The Foundations of Social

Research
Michael Crotty
Chapter 8
Feminism: Re-visioning the Manmade
World
The Foundations of Social Research
• All previous epistemological and
theoretical positions have been
characterized by pluralism, contradiction
and conflict
• Feminism is no different.
• In keeping with Crotty’s tendency to
connect each of the chapters, why do you
suppose he followed Freire up with
feminism?
The Foundations of Social Research
• Is it possible for a man to be a feminist?
• Why does Crotty argue that for women to
attain equality they must lead the
movement and constitute its core?
• What does Crotty mean when he says
“patriarchy and sexism are not fetters
worn by females only; they severely limit
human possibility for males as well.”
The Foundations of Social Research
• What is patriarchy?
– A system in which men dominate because
power and authority are in the hands of adult
men.
• What is Sexism?
– One of the systems/-isms that facilitate
privilege and inequality, subordination and
domination on the basis of gender (Notice I
didn’t say sex).
The Foundations of Social Research
• Varieties of Feminism: Crotty gives us
seven. I’ve heard of as many as eleven
• Liberal Feminism: privileges the
autonomy of a person and views the just
society as a system of individual rights
that safeguard personal autonomy and
allow self-fulfillment. Comes from
liberalism, classical or welfare and is very
mainstream feminism (equal pie analogy)
The Foundations of Social Research
• Marxist Feminism: revolutionary, not
merely reformist (as in liberal feminism).
Without radical change to the class
structure, the equal opportunity sought by
feminists is a chimaera. Capitalism is
patriarchal and sexist. Domestic (private
labor as unpaid, undervalued labor)
The Foundations of Social Research
• Radical Feminism: The oppression of women is
the oldest, most profound and widespread form
of oppression. Oppression of women tends to
cause more suffering than any other form.
Model of oppressing women is necessary to
understand all oppression. Oppression began
with women (new pie). Separatist feminism
(Daly, Sonia Johnson). Eradicate patriarchy.
Most don’t “hate” men, but hate patriarchy, and
some believe that men cannot escape patriarchy.
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• Psychoanalytic Feminism: Freud and the
women’s psyche. Oppression arises out of
sexuality. Break with biological determinism
(Freud)—Jacques Lacan, post-structuralism
• Socialist Feminism: confluence of Marxist,
psychoanalytic and radical streams. Each by
itself is limiting for different reasons (crotty
briefs) and these feminists try to weave together
their strengths.
The Foundations of Social Research
• Existentialist Feminism: Simone de Beauvoir,
The Second Sex, partners with Jean Paul Sartre,
another existentialist philosopher.
– Poir soi (conscious being) and en soi (being-as-object),
modes of being.
– Self and other distinctions: other=another personal
being. Even though the other person is a conscious
being, we dissociate ourselves from the other person
as a being as object. This is mutual dissociation
leading to perceptions of the “other” as a threat and
an object.
The Foundations of Social Research
• Beauvoir construes man as self and woman as
other. The other being a threat to self, woman
must be seen as a threat to man and he needs to
make her subordinate. Hence the oppression of
women.
• Postmodern Feminism: Helene Cixous, Luce
Iragaray, Julia Kristeva; deconstructionist (post-
structuralist)
• Lacan and the imaginary
• Irigaray and “sameness”
The Foundations of Social Research
• I’ll add womanism: bell hooks-critique of Betty
Friedan and liberal feminism, critique of Stokely
Carmichael and the subordination of women in
the civil rights movement, focus on race as a
unique experience and significant factor for
women of color, also the knowledge of the
double consciousness, Dubois, The Souls of
Black Folks.
• I’ll add ecofeminism: Maria Mies and Vandana
Shiva, the oppression of women is tied to the
destruction of the environment.
The Foundations of Social Research
• Categories as heuristic device…
• The masculine epistemology of typologies,
taxonomies, hierarchies for archiving and
evaluating knowledge
• For feminists, the binaries, particularly
male/female are very problematic and the
male/female binary is primary to the
epistemological and ontological experience of
humans and it has a patriarchal source.
• Is there a uniquely feminine (and by definition,
masculine) epistemology/ontology?
The Foundations of Social Research
• What radical feminism offers in terms of critical
theory that differs from that of traditionally
masculine critical theorists
• More optimistic and humane version of change
• And to bring revolutionary change into the
realm of the possible
• But is that truly unique? And, given Adorno’s
critique of the concept, is categorization and
binary thinking uniquely male?
The Foundations of Social Research
• Seigfried’s caveat: “(feminine traits)…can be understood
as the expression of feminine style without implying that
all women think this way or that no men do.”
• Crotty argues, “The real point is, not that feminists gain
insights never glimpsed by others, especially not by
males, but that, as feminist insights, they are grounded
in, and stem from, a specifically feminist standpoint.
(i.e., Adorno may rail against classification but does so
on different grounds) If you disagree with this, see
Sandra Harding (go to Caryn Riswold).
• What about an epistemic community, as Assiter posits,
p. 173?
The Foundations of Social Research
• Crotty posits that it is not that women
“know” in a fundamentally different way
than men, but that they theorize the act of
knowing in a way different from that of
men. What do you think?
• Are men and women essentially different,
inside and out and what would it mean
either way?
The Foundations of Social Research
• Gilligan: women speak in a different voice…
• Harding: the rational is gendered…
• Fonow and Cook: carefully designed research
grounded in feminist theory and ethics is more
useful to understanding women’s experiences
than allegiance to any one particular method per
say (i.e., quantitative as masculine, qualitative as
feminine).
– A major feature of feminist epistemology is attention
to the affective components of the research act.
The Foundations of Social Research
• Fonow and Cook look to Alison Jaggar
• Attention to the realm of emotion-continuous feedback
loop between our emotional constitution and our
theorizing such that each continually modifies the other
and is in principle inseparable from it…(feedback loop,
emotion as heuristic device, sounds also like
hermeneutics in a way)
• Jaggar’s outlaw emotions: conventionally unacceptable
emotional responses…
• Jaggar doesn’t presume that women are more in touch
with or more influenced by emotions than are men…but
rejects the idea of the dispassionate investigator…which
she deems racist, classist, and sexist.
The Foundations of Social Research
• Read quotation p. 176 top.
• Jaggar counters this with the idea that many
outlaw emotions are already or potentially
feminist emotions…Emotions become feminist
once they incorporate feminist perceptions and
values, similar to Assiter, a group’s
epistemological stance does not stem from the
identity of the group members, but from sharing
certain values (i.e., undermining oppressive
gender-based power relations) What does that
mean for men then? Can they be part of the
feminist epistemic community from that basis?
The Foundations of Social Research
• So we have covered feminist theory and epistemology, what of
methodology?
• Are their methodologies uniquely feminist?
• For many, it is a question of feminist perspectives entering into
existing methodologies which makes them unique.
• Feminine forms of research v. feminist forms of research…
• Is uniqueness simply a question of style or something inherently
unique?
• Is it useful to retain the adjective “feminist?”
• Essentialism and its impact on gender/sexuality v. social
constructionism and its impact on gender/sexuality…
• Research as Revision…