Feminist Studies

A Guide to Intersectional Theory, Methodology and Writing

Nina Lykke

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781136978982
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Feminism & Feminist Theory
• Index: Social Sciences

In this book, feminist scholar Nina Lykke highlights current issues in feminist theory, epistemology and methodology. Combining introductory overviews with cutting-edge reflections, Lykke focuses on analytical approaches to gendered power differentials intersecting with other processes of social in/exclusion based on race, class, and sexuality. Lykke confronts and contrasts classical stances in feminist epistemology with poststructuralist and postconstructionist feminisms, and also brings bodily materiality into dialogue with theories of the performativity of gender and sex. This thorough and needed analysis of the state of Feminist Studies will be a welcome addition to scholars and students in Gender and Women's Studies and Sociology.

Part I
What Is Feminist Studies?

1
A Guide’s Introduction

Feminist Studies is an advanced textbook balancing introductory overviews and cutting-edge reflections on current issues in feminist theory. I have written the book to address researchers, teachers, students and others who seek theoretical and methodological inspiration from feminist research, and who are interested in learning from feminist experiments with alternative ways of writing scholarly texts. I have composed the book so that it can be used both by newcomers to the field and by more advanced readers.

The book is written as a theoretical and methodological guide to the field. I introduce central issues in current international debates on feminist theory and discuss how epistemological, methodological and ethical issues are articulated and theorized within different branches of feminist thought. Moreover, the book emphasizes that writing processes and issues of method and methodologies are closely connected. From this point of departure, I take a look at the ways in which feminist researchers have challenged academic genres and writing styles and tried to change them.

As the book is conceived as a textbook, I pay a lot of attention to pedagogical explanations and overviews. But I also find it important to take an anti-canonical stance and to emphasize theoretical diversity and methodological pluralism. I consider theories and methodologies as moments in time and space, and not as universally given phenomena. Furthermore, I see it as an important feature of feminist research that it unlocks fixed and stereotyped ideas and concepts of gender, sex, science and knowledge production. An implication of this stance is that I find it necessary to problematize canon formation as potentially or actually elitist, fixing a status quo rather than opening up for change. Therefore, I wish to emphasize that in this book the reader will find a guide to a field of knowledge production characterized by diversity, fluctuation, fluidity and change. It is a field that looks quite different from the images of monologism, unilateralism and sanctioning of one ‘true’ line of political correctness that anti-feminist prejudice ascribes to feminist thought. Authoritarian monologism belongs to gender conservatism; the aim of Feminist Studies is to break up stereotypes and ideas about sameness.

I define my author’s position as that of a guide; that is, as a person who shows readers around in a diverse landscape of feminist theories, epistemologies, methodologies, ethical reflections and writing practices. As guide I will give explanations, tips and ideas as to how readers may further explore the landscape on their own, but I will not point out one interpretation or one particular way through the landscape as being ‘the right one.’ I like to perform as the kind of guide who has her own opinions, passions and interpretations of the enchantments and attractions of the landscape, and who, therefore, can give personal guidance to the curious traveler. But there are no final instructions in my guidance—no prescription of a universalized canon. I consider it the task of the traveler herself or himself to develop her or his own passions, interpretations and curiosity and to make her or his own choices of directions in which to move.

However, to guide my readers around in the diverse landscape of feminist research, I have made choices as to what to foreground. A guided tour that ‘objectively’ points out all the details of the landscape is, in my opinion, not possible. Central to my understanding of feminist theorizing is a belief in a politics of location and an epistemology of situated and partial knowledges. This implies that the landscape must always be understood as seen from a non-innocent somewhere, and that the author has an obligation to make herself accountable for her location in it. Therefore, in this introductory chapter, I shall outline the main frames of reference on which my guidance is based. I shall outline what I mean by ‘situated knowledges,’ and account for my location and for my overall selection of different sites and sights in the landscape. Finally, I shall make some notes on terminology.

SITUATED KNOWLEDGES

According to a broad tradition within the field of Feminist Studies, all production of knowledge is to be understood as located—or ‘situated’ as feminist scholar Donna Haraway articulated it in a widely read article (Haraway 1991c, 183–201). What does this mean? In order to unpack the concept, I shall briefly elaborate Haraway’s articulation of the epistemological tradition in Feminist Studies, which is often called the politics of location. I choose to use Haraway’s version of this principle as illustration here because it has had a major impact on feminist theorizing, and because I find it important; I shall also give a more elaborate presentation of it in Chapter 8.

Haraway’s articulation of the principle of situated knowledges is based on a critique of what she calls the ‘god-trick’ of positivist epistemology (Haraway 1991c, 191–196). With the term god-trick, she refers to the scientific belief in a faceless, bodiless and contextless knower, who can detach her/himself from the world and the objects of study, and then from an aloof and elevated position of surveillance can produce objective knowledge. According to Haraway, the god-trick is an illusion. In their critique of positivist science, she and other feminist researchers who argue for a politics of location are, to a large extent, in line with postmodern philosophers of science. Like these, feminist critics of positivism stress that the knower is always in medias res (i.e., in the middle of), participant in and in compliance with, the analyzed world. In what has become a famous phrase, Haraway underlines that we are always ‘in the belly of the monster’ (Haraway 1991c, 188). According to this kind of conceptualization of science and knowledge production, there is no ‘outside,’ no comfortably distant position, from which the world can be analyzed. On the contrary, the researcher is involved, in compliance with and co-responsible; and knowledge production will always imply a subjective dimension. As Haraway emphasizes, echoing one of the postmodern science philosophy classics (Lyotard 1984), science is ‘a story-telling practice’ (Haraway 1989, 4); the researcher cannot give an objective depiction of the world ‘out there,’ but produces a story, of which she or he is a part.

For some postmodern thinkers this philosophy of science led to relativism and an abandonment of all objectivity criteria. ‘The death of truth’ has been placed on the agenda, stressing that science is nothing but stories, and that no criteria can define why one story is better or worse than another. To many feminist theorists, who have often had strong political and moral convictions, the relativism of postmodern philosophy has been a stumbling block. Relativism is perceived as problematic, and some feminists have argued that it can turn into an easy way out of the demand that researchers always ought to reflect on ethical implications and take moral and political responsibility for their research results. However, Haraway’s principle of situated knowledges suggests an answer to the postmodern feminist dilemma of wanting to take a clear moral and political stance, but at the same time wishing to avoid universalizing master narratives with their illusory claim that it is possible to give a ‘neutral’ and ‘objective’ depiction of the world.

In order to overcome the dilemma, Haraway builds on the postmodern claim that we, as researchers, can never go beyond the world and the reality that we analyze or the research technologies that we have at our disposal. To this tenet, which is crucial to her world view, she adds the insight of situated knowledges and argues that the researcher, through a conscious reflection of her or his situatedness and her or his research technologies, can obtain a partially objective knowledge, that is, a knowledge of the specific part of reality that she or he can ‘see’ from the position in which she or he is materially discursively located in time, space, body and historical power relations.

Haraway talks about a reclaiming of vision. But in contradistinction to the faceless, bodiless and contextless god’s-eye view of positivism, she interprets vision as a bodily material phenomenon:

I would like to insist on the embodied nature of all vision, and so reclaim the sensory system that has been used to signify a leap out of the marked body and into a conquering gaze from nowhere…l . I want a feminist writing of the body that metaphorically emphasizes vision again, because we need to reclaim that sense to find our way through all the visualizing tricks and powers of modern sciences and technologies that have transformed the objectivity debates. (Haraway 1991c, 188–190)

When Haraway makes a point out of reclaiming vision for feminism, she refers polemically to the kinds of postmodernists, including some postmodern feminists, who reject vision totally due to its link to the positivist ‘god-trick.’ Haraway does not want to end the critique of positivism in a position where she has to completely reject vision as a path to knowledge. Her goal is to redefine vision as something that is inextricably embedded in its bodily context. Playing with the words ‘site’ and ‘sight’ (Haraway 1991c, 201), she emphasizes that we must reflect on our ‘siting’ (localization) and our ‘sighting’ (the ways in which our vision and optical systems are crafted in technological, ideological and bodily biological senses). If we as researchers follow this program, that is, reflect our siting and sighting thoroughly, we can, according to Haraway, talk with an authoritative voice about the partial reality that we can see—and we can make ourselves ethico-politically responsible, democratic players in it. In this way, she says, we can avoid both the god-trick and the position of postmodern relativism with its claim that all interpretations of reality are equally good or bad.

The principle of situated knowledges has many repercussions for research, as well as for the authoring of textbooks. As a textbook author it is difficult not to slip into a subject position either as one who plays the god-trick or as relativist. When I position myself as a personally committed guide, it is precisely in order to avoid these two pitfalls. Defining myself as a guide, I want to create an alternative author’s position that can direct me out of the dilemma depicted in Haraway’s reflections on situated knowledges. The guide is not a relativist; on the contrary, she has committed herself to sharing with the traveler her knowledge about the landscape—to show, to give tips, to explain, to point out. But, in contradistinction to the god’s-eye view of the positivist knower, the guide is not an irrefutable authority. In the relationship between the guide and the traveler, ultimately the important factor is always the curiosity of the traveler. At the end of the day, it is the interests, passions and thirst for knowledge of the traveler that determines to what aspects of the guide’s stories about the landscape and its sights she or he will pay attention.

I shall now follow up my introductory situating of myself as a personally committed guide and make myself accountable overall for my positioning in the landscape of Feminist Studies and for my choices of sites and sights.

A POSITIONING

I have chosen to present my position through a fictitious interview with myself. In summarized form, I shall reiterate some questions about my academic identity that are often posed to me, as well as the answers I usually give:

Q: What is your academic background?

A: Feminist Studies/Gender Studies.

Q: But what is your discipline?

A: I am professor of interdisciplinary Gender Studies.

Q: But you must have a discipline. Feminist Studies/Gender Studies is not a discipline—or, at least, it was not established as such when you were educated in the 1970s.

A: I do not belong to or identify with any discipline in the sense you are asking about. In order to explain myself here, I will have to briefly refer to my intellectual and academic autobiography. My certificates state that I have a masters of arts (MA) degree in Literary Studies and doctorate of philosophy (PhD) in the Humanities. However, I have identified neither as a literary scholar nor exclusively as a humanities scholar. As a student in the 1970s I was engaged in the feminist movement, and this meant that feminist theorizing and interdisciplinary approaches to understanding gender/sex became more important to me than Literary Studies. I studied in an academic environment—the Institute of Literary Studies at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark—where the students’ and women’s movements at that time were strong. This made it possible for me to form a tailor-made curriculum that focused on the study of gender/sex and feminist theorizing. After my graduation I had the opportunity to establish an academic career that has been totally dedicated to interdisciplinary Feminist Studies. All of my academic positions, from when I started as a PhD student in 1981 until today where I am a professor, have been defined within the field of interdisciplinary Feminist Studies. For twenty-three years I was employed at an interdisciplinary Centre for Women’s and Gender Studies in Denmark—from 1986 as associate professor; my associate professorship was established as part of the Action Plan for Women’s Studies, which the Danish Parliament approved in that year. In 1999 I was appointed professor at a program for Interdisciplinary Gender Studies at Linköping University in Sweden; the program was started as part of a big political initiative, carried by women politicians in the Swedish Parliament, aiming at the promotion of gender research and gender equality in Swedish Academia. I am also head of both a Nordic and a Swedish International Research School in Interdisciplinary Gender Studies as well as of an international Centre of Gender Excellence (a Feminist Studies research centre, where excellent international scholars within the field meet via research fellowships). Throughout my whole academic career, I have had the opportunity to make gender/sex and interdisciplinarily based feminist theorizing the primary focus of my research and teaching. I am happy about the text- and discourse-analytic skills I learned when I studied Literary Studies at the University of Copenhagen in the 1970s. But if you insist that I define myself in disciplinary terms, I shall, against the background of both my work as a student and my later academic career, label myself a Feminist Studies scholar and not as a scholar of Literary Studies.

Q: OK. But does that mean that you consider Feminist Studies to be a new discipline?

A: Both yes and no. First of all, I would like to underline that I consider the kind of feminist research that takes place within the framework of existing disciplines to be important, even though I do not carry out such research myself. I agree with the large majority of feminist researchers who think it is important that Feminist Studies is ‘walking on two legs’ (i.e., that it is both integrated into the traditional disciplines and established as an interdisciplinary field of its own). Second, I want to emphasize that Feminist Studies, seen from my point of view, should be understood not as a new discipline in a simple sense, but as something that I will define as a postdisciplinary discipline. This definition implies that I see Feminist Studies as a field of knowledge production that has its own profile, which enables it to pass as a discipline and claim the academic authority of one, but which also keeps up a transversal openness and a dialogical approach to all academic disciplines (human, social, medical, technical and natural science disciplines). This has repercussions for my way of guiding and framing this book.

CHOICE OF SITES AND SIGHTS

So if you choose to follow my guiding, what are the sites and sights you will meet in the four parts of which the book is composed?

Against the background of my academic location and intellectual autobiography, I have framed the book as a cartography of the area of Feminist Studies interpreted as a postdisciplinary discipline (or shorthand: postdiscipline). Hence, it is the aim of Part I, ‘What Is Feminist Studies?’ (Chapters 1–3), to make clear what I mean when I use this oxymoron. I analyze Feminist Studies as an academic field that does not fit well into the monodisciplinary modern university, but which instead articulates a cross-cutting type of knowledge production that points the way toward innovative— postdisciplinary—modes of organizing universities. These argu...