Feminist methodology challenges and choices - Ramazanoglu, Caroline (Sage, 2002)
Includes bibliographical references and index
Three challenges to feminist methodology -- What is gender? -- What is feminism in the twenty-first century? -- Are feminists women? -- What is methodology in social research? -- Is feminist methodology distinctively feminist? -- Reason, science and progress: feminism's Enlightenment inheritance -- Enlightenment thought -- Reason, science and progress: how Enlightenment thought has shaped feminist approaches to methodology -- Modem humanism -- The long shadow of the Enlightenment: challenges and contradictions at the roots of modem feminist methodology -- Can feminists tell the truth? Challenges of scientific method -- Feminist research as a quest for valid knowledge of social realities by a knowing subject -- Feminist objections to scientific method in social research -- Objectivity, subjectivity, relativism: competing paths to truth -- From truth/reality to knowledge/power: taking a feminist standpoint -- The knowing feminist at the limits of modern methodology --
- A methodological continuum: slipping and sliding on Haraway's greasy pole -- What is a feminist standpoint? -- Nancy Hartsock: achieving a feminist standpoint as a vantage point on male supremacy -- Dorothy Smith: taking women's standpoint; beginning in experience -- What problems remain? -- Escape from epistemology? The impact of postmodern thought on feminist methodology -- Postmodern thought -- Postmodern freedoms: sweeping away the foundations of feminist methodology -- Thus far but no further? Feminist resistance to postmodern thought -- searching 'others': feminist methodology and the politics of difference -- Confronting difference in feminist social research -- Being different: the constitution of 'otherness' -- Being different: experiencing and resisting 'otherness' -- Complications of difference -- The politics of representing 'others': the privileged researcher -- The power of interpretation: data analysis -- Reflexivity in the research process --
- Knowledge, experience and reality: justifying feminist connections -- The case against taking experience as a source of knowledge -- A case for taking experience as a source of knowledge -- The difficulties of connecting experience and material realities -- Should feminists specify criteria of validity? -- The idea of a feminist epistemic community -- Choices and decisions: doing a feminist research project -- What makes social research feminist? -- The research process -- Situating your research question -- Face to face with the research: data production -- Face to face with the researched: putting reflexivity into practice -- Face to face with the data: analysis and conclusions -- Face to face with a blank sheet: writing up
'Feminist Methodology' is an accessible demonstration of how feminist approaches to methodology engage with debate in Western philosophy to raise critical questions about knowledge production