify points of disagreement between feminist empiricism and feminist standpoint theory. Intemann (2010, 2016) proposes feminist standpoint empiricism as a synthesis of the two theories, arguing that feminist empiricists should accept standpoint theory’s claim that better (i.e., feminist) values produce better theories. Feminist empiricists have already done so, as long as these claims are kept contingent and local (Anderson 2004, Wylie and Nelson 2007). Some feminist standpoint theorists, however, also claim that exclusion of sexist standpoints, or bad values, can be epistemically justified (Intemann 2010, Hicks 2011).

The history of feminist interventions into most disciplines follows a common pattern. Feminist science critics begin by criticizing accepted disciplinary methods, assumptions, and theories, exposing their androcentric and sexist biases. As feminist inquiries mature, they develop constructive projects, and deploy feminist perspectives as epistemic resources. This history helps us see how feminist epistemology negotiates the tension between the two poles in the paradox of bias in feminist empiricism—viewing bias as error, and as resource.

Feminist Science Criticism: Bias as Error. Feminist science criticism originated in the critiques that working biologists, psychologists, and other scientists made of the androcentric and sexist biases and practices in their own disciplines—especially of theories about women and gender differences that legitimate sexist practices. Exemplary works in this tradition include Bleier (1984), Hrdy (1981), Leacock (1981), Sherif (1987), and Tavris (1992). Feminist science criticism includes several types of research. (1) Studies of how the marginalization of women scientists impairs scientific progress (e.g., Keller 1983). (2) Studies of how applications of science in technology disadvantage women and other vulnerable groups and devalue their interests (e.g., Perez 2019). (3) Studies of how science has ignored women and gender, and how tending to these issues may require revisions of accepted theories (e.g., Hays-Gilpin and Whitley (1998). (4) Studies of how biases toward working with “masculine” cognitive styles—for example, toward centralized, hierarchical control models of causation as opposed to “feminine” (contextual, interactive, diffused) models—have impaired scientific understanding(e.g., Keller 1985b, Spanier 1995). (5) Studies of how research into sex differences that reinforces sex stereotypes and sexist practices fails to follow standards of good science (Fine 2010, Lloyd 2006, Tavris 1992). Theories may also manifest gender bias in their conceptual framework—for example, in representing subjective gender identification as a dichotomous variable, thereby eliminating other modes of gender identity from consideration (Bem 1993). In these cases, gender bias is represented as a cause of error. As philosophers and historians of science joined feminist science criticism, additional models of gender bias were developed (Bluhm 2013; Haraway 1989; Harding 1986, 1991, 1993, 1998; Lloyd 2006; Meynell 2012; Schiebinger 1989; Wylie 1996). Some of this work argues that interests in technological control that underlie modern science limit its scope and what it takes to be significant knowledge (Lacey 1999, Merchant 1980, Tiles 1987). Feminist science criticism in the bias-as-error tradition generates methodological principles for engaging in nonsexist science (Eichler 1988).

Bias in a research program is shown to be limiting or partial , but not erroneous, if it avoids clear error and has some empirical successes, while rival theories in the same domain also avoid clear error and have different empirical successes or other epistemic virtues. Such biases are legitimate: it is rationally acceptable to conduct scientific inquiry under their influence. When biases are partial but not erroneous, they serve a generative function, producing new concepts, methods, and hypotheses that open up new aspects of the world for understanding. They are epistemic resources . Feminist philosophers of science argue that we have an epistemic interest in ensuring that certain limiting biases do not dominate research to the exclusion of other generative biases that yield rival theories possessing a different range of important empirical successes. Exposing androcentric and sexist biases lying behind certain theories makes salient the room for alternative programs not based on such biases.

Feminist Science: Bias as Resource . Most advocates of feminist science argue, in this vein, that scientific inquiries informed by feminist values are based on legitimate, generative limiting biases. This picture of science is pluralistic: science is disunified because the world is rich with a multitude of cross-cutting structures, which no single theoretical vocabulary captures. Different communities have interests in different aspects of reality, so leaving them free to follow their interests will reveal different patterns and structures in the world (Harding 1998; Longino 2001).

Against this pluralistic view, some advocates of feminist science define it in terms of adherence to specific ontologies and methodologies expressing a “feminine” cognitive style (Duran 1991, Keller 1983, 1985a). On this view, for example, feminist science should have a relational rather than an atomistic ontology, favor the concrete over the abstract, and encompass intuition, emotional engagement, and other “feminine” cognitive styles. For example, Stanley and Wise (1983) argue that only qualitative methods that accept women’s reports of their experiences in their own terms, refusing to generalize, uphold feminist values of respecting differences among women and avoiding the replication of power differences between researchers and research subjects.

Pluralist feminist scientists and philosophers of science contest these attempts to define feminist science in terms of preferred content and “feminine” method. Many questions of interest to feminists are best answered with quantitative methods (Jayaratne & Stewart, 1991). Feminists properly make use of diverse methods (Harding 1987, Nielsen 1990, Reinharz 1992). Feminist science is not defined by its content, but rather by pragmatic interests in uncovering the causes of women’s oppression, revealing dynamics of gender in society, and producing knowledge that women can use to overcome the disadvantages to which they are subject. Forms of knowledge that simply valorize the “feminine” may not be helpful to women who would be better off not having norms of femininity imposed on them, and might not be better at generating empirical success (Longino 1989).

On the pluralist view, feminist science amounts to “doing science as a feminist”—using science to answer questions generated by feminist interests—. There is no presumption that certain methods, evidence, etc. are uniquely available to serve feminist cognitive interests. Nevertheless, some common threads in doing science as a feminist tend to contingently favor certain types of representation (Longino 1994). Gender bias may reinforce sexism through the perpetuation of categorical, dichotomous thinking which represents masculinity and femininity as “opposites,” femininity as inferiority, and gender nonconformity as deviant. This gives feminists an interest in the value of “ontological heterogeneity”—using categories that permit the observation of within-group variation, and that resist the representation of difference from the group mean as deviance. Gender bias also reinforces sexism through single-factor causal models that attribute intrinsic powers to men by neglecting their wider context. The value of “complexity of relationship” favors the development of causal models that facilitate the representation of features of the social context that support male power. Other feminist cognitive values involve the accessibility of knowledge, that diffuses power in being usable to people in subordinate positions. Such feminist cognitive values do not displace or compete with tending to evidence, because doing science as a feminist, like doing science with any other interest in mind (for example, medical or military interests) involves commitment to the cognitive value of producing empirically adequate theories.

The Challenge of Value-Neutrality. Against the project of feminist science, many philosophers hold that good science is neutral among social, moral, and political values. Lacey (1999) distinguishes the following claims of value-neutrality: (1) Autonomy : science progresses best when uninfluenced by social/political movements and values. (2) Neutrality : scientific theories do not imply or presuppose judgments about noncognitive values, nor do scientific theories serve any particular noncognitive values more fully than others. (3) Impartiality : The only grounds for accepting a theory are its relations to the evidence. These grounds are impartial among rival noncognitive values.

Of these claims, neutrality is the most dubious, because it depicts the grounds for accepting social, political and moral values as detached from evidence about human potentialities and about what happens when people try to realize these values in practice. If this were true, then the defenders of keeping mathematics a male preserve would not have bothered arguing that women were not intellectually capable of doing mathematics—and feminists would not have bothered disputing this claim. Neutrality is less a claim about the character of science than about the purportedly “fact-free” justification of social and political values. As a claim about the latter, it is false (Anderson 2004, Taylor 1985, Tiles & Oberdiek 1995).

The core claim of value-neutrality is impartiality. Only facts can supply the warrant for other facts. Autonomy, in turn, is defended as a means to ensure impartiality. Social movements are thought to threaten impartiality because their influence on science is thought to consist in pressuring scientists to ignore the facts and validate their worldviews. Defenders of value-neutral science object to the idea of feminist science because they view it as threatening autonomy, and thereby impartiality.

The Basic Underdetermination Argument. Feminist empiricists reply to this challenge by extending Quine’s argument that theory is underdetermined by evidence (Longino 1990, Nelson 1993). Any body of observations counts as evidence for particular hypotheses only in conjunction with certain background assumptions. Vary the background assumptions, and the same observations will support different hypotheses. For example, the failure to observe stellar parallax in the 16th century was taken as evidence that the Earth stands still by geocentrists, and as evidence that the stars are very far away by heliocentrists. No logical principle stops scientists from choosing different background assumptions. In practice, scientists face constraints in selecting background assumptions, based on cognitive values such as simplicity and conservatism (resistance to revising assumptions on which many other beliefs depend). But with respect to open questions, such cognitive values rarely limit the scope for choice down to one option, and their interpretation and weights are contestable in any event (geocentrism was overturned by overriding conservatism). Feminist empiricists conclude that, given the scope for choice in background assumptions, no methodological principle forbids scientists from selecting their background assumptions on account of their fit with social and political values. Hence, feminist scientists may select their background assumptions on account of their fit with feminist values.

Standing alone, the underdetermination argument does not help us discriminate error-generating biases from biases that serve as cognitive resources. Additional criteria are needed. Anderson (2004) argues that the chief danger of value-laden inquiry is wishful thinking or dogmatism (Anderson 2004). To avoid this danger, the value-laden character of the background assumptions linking evidence to theories should not foreclose the possibility of discovering that one’s values are mistaken, because (for example) they are based on false beliefs about human potentialities or the consequences of putting certain values into practice. If women really can’t do math, the values incorporated into feminist science should not close off this possibility in advance. Although, in setting out to test this sexist hypotheses, women scientists presuppose their own mathematical competence, this does not preclude their discovering otherwise. To avoid dogmatism and wishful thinking, they need only make their calculations accountable to public criticism.

The Basic Pragmatic Strategy . The above reflections provide a standard for determining when socially value-laden inquiry has gone wrong. But how can social values function as an epistemic resource? Some feminist epistemologists stress the pragmatic functions of inquiry (Anderson 1995b). All inquiry begins with a question. Questions may be motivated by practical interests in understanding the nature and causes of situations judged to be problematic, and in finding out how to improve those situations. Defenders of the value-neutrality of science acknowledge that pragmatic factors legitimately influence the choice of objects of study. Feminist epistemologists argue that practical interests properly shape the product of inquiry by introducing new dimensions of evaluation to theories. We can ask not only whether theories are backed by evidence, but whether they are cast in forms that are cognitively accessible to the situated knowers who want to use these theories, whether they help these knowers solve their problems, and whether they answer the questions they were designed to answer. A set of statements can be true, yet fail these pragmatic tests. The basic pragmatic strategy for defending feminist science, and any inquiry shaped by social and political values, is to show how the pragmatic interests of that inquiry license or require a particular mode of influence of values on the process, product, and uptake of the product of inquiry, while leaving appropriate room for evidence to play its role in testing hypotheses. Values do not compete with evidence in determining conclusions, but play different, cooperative roles in properly conducted inquiry (Anderson 1995b, 2004).

Types of Legitimate Influence of Social Values in Science. Feminist philosophers of science stress the variety of roles for social and political values in science, and the contingency of their effects (Wylie and Nelson 2007). We must examine how particular values operate in particular scientific investigations and judge whether they are closing off the possibility of discovering unwelcome facts, leading scientists to reason dogmatically, or insulating their findings from critical scrutiny—or rather whether the values are enabling new discoveries. Feminist epistemologists and philosophers of science have defended the following types of influence of social values on theory choice.

Selection and weighting of cognitive values . Kuhn (1977) argued that scientists need to appeal to cognitive values to take up the slack between theory and evidence. His list of cognitive values includes accuracy, scope, simplicity, fruitfulness, internal consistency, and consistency with other beliefs (conservatism). Longino (1994) argues that feminists have reason to prefer theories that manifest other cognitive values, such as diffusion of power. Diffusion of power, like simplicity, is not a truth-oriented cognitive value. Both count as cognitive values because they make theories cognitively accessible. Diffusion of power recognizes that cognitive accessibility is relative to the situation of the knower. Both simplification and diffusion of power stand in tension with truth, in that theories that embody them not only ignore many complex truths, but may even make false claims. Whether this is bad depends on whether the truths ignored or the inaccuracies allowed are important . This can be judged only relative to the interests that the investigation ought to serve. All legitimate research programs must seek empirical adequacy, which requires that theories account for observations. How much accuracy this requires depends on how much the expected usefulness of the knowledge will be compromised by larger risks or margins of error. The situation and pragmatic interests of the inquirer or of the users of a theory may therefore legitimately affect the selection and weighting of cognitive values in theory choice.

Standards of Proof . The argument from inductive risk holds that theories should be accepted or rejected depending on the relative costs of type I error (believing something false) and type II error (failing to believe something true). In medicine, clinical trials are routinely stopped and results accepted as genuine notwithstanding higher P-values than the conventional <5%, if the results are dramatic enough and the costs to patients of not acting on them are high enough. Hare-Mustin and Maracek (1994) argue, by parallel reasoning, that whether studies that find gender differences, or that fail to find them, should be accepted depends on the relative costs of Alpha Bias (exaggerating differences) and Beta Bias (neglecting differences) in the context at hand.

Classification . The ways phenomena are classified may legitimately depend on social values. In medicine, the distinction between health and disease reflects both causal judgments and ethical judgments about human welfare and appropriate ways of dealing with problems. A condition judged bad for human beings is not classified as a disease unless medical intervention is considered an appropriate and potentially effective way to deal with it. Feminist inquiries, too, raise questions about the causes of women’s oppression that require classifying phenomena as instances of rape, sexual objectification, sex discrimination, and so forth—classifications tied to their meeting both empirical and evaluative criteria (Anderson 1995a, 1995b). In general, when inquiry seeks to answer a question about value-laden phenomena, such as the impact of certain practices on human welfare, or whether certain institutions are fair or discriminatory, the contours of the empirical phenomena to be studied will be defined by evaluative judgments (Intemann 2001, 2005).

Methods . The methods selected for investigating phenomena depend on the questions one asks and the kinds of knowledge one seeks, both of which may reflect social interests. Experimental methods in social science may be good for discovering factors that can be used to control people’s behavior in similar settings. But to grasp their behavior as action —that is, as attempts by agents to govern their behavior through their understandings of what they are doing—requires different empirical methods, including participant observation and qualitative interviews (which allow subjects to delineate their own systems of meaning). Standpoint theories, as critical theories, seek to empower the subjects of study by helping them forge liberatory self-understandings. These may require different methods of inquiry—for example, consciousness-raising (MacKinnon 1989).

Causal Explanations; Models; Explanations of Meaning; Narratives . The number of factors that affect the occurrence of most human phenomena is too large to comprehend or test in a single model. Investigators must therefore select a subset of causal factors to include in their models. This selection may be based on fit with the values and interests of the investigator (Longino 1990, 2001). These interests often reflect background social and moral judgments of blame, responsibility, and acceptability of change. Conservatives are more likely to study divorce and out-of-wedlock birth as causes of women’s poverty, whereas feminists are more likely to focus on other causes—for example, the exclusion of women from better-paid jobs, failures of state support for dependent-care work within the family, the weak bargaining power of women in marriage, and norms of masculinity that lead fathers to avoid significant participation in child-rearing. These causal explanations are not incompatible. Normative interests may also determine whether one models only main effects or also interaction effects on outcomes relevant to human welfare. A variable—say, a certain lifestyle—that has a positive main effect on a population may have a negative effect on some subpopulations. Whether one models and tests for such effects may depend on whether one believes that one lifestyle does or should fit all, or whether one values pluralism and ontological heterogeneity (Anderson 2004).

Often inquirers seek not merely a set of facts, but what the facts mean. The meaning or significance of facts depends on their relations to other facts. Even if two inquirers agree on the causal facts, they may still disagree about their meaning because they relate the facts in different ways, reflecting their background values. Feminists may agree with conservatives that divorce is a cause of the feminization of poverty, but deny that this means that women are better off married. They argue that marriage itself, with its gendered division of domestic and market labor, constitutes one of the major structural disadvantages women face, setting them up for worse outcomes in the event of divorce. Conservatives, viewing marriage as an indispensable condition of the good life, are no more willing to view marriage in this light than most people would be willing to blame oxygen for the occurrence of house fires. It might be thought that scientists should stick to the facts and avoid judgments of meaning. But most of the questions we ask demand answers that fit facts into larger, meaningful patterns. Scientists therefore cannot help but tell stories, which require the selection of narrative frameworks that go beyond the facts (Haraway 1989). This selection may depend both on their fit with the facts and on their fit with the background values of the storyteller.

Framework Assumptions . As we ascend to higher levels of abstraction, general framework assumptions constitute the object of study. Some of these are disciplinary. Economics studies humans as self-interested, instrumentally rational choosers. Social psychology studies humans as responding to socially meaningful situations. Behavioral genetics studies human conduct as influenced by their genes. The selection of framework assumptions may depend on their fit with the interests of the inquirer (Longino 1990, Tiles 1987). Feminists, being interested in promoting women’s agency, tend to prefer frameworks that permit the representation of women as agents. This does not guarantee that empirical findings will confirm the background assumption that women’s agency is critical to the phenomena under investigation. The value-laden selection of framework assumptions thus need not lead to a vicious circle of reasoning, because it is still left up to the evidence to determine how successful the assumptions are in explaining the phenomena of interest.

Pluralism and naturalized moral epistemology as upshots of value-laden inquiry. Because inquirers select background assumptions in part for their fit with their varied interests and values, their background assumptions will also vary. Feminist epistemologists urge us to embrace this fact (Haraway 1991, Harding 1998, Longino 2001). Pluralism of theories and research programs should be accepted as a normal feature of science. As long as the different research programs are producing empirical successes not produced by the others, and avoiding clear error and viciously circular or dogmatic reasoning, we should treat the value-biases animating them as epistemic resources, helping us discover and understand new aspects of the world and see them in new perspectives. Feminist science takes its place as one set of legitimate research programs among others. This does not imply relativism. Value-laden research programs are still open to internal and external critique. A naturalized epistemology that rejects neutrality allows that observations may undermine any background assumptions, including value judgments (Anderson 2004).

One way to support this last claim is to advance Quinean holism, and insist that any evidence may bear on any belief or value (Nelson 1990). While accepting the bi-directional influence of facts and values, Anderson (2004) rejects holism, arguing that some observations bear closer relevance relations than others to specific values. Further progress in understanding legitimate and fruitful interactions of facts and values in scientific inquiry will likely involve naturalizing moral epistemology, to get a clearer view of the bearing of observations on values. Tobin and Jaggar (2013) offer one way to naturalize feminist moral epistemology.

Feminist Critiques of Objectivity. Feminists regard the following conceptions of objectivity as problematic: (a) Subject/object dichotomy: what is really (“objectively”) real exists independently of knowers. (b) Aperspectivity: “objective” knowledge is ascertained through “the view from nowhere,” a view that transcends or abstracts from our particular locations. (c) Detachment: knowers have an “objective” stance toward what is known when they are emotionally detached from it. (d) Value-neutrality: knowers have an “objective” stance toward what is known when they adopt an evaluatively neutral attitude toward it. (e) Control: “objective” knowledge of an object (the way it “really” is) is attained by controlling it, especially by experimental manipulation, and observing the regularities it manifests under control. (f) External guidance: “objective” knowledge consists of representations whose content is dictated by the way things really are, not by the knower. These ideas are often combined into a package of claims about science: that its aim is to know the way things are, independent of knowers, and that scientists achieve this aim through detachment and control, which enable them to achieve aperspectivity and external guidance. This package arose in the 17th-18th centuries, as a philosophical account of why Newtonian science was superior to its predecessor. According to this account, the predecessor science, which represented objects as intrinsically possessing secondary qualities and ends, confused the way things are in themselves with the ways they are related to emotionally engaged human knowers, who erroneously projected their own mental states and value judgments onto things. Adoption of the objective methods listed above enabled the successor scientists to avoid these errors and achieve an “absolute” conception of the universe (Williams 1978). Feminists object to each element in this package as a normative ideal and as a general description of how science works.

Subject/object dichotomy . If the object of science is to grasp things as they are, independent of knowers, then one must sharply distinguish the knower from the known. However, when the objects of inquiry are knowers themselves, this dichotomy rules out the possibility that knowers’ self-understandings help constitute the ways knowers are. It thus rules out the possibility that some of our characteristics are socially constructed. This may lead people to make the projective errors objectivity is supposed to avoid: attributing to the natures of the objects of study what are products of people’s contingent beliefs and attitudes about those objects (Haslanger 1995).

Aperspectivity . The ideal of aperspectivity supposes that if one views things from no particular position, without any presuppositions or biases, then the only thing that guides belief-formation is the object itself (external guidance). Feminists question the intelligibility of a “view from nowhere,” and a presuppositionless, bias-free science, for both postmodernist (Haraway 1991) and pragmatist (Antony 1993) reasons. Knowers are situated. The underdetermination of theories by evidence implies that biases are needed to get theorizing off the ground. Rather than undertake a futile attempt to inquire without biases, we should empirically study which biases are fruitful and which mislead, and reform scientific practice accordingly (Antony 1993). Some feminist critics also argue that the practice of objectivity—assuming that observed regularities reflect the intrinsic natures of things, and treating those things accordingly—when adopted by those in power, produces the very regularities taken to vindicate that assumption. When male observers use their power to make women behave in accordance with their desires (for instance, to elicit female submission to their aggressive sexual advances), but assume their own aperspectivity, they misattribute the behavior to women’s intrinsic natures (feminine passivity) rather than to their own socially positioned power. This process constitutes the “objectification” of women. It harms women by legitimating the sexist practices that reinforce the projection. It misrepresents observed regularities as necessary, rather than socially contingent, as well as their cause (as generated by the intrinsic nature of the things observed, rather than by the observer’s own stance toward what is observed.) (MacKinnon 1999, Haslanger 1993).

Detachment . The ideal of detachment, according to which scientists should adopt an emotionally distanced, controlling stance toward their objects of study, is defended as necessary to avoid projective error. Keller suggests that it is responsible for the symbolically “masculine” standing of science that marginalizes women scientists, who are stereotyped as emotional. It reflects an androcentric perspective, serving men’s neurotic anxieties about avoiding the “feminine” (Keller 1985a, Bordo 1987). Emotional distance may also have epistemic defects. A “feeling for the [individual] organism” may sensitize a scientist to critical data (Keller 1983, Ruetsche 2004).

Value-neutrality . The ideal of objectivity as value-neutrality is justified as a psychological stance needed to guard against temptations toward wishful thinking and dogmatic, politically motivated or ideological reasoning. Feminists argue that this ideal is self-deceptive and unrealistic (Potter 1993; Longino 1990, 2001; Harding 1991, 1998; Wylie 1996). When scientists represent themselves as neutral, this blocks their recognition of the ways their values have shaped their inquiry, and thereby evades critical scrutiny of these values. Value-neutrality ignores the many positive roles value judgments play in guiding the process and products of inquiry noted above. Other procedures are available to block wishful thinking and political dogmatism on science, without requiring scientists to bracket their value judgments (Anderson 1995, 2004, Longino 2001).

Control . Experimental contexts, in which scientists elicit regularities in the behavior of the objects of study by manipulating them under controlled conditions, are often taken to generate epistemically privileged evidence about the objects of study. Such evidence is thought to ground knowledge of how the objects “really are,” in contrast with evidence about the objects of study generated through “subjective” methods, such as participant observation, dialogue, political engagement, and caring for their needs. Feminists argue that control is a stance of social, often male, power. The epistemic privilege it enjoys reflects both androcentrism and the prestige attached to the “masculine” (Merchant 1980). The control ideal underrates the epistemic value of experiences gained from loving or cooperative engagement with the objects of study. Theories produced by control generate only a partial view of the potentialities of the objects of study, reflecting and serving interests in control over the objects, but not interests in engaging with the objects in other ways, or in enabling the objects of study, if human, to govern themselves (Tiles 1987).

External guidance . External guidance assumes that to achieve knowledge of the way things “objectively” are, one’s beliefs must be guided by the nature of the object, not by the biases of the knower. Feminists argue that the underdetermination of theories by evidence entails that theories cannot be purely externally guided. Inquirers must make numerous choices concerning how to represent the object of knowledge, how to interpret evidence, and how to represent the conclusions drawn (Anderson 2004, Longino 1990, Nelson 1990). The pretense that sound scientific theories are the products of purely external guidance obscures the forces shaping these choices and absolves scientists from responsibility for defending them. For example, feminists have paid particular attention to the ways metaphors and narrative genres constrain scientific explanations (Haraway 1989, 1991, Martin 1996). The decision to narrate the transition from ape to hominid as a heroic drama dictates a focus on presumptively male activities, such as hunting, as the engine of evolution, obscuring alternatives equally supported by the data, that focus on presumptively female activity (balancing child care needs with gathering) or on behaviors, such as language use, shared by both males and females (Haraway 1989, Longino 1990).

These feminist criticisms of different conceptions of objectivity share common themes. The problematic conceptions of objectivity generate partial accounts of the world, which they misrepresent as complete and universal. The forms of partiality they underwrite are either androcentric, symbolized as “masculine,” or serve male or other dominant group interests. They are justified by appealing to models of cognition that represent error and bias in terms of qualities gender symbolized as “feminine” and attributed to women. Such conceptions of objectivity, in recommending avoidance of the “feminine,” exclude women from participation in inquiry or deprive them of epistemic authority. The problematic conceptions of objectivity ignore the knowledge-enhancing, epistemically fruitful uses of purportedly “feminine” approaches to theorizing. In attempting to transcend their situatedness, inquirers following these ideals of objectivity only mask it, commit the projective errors they seek to avoid, and resist correction.

Feminist Conceptions of Objectivity. Feminist conceptions of objectivity tend to be procedural. Products of inquiry are more objective, the better they are supported by objective procedures. Some influential feminist conceptions of objectivity include the following:

Feminist/nonsexist research methods . Some feminists have offered methodological guidelines for avoiding the sexist and androcentric errors and biases that feminists have identified in mainstream science (Eichler 1988). More ambitiously, feminists have sought research methods that embody feminist values (Nielsen 1990, Reinharz 1992).

Emotional engagement . Some feminist theorists defend the epistemic fruitfulness of emotional engagement with the object of study. Emotions serve epistemic functions in normative inquiry, attuning observers to evaluatively relevant features of the world (Jaggar 1989, Little 1995, Anderson 2004). In social scientific inquiry, emotional engagement with the subjects of study may be necessary both to elicit and interpret behaviors of scientific interest. Ethnographers may need to win the trust of their subjects to get them to open up, and to achieve rapport with them to gain understanding. Keller (1985a) promotes an ideal of “dynamic objectivity,” by which loving attention toward the object enhances perception of it. However, Longino (1993b) questions whether this ideal is generally epistemically superior to other modes of engagement.

Reflexivity . Harding (1993) argues that the objectivity is advanced by reflexivity, which demands that inquirers place themselves on the same causal plane as the object of knowledge. They must make explicit their situatedness and how that shaped their inquiry. Reflexivity affirms the partiality of representations without denying their claim to truth. Inclusion of marginalized groups into inquiry improves reflexivity, because the marginalized are more likely to notice and contest features of accepted representations that reflect the perspectives of the dominant. Harding’s ideal of “strong objectivity” includes both reflexivity and democratic inclusion as key features of more objective processes of inquiry.

Democratic discussion . Longino (1990, 2001) advances a conception of objectivity based on democratic discussion. Knowledge production is a social enterprise, secured through the critical and cooperative interactions of inquirers. The products of this social enterprise are more objective, the more responsive they are to criticism from all points of view. Feminists build on a tradition including Mill, Popper, and Feyerabend (Lloyd 1997a) by offering (i) a more articulate conception of “all points of view,” stressing the influence of the social positions of inquirers on their theorizing; and (ii) a greater stress on the importance of equality among inquirers. In Longino’s account, a community of inquirers is objective if it: (1) offers public venues for the criticism of knowledge claims; (2) responds to criticisms by changing its theories according to (3) publicly recognized standards of evaluation; and (4) follows a norm of equality of intellectual authority among its members. The norm of equality has been refined to distinguish legitimate differences of expertise from illegitimate exercises of social power (Longino 2001).

Pluralist Themes in Feminist Conceptions of Objectivity. Most feminist conceptions of objectivity accommodate both methodological and theoretical pluralism. Different communities of inquiry take an interest in different aspects of the world, and develop partial theories to satisfy varied epistemic and pragmatic values. Most feminists resist the thought that these varied theories must eventually be unified into a single grand theory. As long as different communities of inquiry are producing empirical successes in accordance with publicly recognized standards, while holding themselves accountable to criticism from all sides, their products may each count as objective, however irreducibly plural the content of their theories may be (Longino 2001, Harding 1991, 1998). However, Intemann (2010) questions the value of unlimited pluralism. If sexist and racist values have been found to be unjustified after sustained inquiry, then scientific theories informed by these values need not be taken seriously.

Naturalized epistemology considers the effects of our pervasive epistemic interdependence (Nelson 1990). Because inquiry is collaborative and reliant on testimony, what we believe is influenced by who we believe. Who we believe depends on attributions of epistemic authority, which rely on views about people’s expertise, epistemic responsibility, and trustworthiness. Feminist epistemologists explore how gender and other hierarchical social relations influence attributions of epistemic authority, considering their impact on (1) general models of knowledge; (2) the epistemic standing of knowers; (3) whose claims various epistemic communities do and ought to accept; and (4) how this affects the distribution of knowledge and ignorance in society. Some of these effects amount to epistemic injustice against members of subordinated groups. Some feminist epistemologists have advanced conceptions of virtue epistemology to remedy epistemic injustice and ignorance.

Epistemic Authority and General Models of Knowledge . Gendered ideas about epistemic authority can distort our general models of knowledge. Code (1991) argues that contemporary analytic epistemology’s core model of propositional knowledge implicitly presupposes a male knower. The instances of knowledge analytic epistemology takes to be paradigmatic when it analyzes the formula “S knows that P” are propositions about readily observable mind-independent objects. To take these as the paradigmatic instances of knowledge invites a model of the knower as masculine, in adopting the symbolically masculine objectivity package described above. This implicitly denies epistemic authority to women. Code argues that knowledge of other persons rather than of propositions should be taken as a primary model of knowledge. Such second-person knowledge calls the implicit masculinity of knowers into question, since getting to know others typically requires intimacy, dialogue, empathy and other characteristics gender symbolized as “feminine.”

Recent epistemology’s focus on the indispensability of testimony to inquiry has led feminist epistemologists to take Code’s ideas in a different direction, by investigating the dependence of propositional knowledge on knowledge of persons. For example, anthropologists must cultivate personal relationships of trust with native informants to gain access to the natives’ situated knowledge of their cultures. This requires reflection on the ways differences in power, interest, and social situation between anthropologists and their informants influence testimony its interpretation. Feminist epistemologists question models of testimony as transparent and unidirectional, highlighting testimony’s dialogic, strategic, and empathetic features, as well as the importance and difficulty of cultivating epistemically fruitful relations of mutual trust across differences in power (Bergin 2002; Lugones 1987).

Epistemic Injustice . Other feminist epistemologists focus on the impact of gender and other hierarchical relations on attributions of epistemic authority. Dominant groups tend to accord epistemic authority to themselves and withhold it from subordinates by constructing stigmatizing stereotypes of subordinates as incompetent or dishonest. They promote, as markers of epistemic authority, characteristics stereotypically thought to be distinctively theirs (Addelson 1983; Shapin 1994). They hoard opportunities for gaining access to these markers—for instance, by denying subordinate groups access to higher education. Such practices commit epistemic injustice against members of subordinate groups, undermining their ability to participate in collaborative inquiry. Fricker (2007) calls this “testimonial injustice.” In the core case of testimonial injustice, people discount the credibility of what others say on account of prejudice against their social group. Dotson (2011) distinguishes two kinds of testimonial injustice, silencing and smothering. Silencing follows Fricker’s model, whereas smothering is a kind of self-censorship to protect oneself or one’s group from prejudicial misunderstanding. For example, women of color victimized by domestic violence might not to testify to whites about this, to avoid reinforcing white prejudice against black men. Hookway (2010) identifies epistemic injustice in practices that exclude people from participating in inquiry in non-testimonial ways, such as asking questions, suggesting hypotheses, raising objections, and drawing analogies. When others fail to take such contributions seriously out of prejudicial stereotyping of the contributor, this injustice injures the speaker not as a knower but as an inquirer.

Hermeneutical injustice occurs when the interpretive resources available to a community render a person’s experiences unintelligible or misunderstood, due to the epistemic marginalization of that person or members of her social group from participation in practices of meaning-making (Fricker 2007). An example of hermeneutical injustice is the dismissal of women as humorless or hypersensitive for getting upset at what was seen as mere cloddish courtship or joking, before the concept of sexual harassment was available to make sense of their experiences. This was an injustice because the victims of harassment were prejudicially denied effective access to the practices of meaning-making whereby they could have made their experiences intelligible to others. Mason (2011) argues that marginalized communities may have hermeneutical resources in which their oppression is understood as such, but still suffer hermeneutical injustice if the dominant community fails to take up these resources by according epistemic authority to the marginalized. Pohlhaus (2011) argues that such ignorance can be willful, leading to contributory injustice , an intentional maintenance of inadequate hermeneutical resources that harmfully obstructs the uptake of resources the oppressed have developed to make sense of their experience (Dotson 2012).

Epistemologies of Ignorance. Ignorance, like knowledge, has systematic patterns and social-structural causes (Pohlhaus 2011, Proctor & Schiebinger 2008, Sullivan & Tuana 2007, Tuana & Sullivan 2006). Injustice in according people status as knowers and inquirers generates systematic ignorance that damages the interests of subordinated groups. Society could have access to, but forget or suppress, knowledge useful to subordinated groups—for example, about plants that are effective abortifactants (Schiebinger 2007). Since accurate information on such matters is or was available, explanation is needed for why it is forgotten. Ignorance is sometimes due to to segregation of situated knowers, preventing knowledge or understandings held by subordinate groups from disseminating (Margonis 2007). Members of subordinated groups may have strategic interests in hiding knowledge about themselves from dominant groups (Bailey 2007). Most importantly, dominant groups have interests in avoiding the truth about their own injustices (Mills 2007).

Virtue epistemology . Some feminist epistemologists advance ideals of epistemic virtue to address epistemic injustice. Fricker (2007) argues that to correct for testimonial injustice, hearers need to cultivate the virtue of epistemic justice—a disposition, rooted in one’s testimonial sensibility or second-nature perception of others’ credibility, to neutralize the effects of prejudicial stereotypes on credibility judgments. Jones (2002) proposes rules for checking such biases when confronted with surprising testimony. These include undertaking independent assessments of the credibility of the witness and the plausibility of what they say; and letting the presumption against accepting astonishing testimony be rebutted when one has good reason to distrust one’s distrust of the witness. Alcoff (2010) suggests that correcting for testimonial injustice requires adopting standpoint epistemology: one must not merely neutralize prejudice, but accord epistemic privilege to the marginalized. Kwong (2015) stresses the virtue of open-mindedness, and Daukas (2011) of trustworthiness, while Sholock (2012) explores the importance of the dominant being disposed to acknowledge their own ignorance of the situated knowledge of the oppressed, so that they seek the latter’s testimony, and extend epistemic authority to them. A key theme of feminist virtue epistemology is its aspiration to cultivate dispositions that enable inquirers to produce knowledge that can overcome oppression (Daukas 2018).

Some theorists have questioned suggestions to remedy epistemic injustice with individual virtues. We must share responsibility for devising epistemic practices of resistance to epistemic injustice (Medina 2013). A structural conception of remedies does not preclude the use of virtue epistemology to address structural epistemic injustice, as long as epistemic institutions and systems can be bearers of epistemic virtue (Anderson 2012).

Outside critics of feminist epistemology have argued that the entire research program is fundamentally flawed. Leading critiques of feminist epistemology include a collection of essays in the Monist , 77(4) (1994), Gross and Levitt (1994), Haack (1993), and Pinnick, Koertge and Almeder (2003). The most important criticism, found in all these works, is that feminist epistemology corrupts the search for truth by conflating facts with values and imposing political constraints on the conclusions it will accept. Truths inconvenient to a feminist perspective will be censored, and false views promoted because they support the feminist cause. Critics also accuse feminist epistemologists of a corrosive cynicism about science, claiming that they reject it as a raw imposition of patriarchal and imperialist power. Feminists are charged with holding that, since everyone else is engaged in a cynical power-play, they may as well join the battle and try to impose their beliefs on everyone else.

Defenders of feminist epistemology reply that these criticisms depend on gross misreadings of the feminist research program. Feminists do not reject objectivity and science, but rather seek to improve it by correcting sexist and androcentric biases in scientific inquiry, and by promoting criticism of research from all points of view (Lloyd 1995a, 1995b, 1997a, 1997b, Nelson 1990). Nor do they deny that science discovers truths. The complaint is rather that, as dominantly practiced, it offers a partial view of the world primarily oriented to discovering those truths that serve particular human interests in material control and maintaining current social hierarchies (Harding 1986, 1998, 1993; Tiles 1987). Feminist epistemologists observe that the democratic and egalitarian norms for cognitive authority they accept, along with their requirement that the scientific community be open and responsive to criticism from all quarters, are incompatible with censorship, and with ignoring or suppressing evidence that undermines any theory, including theories inspired by feminist values (Longino 1990, 1993a, 2001; Anderson 2004—see Other Internet Resources). Although facts and values are intertwined, attention to values does not displace or compete with regard for the evidence (Anderson 1995b).

A second charge outside critics make against feminist epistemology is that it accepts and uncritically valorizes traditional, empirically unfounded stereotypes about women’s thinking (as intuitive, holistic, emotional, etc.) (Haack 1993). Valorization of “feminine” ways of thinking may trap women in traditional gender roles and help justify patriarchy (Nanda 2003). Promotion of feminist epistemology may carve out a limited “separate sphere” for female inquirers, but one that will turn into an intellectual ghetto (Baber 1994).

Defenders of feminist epistemology reply that the critics are attacking an obsolete version of feminist epistemology that was only briefly—and even at the time, controversially—entertained when the field was launched in the 1980s (Wylie 2003, Anderson 2004—see Other Internet Resources).

Further development of external critiques of feminist epistemology awaits the critics’ engagement with the feminist epistemology’s defenders and with current developments in the field.

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Handbook of Feminist Research

Handbook of Feminist Research Theory and Praxis

  • Sharlene Nagy Hesse-Biber - Boston College, USA
  • Description

This Handbook presents both a theoretical and practical approach to conducting social science research on, for, and about women. It develops an understanding of feminist research by introducing a range of feminist epistemologies, methodologies, and emergent methods that have had a significant impact on feminist research practice and women's studies scholarship. Contributors to the Second Edition continue to highlight the close link between feminist research and social change and transformation.

The new edition expands the base of scholarship into new areas, with 12 entirely new chapters on topics such as the natural sciences, social work, the health sciences, and environmental studies. It extends discussion of the intersections of race, class, gender, and globalization, as well as transgender, transsexualism and the queering of gender identities. All 22 chapters retained from the first edition are updated with the most current scholarship, including a focus on the role that new technologies play in the feminist research process.

Discover the latest news from Author Sharlene Nagy Hesse-Biber:  Visit  http://www.fordham.edu/Campus_Resources/eNewsroom/topstories_2397.asp

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'The Handbook of Feminist Research: Theory and Praxis is a well-developed contribution to the body of feminist literature. It effectively highlights the connection between feminist research and social change by drawing upon the range of existent feminist epistemologies, methods, and practices, all of which adopt different means of conceptualising, researching, and ultimately representing the lived experiences of women, varied across the lines of race, class and/or other demographics. The text, while accessible for both research and teaching purposes, perhaps most importantly draws our attention to the need to be critically aware in the process of conducting feminist research. One must address the challenges, research developments, and, crucially, the diversity amongst women, that may be incurred in attempting to research, understand, and accurately represent the lived experiences of all women'

Key Features of the Second Edition

  • Expands the base of scholarship into new areas , with new chapters on the place of feminism in the natural sciences, social work, the health sciences, and environmental studies
  • Extends discussion of the intersections of race, class, gender, and globalization , with new chapter on issues of gender identity
  • Updates all chapters retained from the first edition with the most current scholarship , including a focus on the role that new technologies play in the feminist research process
  • Includes research case studies in each chapter , providing readers with step-by-step praxis examples for conducting their own research projects
  • Offers new research and teaching resources, including discussion questions, and a list of websites as well as journal references geared to each chapter's content

We continue to reach out to two primary constituencies. The first is researchers, practitioners, and students within, and outside the academy, who conduct a variety of research projects and who are interested in consulting "cutting edge" research methods and gaining insights into the overall research process. This group also includes policymakers and activists who are interested in how to conduct research for social change. The second edition's audience continues to include academic researchers who, it is hoped, will use the Handbook in their research scholarship, as well as in their courses, at the upper-level undergraduate and graduate levels, as a main or supplementary text.

The second edition of the Handbook also includes a range of new research and teaching resources for both these readership groups with a list of websites as well as journal references that are specifically geared to each chapter's content. In addition, the second edition has an enhanced pedagogical feature at the end of each chapter that provides a set of key discussion questions intended as a praxis application for the ideas and concepts contained in each chapter.

The second edition's Handbook structure contains three primary sections that that represent a more finely tuned focus on theory and praxis, including the an enhanced set of case study research examples for each chapter that provide readers with a step-by- step praxis examples for conducting their own research projects.

Section one, "Feminist Perspectives on Knowledge Building,"

traces the historical rise of feminist research and begins with the early link of feminist epistemologies and perspectives within the research process. We trace the contours of early feminist inquiry and introduce the reader to the history, and historical debates, of and within feminist scholarship. We explore the androcentrism (male bias) in traditional research projects and the alternative set of questions feminist researchers bring to the research endeavor. We explore the political process of knowledge building by introducing the reader to the link between knowledge, authority, representation and power relations.

The chapters in Section One, introduce the unique knowledge frameworks feminists offer to enhance our understanding of the social reality. We explore some of the range of issues and questions feminists have addressed and the emphasis of feminist epistemologies and methodologies on understanding of the diversity of women's experiences, the commitment to the empowerment of women and other oppressed groups.

We examine a broad spectrum of the most important feminist perspectives and we take an in-depth look at how a given methodology intersects with epistemology and method to produce set of research practices. The Handbook's overall thesis is that any given feminist perspective does not preclude the use of specific methods, but serves to guide how a given method is practiced in the research process. While each feminist perspective is distinct, it sometimes shares elements with other perspectives. We discuss the similarities and differences across the spectrum of feminist perspectives on knowledge building.

Section two of the Handbook , "Feminist Research Praxis," examines how feminist researchers utilize a range of research methods in the service of feminist perspectives. Feminist researchers use a range of qualitative and quantitative as well as mixed and multi methods, and this section examines the unique characteristics feminists researchers bring to the practice of feminist research, by by maintaining a tight link between their theoretical perspectives and methods practices.

This section includes three new chapters. Deboleena Roy's chapter titled, "Feminist Approaches to Inquiry in the Natural Sciences: Practices for the Lab," tackles how feminist researchers go about their work within a natural science laboratory setting. She notes the importance of being reflexive of the range of ethical conundrums that are contained within practicing the scientific method. Roy suggests the importance of infusing laboratory research with a sense of "playfulness" and what she terms a "feeling around" in the pursuit of feminist laboratory knowledge building, that privileges a reaching out to other scientists in order to build a community of "togetherness" among researchers.

Stephanie Wahab, Ben Anderson-Nathe, and Christina Gringeri's new chapter, "Joining the Conversation: Social Work Contributions to Feminist Research," provides exemplary case studies of the practice of feminist research within a social work setting. Wahab et al. suggest that social work history of being grounded in praxis, ethics and reflection, can contribute to feminist knowledge building. In turn, social work's engagement with feminist theory, may help to disrupt the assumptions of knowledge contain in social work practice. Kristen Intemann's new chapter, "Putting Feminist Research Principles Into Practice," suggests that research principles of feminist praxis can benefit scientific research. Intemann proposes that scientific communities need to tend to issues of difference in the scientific research process by including diverse researchers (in terms of experiences, social positions, and values), that will serve to enhance a critical reflection on scientific research praxis with the goals of enhancing the perspective of the marginalized, and working towards a multiplicity of conceptual models.

Section III of the Handbook, "Feminist Issues and Insights in Practice and Pedagogy" examines some of the current tensions within feminist research and discusses a range of strategies for positioning of feminist research within the dominant research paradigms and emerging research practices. Section III also introduces some feminist "conundrums" regarding knowledge building that deal with issues of truth, reason logic and ethics. Section III also tackles the conceptualization of difference and its practice. In addition, it addresses how feminist researchers can develop an empowered feminist community of scholars across transnational space. Section three also focuses on issues within the practice of feminist pedagogy that includes a discussion of how feminists can or should convey the range of women's scholarship that differentiates it from the charge that women's studies scholarship conveys only ideology not knowledge.

A new chapter added to this section is Katherine Johnson's contribution titled, "Transgender, Transsexualism, and the Queering of Gender Identities: Debates for Feminist Research." Johnson examines some of the core issues of contention within queer studies with the goal of identify those theoretical perspectives that have particular relevance to feminist researchers. Johnson argues that feminist researchers need to be cognizant of the range of identity positions with regard to gender identities. Johnson encourages feminist researchers to explore definitions, terminology, and areas for coalitions in order to promote the crossing of identity borders. Johnson's work analyzes the dialogues between feminism and transgender, transsexual, and queer studies and at how the fields may work together to more robust research.

Sharlene Hesse-Biber and Abigail Brooks' introduction to this section remind us that "There is no one feminist viewpoint that defines feminist inquiry." But rather "feminists continue to engage in and dialogue across a range of diverse approaches to theory, praxis, and pedagogy" (Hesse-Biber & Brooks, this volume).

Sample Materials & Chapters

Chapter 1: FEMINIST RESEARCH

Chapter 2: FEMINIST EMPIRICISM

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  • Volume 26, Issue 3
  • Research made simple: an introduction to feminist research
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  • Gillian Wilson
  • School of Nursing and Midwifery , University of Hull , Hull , UK
  • Correspondence to Gillian Wilson, University of Hull, Hull, Kingston upon Hull, UK; gillian.wilson{at}hull.ac.uk

https://doi.org/10.1136/ebnurs-2023-103749

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Writing an article for ‘Research Made Simple’ on feminist research may at first appear slightly oxymoronic, given that there is no agreed definition of feminist research, let alone a single definition of feminism. The literature that examines the historical and philosophical roots of feminism(s) and feminist research is vast, extends over several decades and reaches across an expanse of varying disciplines. Trying to navigate the literature can be daunting and may, at first, appear impenetrable to those new to feminist research.

There is no ‘How To’ in feminist research. Although feminists tend to share the same common goals, their interests, values and perspectives can be quite disparate. Depending on the philosophical position they hold, feminist researchers will draw on differing epistemologies (ways of knowing), ask different questions, be guided by different methodologies and employ different methods. Within the confines of space, this article will briefly outline some of the principles of feminist research. It will then turn to discuss three established epistemologies that can guide feminist research (although there are many others): feminist empiricism, feminist standpoint and feminist postmodernism.

What makes feminist research feminist?

Feminist research is grounded in a commitment to equality and social justice, and is cognisant of the gendered, historical and political processes involved in the production of knowledge. 1 It also strives to explore and illuminate the diversity of the experiences of women and other marginalised groups, thereby creating opportunities that increase awareness of how social hierarchies impact on and influence oppression. 2 Commenting on the differentiation between feminist and non-feminist research, Skeggs asserts that ‘feminist research begins from the premise that the nature of reality in western society is unequal and hierarchical’ Skeggs 3 p77; therefore, feminist research may also be viewed as having both academic and political concerns.

Reflexivity

The practice of reflexivity is considered a hallmark of feminist research. It invites the researcher to engage in a ‘disciplined self-reflection’ Wilkinson 9 p93. This includes consideration of the extent to which their research fulfils feminist principles. Reflexivity can be divided into three discrete forms: personal, functional and disciplinary. 9 Personal reflexivity invites the researcher to contemplate their role in the research and construction of knowledge by examining the ways in which their own values, beliefs, interests, emotions, biography and social location, have influenced the research process and the outcomes (personal reflexivity). 10 By stating their position rather than concealing it, feminist researchers use reflexivity to add context to their claims. Functional reflexivity pays attention to the influence that the chosen research tools and processes may have had on the research. Disciplinary reflexivity is about analysing the influence of approaching a topic from a specific disciplinary field.

Feminist empiricism

Feminist empiricism is underpinned by foundationalist principles that believes in a single true social reality with truth existing entirely independent of the knower (researcher). 8 Building on the premise that feminist researchers pay attention to how methods are used, feminist empiricist researchers set out to use androcentric positivist scientific methods ‘more appropriately’. 8 They argue that feminist principles can legitimately be applied to empirical inquiry if the masculine bias inherent in scientific research is removed. This is achieved through application of rigorous, objective, value-free scientific methods. Methods used include experimental, quasi-experimental and survey. Feminist empiricists employ traditional positivist methodology while being cognisant of the sex and gender biases. What makes the research endeavour feminist is the attentiveness in identifying potential sources of gendered bias. 11

Feminist standpoint

In a similar way to feminist empiricism, standpoint feminism—also known as ‘women’s experience epistemology’ Letherby 8 p44—holds firm the position that traditional science is androcentric and is therefore bad science. This is predicated on the belief that traditional science only produces masculine forms of knowledge thus excluding women’s perspectives and experiences. Feminist standpoint epistemology takes issue with the masculinised definition of women’s experience and argue it holds little relevance for women. Feminist standpoint epistemology therefore operates on the assumption that knowledge emanates from social position and foregrounds the voices of women and their experiences of oppression to generate knowledge about their lives that would otherwise have remained hidden. 12 Feminist standpoint epistemology maintains that women, as the oppressed or disadvantaged, may have an epistemological advantage over the dominant groups by virtue of their ability to understand their own experience and struggles against oppression, while also by being attuned to the experience and culture of their oppressors. 11 This gives women’s experience a valid basis for knowledge production that both reflects women’s oppression and resistance. 13

Feminist standpoint epistemology works on the premise that there is no single reality, 11 thus disrupting the empiricist notion that research must be objective and value-free. 12 To shed light on the experiences of the oppressed, feminist standpoint researchers use both quantitative and qualitative approaches to see the world through the eyes of their research participants and understand how their positions shape their experiences within the social world. In addition, the researchers are expected to engage in strong reflexivity and reflect on, and acknowledge in their writing, how their own attributes and social location may impact on interpretation of their data. 14

Feminist postmodernism

Feminist postmodernism is a branch of feminism that embraces feminist and postmodernist thought. Feminist postmodernists reject the notion of an objective truth and a single reality. They maintain that truths are relative, multiple, and dependent on social contexts. 15 The theory is marked by the rejection of the feminist ideology that seeks a single explanation for oppression of women. Feminist postmodernists argue that women experience oppression because of social and political marginalisation rather than their biological difference to men, concluding that gender is a social construct. 16

Feminist postmodernists eschew phallogocentric masculine thought (expressed through words and language) that leads to by binary opposition. They are particularly concerned with the man/woman dyad, but also other binary oppositions of race, gender and class. 17 Feminist postmodernist scholars believe that knowledge is constructed by language and that language gives meaning to everything—it does not portray reality, rather it constructs it. 11 A key feature of feminist postmodernist research is the attempt to deconstruct the binary opposition through reflecting on existing assumptions, questioning how ways of thinking have been socially constructed and challenging the taken-for-granted. 17

This article has provided a brief overview of feminist research. It should be considered more of a taster that introduces readers to the complex but fascinating world of feminist research. Readers who have developed an appetite for a more comprehensive examination are guided to a useful and accessible text on feminist theories and concepts in healthcare written by Kay Aranda. 1

  • Western D ,
  • Giacomini M
  • Margaret Fonow M ,
  • Wilkinson S
  • Campbell R ,
  • Wigginton B ,
  • Lafrance MN
  • Naples NA ,
  • Hesse-Biber S

Funding The authors have not declared a specific grant for this research from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.

Competing interests None declared.

Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; internally peer reviewed.

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Feminist Theory in Sociology

An Overview of Key Ideas and Issues

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Feminist theory is a major branch within sociology that shifts its assumptions, analytic lens, and topical focus away from the male viewpoint and experience toward that of women.

In doing so, feminist theory shines a light on social problems, trends, and issues that are otherwise overlooked or misidentified by the historically dominant male perspective within social theory .

Key Takeaways

Key areas of focus within feminist theory include:

  • discrimination and exclusion on the basis of sex and gender
  • objectification
  • structural and economic inequality
  • power and oppression
  • gender roles and stereotypes

Many people incorrectly believe that feminist theory focuses exclusively on girls and women and that it has an inherent goal of promoting the superiority of women over men.

In reality, feminist theory has always been about viewing the social world in a way that illuminates the forces that create and support inequality, oppression, and injustice, and in doing so, promotes the pursuit of equality and justice.

That said, since the experiences and perspectives of women and girls were historically excluded for years from social theory and social science, much feminist theory has focused on their interactions and experiences within society to ensure that half the world's population is not left out of how we see and understand social forces, relations, and problems.

While most feminist theorists throughout history have been women, people of all genders can be found working in the discipline today. By shifting the focus of social theory away from the perspectives and experiences of men, feminist theorists have created social theories that are more inclusive and creative than those that assume the social actor to always be a man.

Part of what makes feminist theory creative and inclusive is that it often considers how systems of power and oppression interact , which is to say it does not just focus on gendered power and oppression, but on how this might intersect with systemic racism, a hierarchical class system, sexuality, nationality, and (dis)ability, among other things.

Gender Differences

Some feminist theory provides an analytic framework for understanding how women's location in and experience of social situations differ from men's.

For example, cultural feminists look at the different values associated with womanhood and femininity as a reason for why men and women experience the social world differently.   Other feminist theorists believe that the different roles assigned to women and men within institutions better explain gender differences, including the sexual division of labor in the household .  

Existential and phenomenological feminists focus on how women have been marginalized and defined as  “other”  in patriarchal societies . Some feminist theorists focus specifically on how masculinity is developed through socialization, and how its development interacts with the process of developing femininity in girls.

Gender Inequality

Feminist theories that focus on gender inequality recognize that women's location in and experience of social situations are not only different but also unequal to men's.

Liberal feminists argue that women have the same capacity as men for moral reasoning and agency, but that patriarchy , particularly the sexist division of labor, has historically denied women the opportunity to express and practice this reasoning.  

These dynamics serve to shove women into the  private sphere  of the household and to exclude them from full participation in public life. Liberal feminists point out that gender inequality exists for women in a heterosexual marriage and that women do not benefit from being married.  

Indeed, these feminist theorists claim, married women have higher levels of stress than unmarried women and married men.   Therefore, the sexual division of labor in both the public and private spheres needs to be altered for women to achieve equality in marriage.

Gender Oppression

Theories of gender oppression go further than theories of gender difference and gender inequality by arguing that not only are women different from or unequal to men, but that they are actively oppressed, subordinated, and even abused by men .  

Power is the key variable in the two main theories of gender oppression: psychoanalytic feminism and  radical feminism .

Psychoanalytic feminists attempt to explain power relations between men and women by reformulating Sigmund Freud's theories of human emotions, childhood development, and the workings of the subconscious and unconscious. They believe that conscious calculation cannot fully explain the production and reproduction of patriarchy.  

Radical feminists argue that being a woman is a positive thing in and of itself, but that this is not acknowledged in  patriarchal societies  where women are oppressed. They identify physical violence as being at the base of patriarchy, but they think that patriarchy can be defeated if women recognize their own value and strength, establish a sisterhood of trust with other women, confront oppression critically, and form female-based separatist networks in the private and public spheres.  

Structural Oppression

Structural oppression theories posit that women's oppression and inequality are a result of capitalism , patriarchy, and racism .

Socialist feminists agree with  Karl Marx  and Freidrich Engels that the working class is exploited as a consequence of capitalism, but they seek to extend this exploitation not just to class but also to gender.  

Intersectionality theorists seek to explain oppression and inequality across a variety of variables, including class, gender, race, ethnicity, and age. They offer the important insight that not all women experience oppression in the same way, and that the same forces that work to oppress women and girls also oppress people of color and other marginalized groups.  

One way structural oppression of women, specifically the economic kind, manifests in society is in the gender wage gap , which shows that men routinely earn more for the same work than women.

An intersectional view of this situation shows that women of color, and men of color, too, are even further penalized relative to the earnings of white men.  

In the late 20th century, this strain of feminist theory was extended to account for the globalization of capitalism and how its methods of production and of accumulating wealth center on the exploitation of women workers around the world.

Kachel, Sven, et al. "Traditional Masculinity and Femininity: Validation of a New Scale Assessing Gender Roles." Frontiers in Psychology , vol. 7, 5 July 2016, doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00956

Zosuls, Kristina M., et al. "Gender Development Research in  Sex Roles : Historical Trends and Future Directions." Sex Roles , vol. 64, no. 11-12, June 2011, pp. 826-842., doi:10.1007/s11199-010-9902-3

Norlock, Kathryn. "Feminist Ethics." Standford Encyclopedia of Philosophy . 27 May 2019.

Liu, Huijun, et al. "Gender in Marriage and Life Satisfaction Under Gender Imbalance in China: The Role of Intergenerational Support and SES." Social Indicators Research , vol. 114, no. 3, Dec. 2013, pp. 915-933., doi:10.1007/s11205-012-0180-z

"Gender and Stress." American Psychological Association .

Stamarski, Cailin S., and Leanne S. Son Hing. "Gender Inequalities in the Workplace: The Effects of Organizational Structures, Processes, Practices, and Decision Makers’ Sexism." Frontiers in Psychology , 16 Sep. 2015, doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2015.01400

Barone-Chapman, Maryann . " Gender Legacies of Jung and Freud as Epistemology in Emergent Feminist Research on Late Motherhood." Behavioral Sciences , vol. 4, no. 1, 8 Jan. 2014, pp. 14-30., doi:10.3390/bs4010014

Srivastava, Kalpana, et al. "Misogyny, Feminism, and Sexual Harassment." Industrial Psychiatry Journal , vol. 26, no. 2, July-Dec. 2017, pp. 111-113., doi:10.4103/ipj.ipj_32_18

Armstrong, Elisabeth. "Marxist and Socialist Feminism." Study of Women and Gender: Faculty Publications . Smith College, 2020.

Pittman, Chavella T. "Race and Gender Oppression in the Classroom: The Experiences of Women Faculty of Color with White Male Students." Teaching Sociology , vol. 38, no. 3, 20 July 2010, pp. 183-196., doi:10.1177/0092055X10370120

Blau, Francine D., and Lawrence M. Kahn. "The Gender Wage Gap: Extent, Trends, and Explanations." Journal of Economic Literature , vol. 55, no. 3, 2017, pp. 789-865., doi:10.1257/jel.20160995

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Feminist Theory in Sociology: Deinition, Types & Principles

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Feminist Theory Sociology 1

Feminist theory is a major branch of sociology. It is a set of structural conflict approaches which views society as a conflict between men and women. There is the belief that women are oppressed and/or disadvantaged by various social institutions.

Feminist theory aims to highlight the social problems and issues that are experienced by women. Some of the key areas of focus include discrimination on the basis of sex and gender, objectification, economic inequality, power, gender role, and stereotypes.

Feminists share a common goal in support of equality for men and women. Although all feminists strive for gender equality, there are various ways to approach this theory.

Some of the general features of feminism include:

An awareness that there are inequalities between men and women based on power and status.

These inequalities can create conflict between men and women.

Gender roles and inequalities are usually socially constructed.

An awareness of the importance of patriarchy: a system of social structures and practices in which men dominate, oppress, and exploit women.

What Are The Goals of Feminism?

The perspectives and experiences of women and girls have historically been excluded from social theory and social science. Thus, feminist theory aims to focus on the interactions and issues women face in society and culture, so half the population is not left out.

Feminism in general means the belief in the social, economic, and political equality of the sexes.

The different branches of feminism may disagree on several things and have varying values. Despite this, there are usually basic principles that all feminists support:

Increasing gender equality

Feminist theories recognize that women’s experiences are not only different from men’s but are unequal. Feminists will oppose laws and cultural norms that mean women earn a lower income and have less educational and career opportunities than men.

Ending gender oppression

Gender oppression goes further than gender inequality. Oppression means that not only are women different from or unequal to men, but they are actively subordinated, exploited, and even abused by men.

Ending structural oppression

Feminist theories posit that gender inequality and oppression are the result of capitalism and patriarchy in which men dominate.

Expanding human choice

Feminists believe that both men and women should have the freedom to express themselves and develop their interests, even if this goes against cultural norms.

Ending sexual violence

Feminists recognize that many women suffer sexual violence and that actions should be taken to address this.

Promoting sexual freedom

Having sexual freedom means that women have control over their own sexuality and reproduction. This can include ending the stigma of being promiscuous and ensuring that everyone has access to safe abortions.

The Waves Of Feminism

The history of modern feminism can be divided into four parts which are termed ‘ waves .’ Each wave marks a specific cultural period in which specific feminist issues are brought to light.

First wave feminism

The first wave of feminism is believed to have started with the ‘Women’s Suffrage Movement’ in New York in 1848 under the leadership of Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton.

Those involved in this feminist movement were known as suffragettes. The main aim of this movement was to allow women to vote. During this time, members of the suffrage movement engaged in social campaigns that expressed dissatisfaction with women’s limited rights to work, education, property, and social agency, among others.

Emmeline Pankhurst was thought to be the leader of the suffragettes in Britain and was regarded as one of the most important figures in the movement. She founded the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), a group known for employing militant tactics in their struggle for equality.

Despite the first wave of feminism being mostly active in the United States and western Europe, it led to international law changes regarding the right for women to vote.

It is worth noting that even after this first wave, in some countries, mostly white women from privileged backgrounds were permitted to vote, with black and minority ethnic individuals being granted this right later on.

Second wave feminism

Second-wave feminism started somewhere in the 1960s after the chaos of the second world war.

French feminist author Simone de Beauvoir published a book in 1949 entitled ‘The Second Sex’ which outlined the definitions of womanhood and how women have historically been treated as second to men.

She determined that ‘one is not born but becomes a woman’. This book is thought to have been foundational for setting the tone for the next wave of women’s rights activism.

Feminism during this period was focused on the social roles in women’s work and family environment. It broadened the debate to include a wider range of issues such as sexuality, family, reproductive rights, legal inequalities, and divorce law.

From this wave, the movement toward women’s rights included the signing of the Equal Pay Act of 1963, which stipulated that women could no longer be paid less than men for comparable work.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 included a section which prevents employers from discriminating against employees on the basis of sex, race, religion, or national origin. Likewise, the famous Roe v. Wade decision protected a woman’s right to have an abortion from 1973.

Third wave feminism

The third wave of feminism is harder to pinpoint but it was thought to have taken off in the 1990s. Early activism in this wave involved fighting against workplace sexual harassment and working to increase the number of women in positions of power.

The work of Kimberlé Crenshaw in the 1980s is thought to have been the root. She coined the term ‘intersectionality’ to describe the ways in which different forms of oppression intersect, such as how a black woman is oppressed in two ways: for being a woman and for being black.

Since there was not a clear goal with third-wave feminism as there was with previous waves, there is no single piece of legislation or major social change that belongs to the wave.

Fourth wave feminism

Many believe that there is now a fourth wave of feminism which began around 2012.

It is likely that the wave sparked after allegations of sexual abuse and harassment, specifically of celebrities, which gave birth to campaigns such as Everyday Sexism Project by Laura Bates and the #MeToo movement.

With the rise of the internet and social platforms, feminist issues such as discrimination, harassment, body shaming, and misogyny can be widely discussed with the emergence of new feminists.

Fourth-wave feminism is digitally driven and has become more inclusive to include those of any sexual orientation, ethnicity, and trans individuals.

Types of Feminism

Liberal feminism.

Liberal feminism is rooted in classic liberal thought and these feminists believe that equality should be brought about through education and policy changes. They see gender inequalities as rooted in the attitudes of social and cultural institutions, so they aim to change the system from within.

Liberal feminists argue that women have the same capacity for moral reasoning and agency as men, but that the patriarchy has denied them the opportunity to practice this. Due to the patriarchy, these feminists believe that women have been pushed to remain in the privacy of their household and thus been excluded from participating in public life.

Liberal feminists focus mainly on protecting equal opportunities for women through legislation. The Equal Rights Amendment

in 1972 was impactful for liberal feminists which enforced equality on account of sex.

Marxist feminism

Marxist feminism evolved from the ideas of Karl Marx, who claimed capitalism was to blame for promoting patriarchy, meaning that power is held in the hands of a small number of men.

Marxist feminists believe that capitalism is the cause of women’s oppression and that this oppression in turn, helps to reinforce capitalism. These feminists believe that women are exploited for their unpaid labor (maintaining the household and childcare) and that capitalism reinforces that women are a reserve for the work force and they must create the next generation of workers.

According to Marxist feminists, the system and traditional family can only be replaced by a socialist revolution that creates a government to meet the needs of the family.

Radical feminism

Radical feminists posit that power is key to gender oppression. They argue that being a woman is a positive thing but that this is not acknowledged in patriarchal societies.

The main belief of radical feminists is that equality can only be achieved through gender separation and political lesbianism. They think the patriarchy can be defeated if women recognize their own value and strength, establish trust with other women, and form female-based separatist networks in the private and public spheres.

Intersectional feminism

Intersectional feminism believes that other feminist theories create an incorrect acceptance of women’s oppression based on the experiences of mostly western, middle class, white women.

For instance, while they may acknowledge that the work of the suffragette movement was influential, the voting rights of working class or minority ethnic groups was forgotten at this time.

Intersectionality considers that gender, race, sexual orientation, gender identity, and others, are not separate, but are interwoven and can bring about different levels of oppression.

This type of feminism offers insight that not all women experience oppression in the same way. For instance, the wage gap shows that women of color and men of color are penalized relative to the earnings of white men.

Feminist theory is important since it helps to address and better understand unequal and oppressive gender relations. It promotes the goal of equality and justice while providing more opportunities for women.

True feminism benefits men too and is not only applicable to women. It allows men to be who they want to be, without being tied down to their own gender roles and stereotypes.

Through feminism, men are encouraged to be free to express themselves in a way which may be considered ‘typically feminine’ such as crying when they are upset.

In this way, men’s mental health can benefit from feminism since the shame associated with talking about their emotions can be lifted without feeling the expectation to ‘man up’ and keep their feeling buried.

With the development of intersectionality, feminism does not just focus on gendered power and oppression, but on how this might intersect with race, sexuality, social class, disability, religion, and others.

Without feminism, women would have significantly less rights. More women have the right to vote, work, have equal pay, access to health care, reproductive rights, and protection from violence. While every country has its own laws and legislature, there would have been less progress in changing these without the feminist movement.

Feminist theory is also self-critical in that it recognizes that it may not have been applicable to everyone in the past. It is understood that it was not inclusive and so evolved and may still go on to evolve over time. Feminism is not a static movement, but fluid in the way it can change and adjust to suit modern times.

Some critics suggest that a main weakness of feminist theory is that it is from a woman-centered viewpoint. While the theories also mention issues which are not strictly related to women, it is argued that men and women view the world differently.

Some may call feminist theory redundant in modern day since women have the opportunity to work now, so the nature of family life has inevitably changed in response.

However, a counterpoint to this is that many women in certain cultures are still not given the right to work. Likewise, having access to work does not eradicate the other feminist issues that are still prevalent.

Some feminists may go too far into a stage where they are man-hating which causes more harm than good. It can make men feel unwelcome to feminism if they are being blamed for patriarchal oppression and inequalities that they are not directly responsible for.

Other women may not want to identify as a feminist either if they have the impression that feminists are man-haters but they themselves like men.

There are criticisms even between feminists, with some having values that can lead to others having a negative view of feminists as a whole.

For instance, radical feminists often receive criticism for ignoring race, social class, sexual orientation, and the presence of more than two genders. Thus, there are aspects of feminism which are not inclusive.

What is the main goal of feminism?

The goal of feminism is to reach social, political, and economic equality of the sexes. Feminists aim to challenge the systemic inequalities women face on a daily basis, change laws and legislature which oppress women, put an end to sexism and exploitation of women, and raise awareness of women’s issues.

However, the different types of feminists may have distinct goals within their movement and between each other.

How was feminist theory founded?

Although many early writings could be characterized as feminism or embodying the experiences of women, the history of Western feminist theory usually begins with the works of Mary Wollstonecraft.

Wollstonecraft was one of the first feminist writers, responsible for her publications such as ‘A Vindication of the Rights of Woman’, published in 1792.

How does feminist theory relate to education?

Feminist theory helps us understand gender differences in education, gender socialization, and how the education system may be easier for boys to navigate than girls.

Many feminists believe education is an agent of secondary socialization that helps enforce patriarchy.

Feminist theory aims to promote educational opportunities for girls. It assures that they should not limit their educational aspirations because they may go against what is traditionally expected of them.

What are feminist sociologists view on family roles and relationships?

Some feminists view the function of the  nuclear family  as a place where patriarchal values are learned by individuals, which in turn add to the patriarchal society.

Young girls may be socialized to believe that inequality and oppression are a normal part of being a woman. Boys are socialized to believe they are superior and have authority over women.

Feminists often believe that the nuclear family teaches children gender roles which translates to gender roles in wider society.

For instance, girls may learn to accept that being a housewife is the only possible or acceptable role for women. Some feminists also believe that the  division of labor  is unequal in nuclear families, with women and girls accepting subservient roles in the household.

How does feminist theory relate to crime?

Feminists recognize that there is a disproportionate amount of violence and crime against women and that the reason may be due to the inequalities and oppression that women face.

If the patriarchy posits that men are more powerful, this can lead them to abuse this power over women, resulting in harassment, physical, emotional, and sexual abuse, and even murder of women.

Feminists point out that there is a lot of systemic sexism in the justice system which needs to be tackled. Female victims of sexual abuse from men may often feel as if they are the ones put on trial and even experience blame for what happened to them.

Thus, many women do not report their sexual abuse for fear of not being believed or taken seriously in a system that favors men.

Therefore, many feminists would aim to fix the system so that fewer men commit these crimes and that there is proper justice for women who experience violence from men.

How far would sociologists agree that feminism has changed marriage?

Feminists often believe that the meaning of marriage is deeply rooted in  patriarchy  and gender inequality. In modern times, it would, therefore, not make sense for a woman to get married unless she has a partner willing to overturn a lot of the traditional and sexist values of marriage.

Most feminists believe that women should have the choice over whether they want to get married or even be in a relationship. Marriage for feminists can be; however, they want it to be, including their vows and values that make them and their partners equal.

A study found that having a feminist partner was linked to healthier heterosexual relationships for women (Rudman & Phelan, 2007).

They also found that men with feminist partners reported more stable relationships and greater sexual satisfaction, suggesting that feminism may predict happier relationships.

There are  differences between radical and liberal feminism  regarding ideas about the private sphere. Liberal feminists are generally not against heterosexual marriage and having children, as long as this is what the woman wants.

If the woman is treated as an equal by their partner and chooses how to raise their family, this is a feminist choice.

Even in modern marriage, radical feminists argue that women married to men are under patriarchal rule and are still made to complete much of the unpaid labor in the household compared to their husbands.

What is meant by the term malestream?

Feminists use the term malestream to highlight the need for more inclusive research methodologies and theoretical perspectives that better represent and address the experiences and issues of women and other marginalized groups. It’s a call to move beyond the male-centric biases in various academic disciplines, including sociology.

Armstrong, E. (2020). Marxist and Socialist Feminisms.  Companion to Feminist Studies , 35-52.

Bates, L. (2016).  Everyday sexism: The project that inspired a worldwide movement . Macmillan.

Crenshaw, K. W. (2006). Intersectionality, identity politics and violence against women of color.  Kvinder, kön & forskning , (2-3).

Malinowska, A. (2020). Waves of Feminism.  The International Encyclopedia of Gender, Media, and Communication,  1, 1-7.

Oxley, J. C. (2011). Liberal feminism.  Just the Arguments,  100, 258262.

Rudman, L. A., & Phelan, J. E. (2007). The interpersonal power of feminism: Is feminism good for romantic relationships?.  Sex Roles, 57 (11), 787-799.

Srivastava, K., Chaudhury, S., Bhat, P. S., & Sahu, S. (2017). Misogyny, feminism, and sexual harassment.  Industrial psychiatry journal, 26( 2), 111.

Thompson, D. (2001).  Radical feminism today . Sage.

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  1. Feminist Theory

    Work in feminist theory, including research regarding gender equality, is ongoing. Gender equality continues to be an issue today, and research into gender equality in education is still moving feminist theory forward. For example, Pincock's (2017) study discusses the impact of repressive norms on the education of girls in Tanzania.

  2. Feminist Theory and Its Use in Qualitative Research in Education

    Feminist theory informs both research questions and the methodology of a project in addition to serving as a foundation for analysis. The goals of feminist educational research include dismantling systems of oppression, highlighting gender-based disparities, and seeking new ways of constructing knowledge.

  3. Learning critical feminist research: A brief introduction to feminist

    Thus, feminist standpoint theory emphasizes the role of research as an impetus for social change. Although standpoint research may be conducted from the margins, it is never, as Harding (1992) reminds us, value-free, and new ways of dealing with the values and interests inherent in the process of inquiry are needed.

  4. Feminist Theory

    Mapping 21st-Century Feminist Theory. Feminist theory is a vast, enormously diverse, interdisciplinary field that cuts across the humanities, sciences, and social sciences. As a result, this article cannot offer a historical overview or even an exhaustive account of 21st-century feminist theory. But it offers a genealogy and a toolkit for 21st ...

  5. Feminist Theory: Sage Journals

    Feminist Theory is an international peer reviewed journal that provides a forum for critical analysis and constructive debate within feminism. Feminist Theory is genuinely interdisciplinary and reflects the diversity of feminism, incorporating perspectives from across the broad spectrum of the humanities and social sciences and the full range ...

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    In their lead editorial, Catriona Macleod, Jeanne Marecek, and Rose Capdevila (2014) highlighted the importance of theory in the articles published in Feminism & Psychology between 2000 and 2012. They identified 107 articles that fit this specific topic area, making it the top-ranked area of scholarly focus.

  7. Feminist Theory Today

    Feminist theory is not only about women; it is about the world, engaged through critical intersectional perspectives. Despite many significant differences, most feminist theory is reliably suspicious of dualistic thinking, generally oriented toward fluid processes of emergence rather than static entities in one-way relationships, and committed to being a political as well as an intellectual ...

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    The chapter covers issues including the Women's Movements, Women's Studies/Feminism, the different waves of feminism, feminist perspectives, feminist research / feminist methods, objectivity for feminist research and feminist theories. We cover theory and method for social science in general, but there is a section that features psychology ...

  9. Feminist Theory

    Feminist Studies is a leading journal in feminist thought and politics. First published in 1972, its origins are directly traceable to American feminist activism in the late 1960s and early 1970s. True to its beginnings, the journal's articles aim to provide both scholarly and political insight. Feminist Theory.

  10. Handbook of Feminist Research: Theory and Praxis

    This Handbook presents both a theoretical and practical approach to conducting social science research on, for, and about women. It develops an understanding of feminist research by introducing a range of feminist epistemologies, methodologies, and emergent methods that have had a significant impact on feminist research practice and women's studies scholarship.

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    The emphasis here is on general resources useful for doing research in feminist philosophy or interdisciplinary feminist theory, e.g., the links connect to bibliographies and meta-sites, and resources concerning inclusion, exclusion, and feminist diversity. The list is incomplete and will be regularly revised and expanded.

  12. The Oxford Handbook of Feminist Theory

    Abstract. The Oxford Handbook of Feminist Theory provides an overview of the analytical frameworks and theoretical concepts feminist theorists have developed to challenge established knowledge. Leading feminist theorists, from around the globe, provide in-depth explorations of a diverse array of subject areas, capturing a plurality of approaches.

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    Feminist theories and methodologies have the potential to transform education research and praxis. "Feminist research positions gender as the categorical center of inquiry and the research process," in which "feminist researchers use gender as a lens through which to focus on social issues" (Hesse-Biber, 2014, p. 3).While some employments of feminist thought solely center on the ...

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    1. The feminist "we" of this article is the "we" of a co-authorship relationship that we have sustained across research questions and the "we" of our feminist research practice, by which we conceive of our work as part of a broad and open field (that certainly has its moments of exclusions) but which is at its best, dynamically inclusive of diverse people, ideas, and struggles.

  16. Full article: The Untimeliness of Feminist Theory

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    7 The Grounded Theory Method Notes. Notes. Collapse 8 Feminist Qualitative Research: Toward Transformation of Science and Society Expand What Is ... Feminist research is described in terms of its purposes of knowledge about women's lives, advocacy for women, analysis of gender oppression, and transformation of society. ...

  18. Feminist Theories: Knowledge, Method, and Practice

    As a politicized and contentious framework, feminist theories generate controversies. Some controversies are long-standing, such as how gender, race, social class, and sexuality have led to divisions in feminist theory, activism, and community, and others have arisen in light of the revolution in mass communication and new social media as well as the emergence of new understandings about the ...

  19. Feminist Epistemology and Philosophy of Science

    First published Wed Aug 9, 2000; substantive revision Thu Feb 13, 2020. Feminist epistemology and philosophy of science studies the ways in which gender does and ought to influence our conceptions of knowledge, knowers, and practices of inquiry and justification. It identifies how dominant conceptions and practices of knowledge attribution ...

  20. Handbook of Feminist Research

    'The Handbook of Feminist Research: Theory and Praxis is a well-developed contribution to the body of feminist literature. It effectively highlights the connection between feminist research and social change by drawing upon the range of existent feminist epistemologies, methods, and practices, all of which adopt different means of conceptualising, researching, and ultimately representing the ...

  21. Research made simple: an introduction to feminist research

    Writing an article for 'Research Made Simple' on feminist research may at first appear slightly oxymoronic, given that there is no agreed definition of feminist research, let alone a single definition of feminism. The literature that examines the historical and philosophical roots of feminism(s) and feminist research is vast, extends over several decades and reaches across an expanse of ...

  22. Feminist Theory: Definition and Discussion

    Updated on February 25, 2020. Feminist theory is a major branch within sociology that shifts its assumptions, analytic lens, and topical focus away from the male viewpoint and experience toward that of women. In doing so, feminist theory shines a light on social problems, trends, and issues that are otherwise overlooked or misidentified by the ...

  23. Feminism & Psychology Learning critical feminist research: A brief

    emergence of feminist scholarship - focusing particularly on the discipline of psychology - to show readers how and why feminist scholars sought to depart from conventional science. In doing so, we explain the emergence of three main ways of doing and thinking about research (i.e. epistemologies): feminist empiricism, standpoint theory, and

  24. Feminist Theory in Sociology: Deinition, Types & Principles

    References. Feminist theory is a major branch of sociology. It is a set of structural conflict approaches which views society as a conflict between men and women. There is the belief that women are oppressed and/or disadvantaged by various social institutions. Feminist theory aims to highlight the social problems and issues that are experienced ...

  25. PDF Casting a Wider Net: Incorporating Black Feminist Theory to Support EdD

    research. Black Feminist Theory places importance on the identity of the researcher and requires researchers to own their ideas, which can be immensely useful as EdD students develop their positionalities. Black Feminist Theory as a lens to conceptualize a study can guide the researcher's decision-making about a host of methodological issues.