Feminist Approaches

There is no single research model guiding feminist research. Feminist practices are diverse, interdisciplinary (drawing from different academic traditions), and driven by research purpose. For example, some researchers focus on law, policy, and curriculum as vehicles to advance women's status; others study how economic forces produce gender, race, and class inequities; and others consider the role of language and systems of thought in creating, and recreating, categories people inhabit, such as “woman” and “sexuality.” Each focus reflects different theoretical approaches to formulating and conducting research.

This section will first describe several approaches to developing research questions and then provide examples of two qualitative approaches to feminist inquiry: oral history and ethnography. Oral history seeks to capture individual experiences within their social and cultural contexts; ethnography focuses on cultural practices (see Chapters Six and Seven).

Developing Research Questions

Research begins from any number of philosophical and practical questions about the social world. Questions might arise from the lived experiences of marginalized groups, a concrete problem in a program or community, particular gaps in knowledge about underrepresented groups, or critiques of sexist, heterosexist, or racist assumptions that have shaped knowledge.

Lived Experience

Research questions can emerge from the perspectives and standpoints of disadvantaged groups. Proceeding from the belief that everyone occupies a particular standpoint based on his or her social position, researchers inhabiting social roles with greater advantages might try to step outside the frameworks they assume are universal and consider the issue from the perspective of a disadvantaged person or group. A question to nourish this shift in perspective might be, What would a food program developed from the perspective of our most vulnerable citizens look like? Schmitt and Martin's case study (1999) of activist methods in a rape crisis center reflects this spirit when activists assert, “All we do comes from victims” (p. 364).

Researchers' assumptions shape the questions they formulate, the data they collect to answer their questions, and the knowledge they generate—which in turn shapes human lives and thought. Thus beginning from the standpoint of vulnerable people invites different kinds of questions for examining phenomena.

Concrete Issues

Research might also arise from a concrete issue that merits scrutiny. Perhaps a researcher has noted that a battered women's shelter is underused or a female administrator has advanced more rapidly than her peers. To understand why the women's shelter is underused or how the administrator has advanced, researchers might design an instrumental case study to explore each case in depth and theorize how they might use findings to improve services or advance other women administrators (see also Chapter Ten).

In the case of the shelter researchers might consider: Who is the center designed to serve? What are the characteristics of the community? How close or collaborative are relations between shelter employees and community residents?

Data collection to answer these questions might include long-term immersion in the setting through doing volunteer work and conducting participant observations. It might include informal interviews with stakeholders, employees, and community members. It might include reviewing shelter documents and police reports to determine how the shelter is used.

Analyzing the data for themes and patterns might reveal gaps between shelter services and community needs. For example, researchers might discover that many community members speak a different language than police officers and shelter employees, that the shelter restricts services to women with very young children, or that some lesbians and women of color feel hesitant to report abuse because it might cast further stigma on their communities (Crenshaw, 1991). Identifying key issues allows researchers to strategize about how to better meet diverse women's needs.

Knowledge Gaps

Researchers might also focus on gaps in knowledge that linger from researchers' disproportionate attention to privileged groups historically. Researchers have worked to sculpt more textured understandings of human lives and social processes on an array of topics: domestic work, sex education, welfare-to-work programs, teaching, letter writing, postpartum depression, midwifery, quilting, reading practices, sex work, cocktail waitressing, and homelessness, to name a few. Such knowledge is not relevant only to women; it benefits us all.

For example, Fonow (2003) examined women's roles in the steel industry and male-dominated labor movement using statistics, historical records, observations, and interviews with women in the United Steelworkers Union. Her study revealed that women's activism helps to forge a collective identity (“Women of Steel”), decrease marginalization in unions, and challenge global changes in manufacturing—powerful forces that affect all workers.

Critique and Revision

Researchers might also question common, taken-for-granted assumptions that shape perspectives and policy. For example, Pillow(2004) challenged the assumption that teen pregnancy is a “crisis” in the United States. She used statistics, media images, and fieldwork in schools to trace sources of negative attitudes toward pregnant and mothering teens, to highlight the racial undercurrents animating the issue, and to explore young women's experiences. In particular, her research revealed schools' failures to meet the mandates of federal policy (Title IX) that since 1972 has explicitly protected the rights of pregnant and mothering students to receive an education equal to that of their peers.

Similarly, researchers have critiqued the trivialization of women's roles and sought to take their labor, activities, and roles seriously. For example, Adams and Bettis (2003) used a feminist lens to analyze cheerleading—a highly feminized activity many dismiss as unimportant. Yet this activity garners significant revenue and endures in popularity; as a giddy twelve-year-old joining a squad phrased it, “I've been waiting for this all of my life” (p. 24). The researchers interviewed cheerleaders in a range of contexts, observed in schools, and analyzed popular films, newspaper reports, and policies. Their data revealed that an activity that the public (and many feminists) see as trivial is suffused with complex racial politics, economic issues, sexual dynamics, and gender messages. Moreover, some girls experienced cheerleading as empowering.

Revisiting common assumptions and topics from a feminist perspective offers new and potentially transformative insights. Audiences can use findings from such studies to reconsider the past, better understand complex social issues, heighten consciousness about discriminatory practices, and develop strategies to combat them.

Feminist Applications of Qualitative Approaches

Research purpose determines which approaches and methods are appropriate for a given topic, and varied research approaches lend themselves to feminist purposes. Researchers can conduct surveys to capture a broad portrait of social phenomena, study history (Chapter Six), conduct ethnography in which they study particular cultural groups in depth (Chapter Seven), or pursue many other forms of research from a feminist perspective.

Those interested in questions about power or activism in school curricula, in films, on the Internet, in video games, or in newspapers can use content analysis to trace patterns in ideas over time or contradictions in cultural meanings. Others interested in the implications of particular policies for marginalized groups can use feminist policy analysis (Campbell, 2000; Pillow, 2004) to examine how dominant ideas about gender, race, and sexuality shape the policymaking process or how policies might fuel inequities. Those seeking to explore women's lives that do not map onto traditional ideas of success can use oral history. Those interested in gender and cultural processes can use ethnography. Examples of conducting oral history and ethnography from a feminist perspective follow.

Feminist Oral History

Oral history is both a qualitative approach researchers can use to preserve firsthand accounts of people's lives and the final story that is preserved. There are many different ways to conduct oral history and different theories that govern these approaches. Whereas oral history was traditionally used to record the memories of elite leaders or citizens in unique positions in their communities, oral histories conducted from a feminist perspective have often sought to understand the everyday lives of women and other community members. Since the 1970s feminist researchers have used oral history to preserve women's accounts of their lives in their own words and, significantly, to link experiences that feel deeply personal with their broader social and historical context (see Research Snapshot 2). Oral history honors storytelling in everyday language, oral traditions as a method of preserving and transmitting cultural knowledge, and in-depth exploration of important events and individual experiences.

From this perspective, oral histories are potentially emancipatory. All members of societies do not have equal opportunities for expression, for literacy (to read and write), or for occupying social roles with sufficient status to enable voice. Literacy itself is historically, culturally, and geographically specific. Thus oral history can provide voice and visibility to varied groups and convey how marginalized people make meaning of their experiences within dominant discourses. In this view, stories are versions—rather than mirrors—of lives; broader context, norms, and audiences always mediate the stories people sculpt.

Methodology

A narrator's (that is, the person telling his or her own oral history) use of language and her rapport with the researcher are key methodological aspects of oral histories. The primary method researchers use to collect data are in-depth interviews. Researchers traditionally use audiotapes to record interviews, although some may also use video or photography. Rather than using a traditional, structured interview protocol, a researcher might collect an oral history with only a few themes and biographical notes. For example, Middleton (1993) interviewed New Zealand teachers using a three-part, open-ended question. She asked, “I would like you to tell me how and why you became an educator, how and why you came to identify yourself as a feminist, and how your feminism influences your work and activities in education” (p. 70). With prompts from the researcher, participants talked for as long as three hours in the first interview.

Although traditional approaches to oral history often position the researcher as a vehicle for capturing and conveying an individual's story, feminist approaches more often consider oral histories as coconstructed between narrator and researcher. A researcher's questions, prompts, and body language can subtly shape the narrator's account. To attempt to dominate an interview, to impose the researcher's agenda too heavily on a narrator, runs counter to feminist goals of collaborative inquiry. Oral historians must thus balance their research agendas with active listening (Anderson & Jack, 1991). Active listening involves being receptive to varied aspects of communication, including body language, speaking style, silences, and emotion. For example, a narrator's shedding tears when discussing childhood or changing the subject when discussing race may indicate painful or taboo topics. In turn, these communicative forms can shed light on cultural norms and dynamics that shape the narrator's experiences.

Analysis

Conducting oral history from a feminist perspective includes contemplating how such forces as gender, race, and sexuality both shape life experience and structure communication. For example, a woman's devaluing of her domestic labor may reflect her absorption of cultural dismissals of its value. Cultural norms and power dynamics can also shape how narrators tell their stories and what they share. Indigenous women who believe questioning their elders is disrespectful might hesitate to interrupt or clarify responses. Some men might downplay feelings of sadness because social norms link masculinity with rationality and control. Some female narrators might avoid taking charge of an interview, even when encouraged to do this, so as not to appear aggressive or self-aggrandizing.

The theory and purpose of the specific inquiry project shape how researchers analyze oral history data. Some may emphasize memories of key events. Some may link experiences to broader contextual forces, such as a natural disaster, social activism, or community identity. Others may pay particular attention to the intersections among gender, sexuality, race, class, and ethnicity shaping women's lives. Other oral historians may consider how a story is told and what it means to the narrator to be as important as the events detailed. What stories does the narrator share, and what meaning do they hold for her or him? What role does the narrator play in the story? (Is she or he a heroine, a victim, a figure hovering on the margins?) When is she or he silent? What might such silences reveal about the narrator's experiences as well as the social norms governing speech? These questions can help guide the researcher's analysis and interpretation.

Form

Oral historians must also consider the politics of representation in the final story they present. A traditional method of preserving oral histories is to preserve the audiotape, or a transcription of the history typed word for word. Others arrange the accounts in themes or time periods significant to the narrator, organization, or community. These choices require subtle interpretive decisions. Perhaps the narrator uses slang or a dialect that readers might judge harshly. How will the researcher represent the style and speech of the respondent authentically and respectfully? Perhaps the narrator shares private information. What should the researcher include in the final account? Perhaps the oral historian and narrator interpret the story differently (Borland, 1991). Who owns the story? There are no straightforward answers to these questions; considering them carefully is foundational to feminist research.

Feminist Ethnography

There is no definitive approach to feminist ethnography; it is a flexible methodology researchers use to study culture in detail and depth. The need for feminist ethnographic practices emerged from anthropologists' recognition in the 1970s that the primary focus of ethnography—culture—often dealt solely with male roles. As a result, women often seemed bereft of culture rather than active agents in its creation. Debates continue as to whether ethnography can shake the vestiges of its inequitable origins to embrace truly feminist and emancipatory practices (Abu-Lughod, 1993; Stacey, 1991; Visweswaran, 1994). Indeed, Stacey characterizes the relationship between feminism and ethnography as “unavoidably ambiguous” (p.117).

Ethnography (writing culture) is both a research approach used to explore the practices and worldviews in a given culture and a product of research (the presentation of findings from conducting ethnography). As discussed in Chapter Seven, ethnography relies as much as possible on researchers' direct observations of daily life and practices in the culture of interest. Researchers both participate in and observe the intricacies of cultural practice through long-term immersion in the field. In contemporary ethnography, various groups and settings can constitute cultures: a beauty salon, a mining community, a gang, or a homeschooling organization.

In contrast to traditional ethnography, feminist ethnography generally includes attention to the gendered aspects of culture, the cultural forces that limit women's opportunities, women's roles in their cultural context, and women's agency as cultural actors. For example, ethnographers have studied women's economic activities in Thailand (Wilson, 2004); the work of Latina maids in California (Hondagneu-Sotelo, 2001); African American and white women's experiences with the culture of romance in college (Holland & Eisenhart, 2001); sex education in a New York high school (Fine, 1988); and the moral issues pregnant women face during fetal testing for genetic anomalies and their decisions about whether to continue or terminate their pregnancies (Rapp, 2000).

Methodology

The experiential and dynamic aspects of ethnography lend themselves to feminist inquiry; they offer opportunities to consider the intricacies of daily lives in context, to explore the intersections between gender and culture, and to examine systems of power that constrain women's opportunities. For example, Riemer's research (2001) in workplaces employing former welfare recipients offers insights into the beliefs and organizational practices that shaped the women's ability to thrive in new employment.

Immersion in local culture allows researchers both to hear what people say and to observe what they do in their natural settings—multiple data sources that in concert offer richer, more potentially contradictory, and more substantive information than single data sources can provide. Clifford (1997) has termed this day-to-day immersion in the local as “deep hanging out” (p. 90). The ethnographer's gaze focuses on understanding the worldviews and practices of cultural insiders. Methods must be context-, topic-, and often gender-specific; for example, women may use letter and journal writing more frequently than men; some women may prefer interactive conversation to formal methods; and participants in some cultures, such as in Thailand, may view formal interviews as hierarchical. Thus researchers need to consider gender- and culture-appropriate methods to elicit data. In addition to jottings (brief notations of events or terms) and developed field notes (see Chapter Seven) about women's activities, researchers might view social networking Web pages, collect photographs, and examine cultural artifacts to understand cultural processes.

Access and Entry

Researchers must consider how their identities and assumptions can shape ethnographic practice, from developing study questions to accessing a research site, to navigating the field, to writing up accounts. Feminist ethnography, like critical ethnography (see Chapter Fifteen), is concerned with systems of power that shape culture and research. For example, accessing a site can require significant time and resources. As an American anthropologist writes of her fieldwork in Thailand, “There is the bare fact that the United States' great financial and political power underwrites U.S. citizens' ability to conduct research in less wealthy nations such as Thailand. Relatedly, my white identity situated me in a privileged position” (Wilson, 2004, p.27). Researching female refugees, prisoners, graffiti artists, white supremacists, or schoolgirls involves different systems of power, research sites, and preparation.

Conducting ethnography in some settings also requires a degree of freedom to leave family and other work behind for extended periods, a condition that is impossible to meet for some working-class researchers or parents of young children. It requires financial support, specialized training, and sometimes mastery of an additional language, an educational nexus available to few. It may require a researcher to consider safety issues, which face all ethnographers but which may have particular implications for women, sexual minorities (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender individuals), and people with mobility impairments. These factors shape who conducts research and in what ways.

Navigating the Setting

Like traditional ethnographers, feminist researchers must navigate insider/outsider status and power relations within the culture of interest. For some feminist topics, shared experience with key insiders may facilitate rapport and connection—indeed, researchers may be members of the community under study. For example, Rapp (2000) found that having experienced amniocentesis facilitated rapport with women she interviewed in the same situation. Participants considered her an insider. For Bhavnani and Davis (2000), who studied women prisoner's experiences, the researchers' status as nonprisoners and their racial and national identities (which made them outsiders) seemed to evoke less interest than their roles as prison activists and scholars. Navigating different subcultures within the same setting may require careful strategizing, particularly if groups do not get along. Researchers' interactions with one group may jeopardize their access to another group. Such tensions and hierarchies can shape researchers' access to information and the knowledge generated.

Mendoza-Denton (2008) describes her gradual immersion among Latina youth that facilitated her understanding of group culture. Like the participants who educated Lather and Smithies (1997) in the HIV/AIDS study, Latina youth taught Mendoza-Denton specific lessons, such as how to dress, apply makeup, and style hair in line with their cultural codes. As her study unfolded, she reflected,

Practices of participant observation can be age-, race-, and gender-specific as ethnographers adjust to different cultural norms. Navigating insider/outsider status and nuanced dynamics in a given setting can require strategizing and skill.

Narrative Practices

All ethnographers strive to produce lush descriptions in which details and interactions in the setting under study spring to life. Using empirical data—the sights, sounds, scents, and texture of a setting—the researcher works to capture an insider glimpse of culture. However, the narrative basis of ethnography lends itself to feminist researchers' use of innovative writing forms (drama, autobiographical reflections, multivocal texts) to challenge positivist conventions for research reporting (formal, crisp, authoritative).

Some ethnographers' narrative choices diverge strikingly from traditional ethnographic forms. First, some accounts provide a foreground to the researcher's, rather than the participant's, experience in the field. For example, St. Pierre (2000) has often chosen to narrate methodological reflections of her research among older women rather than represent the women and their words directly. Her choices are theoretically driven and, among other purposes, shift attention to the process rather than the product of inquiry. Some first-person accounts weave the researcher's experiences with accounts of the culture under study to demonstrate the coconstruction of knowledge.

Other texts blend fictional, poetic, and empirical elements. Hurston, a folklorist and novelist, produced a variety of novels that drew from her observations of Southern African American culture (for example, her 1935 collection of folklore, Mules and Men). She also incorporated autobiographical narrative into her ethnographic accounts. Richardson (1997) has explored her work through poems, and Visweswaran (1994) has used drama to question dominant conventions and explore ethnographic practice.

Although some dismiss such forms as unscientific, feminist researchers view these methods as important vehicles for exploring experiential knowledge and alternatives to dominant positivist conventions (Visweswaran, 1994). Such techniques are contested; some researchers are concerned that blending autobiographical, novelistic, and dramatic elements with fieldwork may undermine the professional and scientific boundaries of ethnography because these practices blur empirical science and fiction.