[Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 2005, vol. 30, no. 4]
2005 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0097-9740/2005/3004-0002$10.00
M a r y M a r g a r e t F o n o w
J u d i t h A . C o o k
Feminist Methodology: New Applications in the Academy
and Public Policy
In 1991, we coedited Beyond Methodology: Feminist Scholarship as Lived
Research (Fonow and Cook 1991b), an anthology that addressed the
challenges and dilemmas of feminist research practices. Our interest in
feminist methodology began when we were sociology graduate students
at Ohio State University in the 1970s, where, under the direction of our
dissertation advisor, Laurel Richardson, we struggled to understand what
feminist research should look like (Richardson, Fonow, and Cook 1985).
In our graduate seminars, we critiqued the prevailing methodological wis-
dom, debated the usefulness of "using the master's tools to dismantle the
master's house," questioned the assumptions of science, and analyzed the
politics of knowledge creation--in essence, challenging the very episte-
mological foundations of what constituted knowledge. Our goal was to
reveal what had previously been hidden about women's lives, experiences,
and contributions and, in the process, to produce the kind of knowledge
that would liberate them. In retrospect, it all sounds more than a little
grandiose. Decades of doing research have tempered our claims and those
of most other feminists we know, but we were, at the time, and we remain,
part of a broad movement for social change, trying to imagine a better
world.
Once we became professionals, we began to ask more pragmatic ques-
tions. Could we teach others to do this kind of research? How would policy
makers receive our scholarship? Would the subjects of our efforts need or
even want this information, let alone be empowered by it? Would they want
to play an active role in the production of feminist knowledge? Was the
The authors wish to thank the participants in the National Endowment for the Humanities
2003 Summer Seminar on Feminist Epistemologies, held at Pennsylvania State University
under the direction of Nancy Tuana and Shannon Sullivan, for their encouragement and
suggestions for revisions. Grateful appreciation is also extended to Cory Dillon for her
editorial assistance.
2212  Fonow and Cook
new scholarship on women substantial enough and of sufficient rigor to
support a curriculum for women's studies? Could we have an impact on
public opinion and on social movements for equality and justice? Would
our professional obligations compromise our political commitments?
In Beyond Methodology, we attempted to explicate the "logic-in-use" of
feminist research practices. In our collection of articles, feminists addressed
the issue of research as it was lived at a particular moment in time. These
essays discussed epistemological arguments about how to comprehend the
social as well as specific research techniques and practices to capture the
intersectionality of gender with other categories of difference such as race,
sexuality, and class. Also included were discussions of data collection and
analysis, ethics, reflexivity, policy implications, social action, collaboration,
and dissemination of research findings. Our original goal in compiling
these articles was to capture the dilemmas feminists faced at each step of
the research process, from the formulation of research questions to the
dissemination and utilization of research results.
Before our collection was published, feminists writing on methodology
focused mostly on epistemological issues and their relationship to the
conduct of inquiry.1
Epistemology was seen as the general framework or
theory for specifying the generation of knowledge: how does the knower
come to understand and interpret the nature of reality? Its domain con-
cerned macro-level philosophical questions: What is knowledge? Who can
know and by what means? How do we recognize, validate, and evaluate
knowledge claims? Feminist scholars, particularly feminist philosophers,
analyzed ongoing debates, refashioned old concepts, and generated new
ideas regarding a range of epistemological issues, including agency, cog-
nitive authority, objectivity, methods of validation, fairness, standpoint,
and context of discovery. Some of these discussions were stimulated by
the growth of poststructuralism in the academy, but others resulted from
critiques of knowledge, including feminist knowledge, by scholars working
in postcolonial, race, and ethnic studies.2
Women of color raised important questions concerning epistemologies
of the oppressed. Did oppressed people, by virtue of their knowledge of
both the oppressor's views of reality and that of their own subjugated
1
See Millman and Kanter 1975; Bowles and Klein 1983; Harding and Hintikka 1983;
Bell and Roberts 1984; Harding 1987; Smith 1988; Bordo and Jaggar 1989. The early
1990s were fertile years for publishing on the topic of feminist epistemology and method-
ology. See Longino 1990; Nelson 1990; Code 1991; Harding 1991; Reinharz 1992; Alcoff
and Potter 1993; Antony and Witt 1993; Stanley and Wise 1993.
2
Moraga and Anzaldúa 1981; hooks 1984; Mohanty 1987; Ong 1987; Spivak 1987;
Trinh 1989; Anzaldúa 1990; Collins 1990.
S I G N S Summer 2005  2213
groups, have access to truer or better knowledge? Who is privileged in an
epistemological sense--feminists, women of color, lesbians, working-class
women, postcolonials? Who can speak for whom? These discussions were
and continue to be pivotal in helping feminists to clarify the links among
theory, method, and action that we believe spurred the growth, devel-
opment, and acceptance of feminist scholarship in a variety of contexts.
Our original analysis of feminist approaches to social science research
in women's studies revealed some commonalities, which we articulated
as guiding principles of feminist methodology: first, the necessity of con-
tinuously and reflexively attending to the significance of gender and gender
asymmetry as a basic feature of all social life, including the conduct of
research; second, the centrality of consciousness-raising or debunking as
a specific methodological tool and as a general orientation or way of seeing;
third, challenging the norm of objectivity that assumes that the subject
and object of research can be separated from each other and that personal
and/or grounded experiences are unscientific; fourth, concern for the
ethical implications of feminist research and recognition of the exploitation
of women as objects of knowledge; and finally, emphasis on the empow-
erment of women and transformation of patriarchal social institutions
through research and research results.
Today the spectrum of epistemological and methodological positions
among feminists is much broader--a healthy sign of the vitality of feminist
studies. There has never been one correct feminist epistemology generating
one correct feminist methodology for the interdisciplinary field of women's
studies. Feminist scholars work within, against, and across epistemologies,
often combining elements from different perspectives. Innovative methods
are derived from successful efforts to reconcile differences and even from
those efforts that conclude that certain epistemological differences are
irreconcilable.
Our notion of methodology was, and continues to be, influenced by
the philosopher of science Abraham Kaplan, who wrote, "The aim of
methodology is to describe and analyze research methods, throwing light
on their limitations and resources, clarifying their presuppositions and
consequences, relating their potentialities to the twilight zone at the fron-
tiers of knowledge" (1964, 23). In our formulation, feminist methodology
involves the description, explanation, and justification of techniques used
in feminist research and is an abstract classification that refers to a variety
of methodological stances, conceptual approaches, and research strategies.
There is an overarching concept of feminist methodology in its episte-
mological assumptions, but on the way from ideas to practice, this concept
is differentially articulated in different disciplines. Some features of fem-
2214  Fonow and Cook
Table 1 Selected Methods Employed by Feminist Scholars
Method Method
Action/participatory
Autoethnography
Biography
Case study
Close reading
Comparative case study
Content analysis
Conversational analysis
Cross-culture analysis
Deconstruction
Deviant historiography
Discourse analysis
Ethnography
Ethnomethodology
Evaluation
Experiential
Experimental
Feminist jurisprudence
Focus group
Genealogy
Geographic information systems
Historiography
Institutional ethnography
Intertextuality
Meta-analysis
Multisite
Narratology
Needs assessments
Oral history
Participant observation
Personal narrative
Simulation
Survey
Thick description
Trope analysis
Unobtrusive observation
Visual analysis
inist methodology are specific to the discipline in which it is practiced,
while other features are more general and apply across fields.
Theories about how to know social life relate to how we go about
studying that life, and the techniques we use to elicit knowledge influence
our own theories of how to know and understand social phenomena. The
interplay between theory as defining one's research and theory being
defined by one's research suggests that researchers must become more
aware of the rationale for the selection of methods and of those methods'
strengths and weaknesses in studying specific settings and topics. Thus,
there is no one correct method for feminist research. In table 1, we list
the variety of methods and research designs employed by feminist scholars.
Just as our theorizing about gender, nation, race, sexuality, class, and
physical ability has grown more complex, so too must our discussions of
methods. We are excited by the creativity and diversity of these methods.
Their use illustrates a diverse scholarship capable of fueling curricular
reform in the academy's course offerings on research methodology.3
Fem-
3
Debates, critiques, and reflections on the meaning and scope of feminist methodology
have greatly expanded since the publication of our collection. See, e.g., Visweswaran 1994;
Gottfried 1996; Wolf 1996; Laslett and Thorne 1997; Bloom 1998; Ribbens and Edwards
1998; DeVault 1999; Hawkesworth 1999; Hunter 1999; Parker, Deyhle, and Villenas 1999;
S I G N S Summer 2005  2215
inists have nothing to fear from healthy internal debates about methods
and their epistemological antecedents or from vigorous engagement with
other critical fields of study.
In the following sections, we revisit some of our earlier ideas about
feminist methodology and identify newer trends and debates. Instead of
an exhaustive review of the literature, we provide a selection of examples
that serve to illustrate points about the dilemmas that we encounter not
only in the literature but also in our work as researchers and teachers.
The epistemic and ontological turn to the body
When we published Beyond Methodology, the critique of the disembodied
abstract knower was well under way. It was exciting for us, as young
scholars, to discover that there was philosophical grounding in feminism
from which we could explore methodology, and we chose two episte-
mological essays to frame our collection--Kathryn Pyne Addelson's "The
Man of Professional Wisdom" (1991) and Patricia Hill Collins's "Learning
from the Outsider Within" (1991). At last the knowing subject had a
body, one embedded in a complex matrix of power relations (even if mostly
obscured) constituted by social categories of difference. Addelson ad-
dressed the taken-for-granted ways that those from the dominant group
claimed cognitive authority, while Collins made a compelling case for the
unique standpoint of black women scholars as "outsiders within" the
academy. Today it is hard to imagine a time when we did not know that
bodies and their location mattered or that rationalities were gendered.
Ontological and epistemological discussions about research have ex-
panded and continue to be fruitful and important to the way feminists
theorize about the production of knowledge. From the beginning, fem-
inists challenged the artificial separation of reason (mind) and emotion
(body), and they have come to view emotion as both a legitimate source
of knowledge and a product of culture that is as open to analysis as any
other culturally inscribed phenomenon. The significance and legitimacy
of emotions as a topic of inquiry, as a source of theoretical insight, and
as a signal of rupture in social relations is now well established in feminist
circles.4
We did not anticipate the enormous growth in feminist scholarship
about the body, and there are no entries in our book's index for "body,"
Oakley 2000; Mayberry, Subramaniam, and Weasel 2001; Jacobs 2002; Ramazanog˘lu with
Holland 2002; Letherby 2003; Mohanty 2003; Naples 2003; Hesse-Biber and Yaiser 2004.
4
Behar 1996; Alcoff 2000; Franzway 2001; Shields 2002.
2216  Fonow and Cook
"embodiment," or "ontology." Our generation was busy refuting bio-
logical determinism by showing that gender was a social construct, sep-
arate from the biological construct of sex. It did not occur to us to view
the physical itself as a social construct. Since then, there has been an
explosion of feminist scholarship on the body, due in part to philosophical
and theoretical advances in feminist scholarship that challenged the du-
alism of nature versus culture. Feminist scholars view the body in at least
four ways: two of these--the embodied knower and the body as object
of inquiry--were familiar to us, but two others--the body as a category
of analysis and the body in relationship to the material--are relatively new.
Attention to the body as object of inquiry flowed from the fact that
so many of the early struggles of the contemporary women's movement
centered on women's right to bodily integrity. By focusing research on
topics such as reproductive rights, violence and rape prevention, moth-
ering and pregnancy discrimination, sexual harassment in the workplace,
body image, and sexist representations of women's bodies in advertising
and popular culture, feminists were able to show how control over
women's bodies was the linchpin of women's oppression and of their
potential liberation.
Women's bodies continue to incite political debate, but our under-
standing of the battlefield is much more nuanced and complex because
of the shift from studying the body as an object of inquiry to using the
body as social category of analysis. Contemporary feminist theory has
added new ways to think about the body, and feminists now speak of
writing the body, reading the body, sexing the body, racing the body,
enabling the body, policing the body, disciplining the body, erasing the
body, and politicizing the body (Weitz 1998; Lee 2003).
More recently, the body has come to be seen as the site of culturally
inscribed and disputed meanings, experiences, and feelings that can,
like emotion, be mined as sources of insight and subjects of analysis.
For example, theorizing the body has led to important breakthroughs
in our understanding of disability. Through her close reading of med-
ical discourse, sculpture, and commercial advertising, Rosemarie Gar-
land-Thomson (2002) uncovers the politics and norms of appearance.
She argues that feminists must incorporate disability as a category of
analysis and as a system of representation in order to understand the
challenges of studying the body. The potential of feminist disability
S I G N S Summer 2005  2217
theory as radical critique hinges on a broad understanding of disability
as a cultural system that stigmatizes certain kinds of bodily variations.5
Jennifer Terry (1999) uses deviant historiography to trace the contra-
dictory discourses, both popular and scientific, that constitute the ho-
mosexual body throughout the twentieth century. She relies on a discourse
analysis of medical texts, scientific reports, psychiatric case studies, statis-
tical accounts, legal cases, legislative debates, and published first-person
accounts of homosexuality to show the material effects of these discourses
on the constitution of homosexual identities or sex-variant subjectivity.
She views expert commentary as the site of the production and circulation
of a particular kind of knowledge that passes as both scientific "truth"
and as common sense about homosexuals. Because Terry relies on texts
from different genres, she uses multiple analytic strategies to understand
the formation of sex-variant subjectivity. Her methods allow her to see
how individuals accept, transform, and/or resist experts' accounts of who
they are.
Ontological insights about the body are also important in understand-
ing new developments in methodology. Donna Haraway's (1985) im-
portant work on the nexus of body and machine has inspired philosophers
of science such as Nancy Tuana (2001) to look at embodiment and ep-
istemic agency in terms of how bodies interact with the natural, the ma-
terial, and the more-than-human environment. Both interactions and in-
tra-actions are central not only to what and how we know but also to
what there is to know (Tuana 2001; Barad 2003; Code 2003). In Thinking
from Things, philosopher of archaeology Alison Wylie (2002) makes a case
for what we can learn about culture from the seemingly inarticulate ma-
terials of the archaeological past. As a philosopher, she offers us new ways
to think about the methods of philosophy and archaeology in the post-
positivist period by proposing ways to be "empirical" but not "narrowly
empiricist." The fragmentary materials of the archaeological record are
an asset because they force researchers to look beyond data to background
knowledge and auxiliary assumptions in order to establish evidence that
is believable. The data or material become laden with theory that enriches
the analysis.
Detailed methodological discussions of the ontological and episte-
mological shift from the body as object to the body in relation to the
material realm are just beginning to emerge. In The Body Multiple,
Annemarie Mol (2002) proposes an intriguing way to examine the
5
For an example of feminist research and scholarship on disability, see the specialdisability
issue of NWSA Journal 14, no.3, published in Fall 2002.
2218  Fonow and Cook
methodological implications of ontology through what she calls phil-
osophical ethnography. She draws on feminist theory, medical anthro-
pology, sociology, philosophy, and science and technology studies to
reframe such issues as the disease-illness distinction, subject-object re-
lations, boundaries, difference, situatedness, and ontology. She uses
the standard ethnographic methods of observation, analysis of records,
and interviews to uncover the multiple ways the disease of atheroscle-
rosis is "enacted" by the materials (such as medical tests, machines,
surgical practices, and medicines) used to diagnose and treat it and by
the practices of doctors, patients, pathologists, and lab technicians.
Our understanding of atherosclerosis coheres across a range of prac-
tices, from doctor-patient conversation and the way records are made
and stored to the slides made by the pathologist, including the tools
and the dyes used in the process. Mol labels her methodological ap-
proach praxiography, or ontology-in-practice. She contends that our
methods for understanding the objects and subjects we study mediate
between an object and its representation.
Reflexivity
In Beyond Methodology, we defined reflexivity as the tendency of feminists
to reflect on, examine critically, and explore analytically the nature of the
research process. Nearly all of the pieces in our collection explicitly re-
flected on some aspect of the research process. At that time, there was a
desire on the part of feminist researchers to focus on women's "lived
experience" as a way to recover what had been omitted or distorted in
academic knowledge about women and gender and to give women a voice
in the construction of new knowledge. This led to a number of meth-
odological innovations, but it also led to criticisms about how those voices
were to be represented, who had the authority to do so, and what form
these representations should take (Spivak 1990; Roof and Wiegman 1995;
Olesen 2000) and to critiques of the way experience itself had become
foundational in feminist research (Gorelick 1996; Scott 1996).
Phenomenological and hermeneutical epistemologies had encouraged us
to think about the types of methods that would be required to capture the
ways subjects themselves made sense of their own experiences. This in turn
led to an interest in consciousness-raising as a process worth studying and
as a methodological tool for gaining access to the hidden, taken-for-granted,
commonsense understanding of everyday lives. To reveal how conscious-
ness-raising worked, feminists employed such techniques as group inter-
views, long interviews repeated with the same subject over time, and asking
S I G N S Summer 2005  2219
respondents for feedback about the research. Today, in addition to the
researchers' reflections on methods and the subjects' reflections on the
meaning of experiences under investigation, reflexivity has also come to
mean the way researchers consciously write themselves into the text, the
audiences' reactions to and reflections on the meaning of the research, the
social location of the researcher, and the analysis of disciplines as sites of
knowledge production.
Understanding of the role of the feminist researcher as an active agent
in constructing knowledge has generated a large body of reflexive writing
and reminiscences about the motivation, interpretation, and process of
doing research and producing scholarship. Experienced scholars in soci-
ology--Laurel Richardson (1997), Dorothy Smith (1998), Marjorie L.
DeVault (1999), and Nancy A. Naples (2003)--have published collective
works that look back at their research over time and attempt to place their
careers and work within broader philosophical and theoretical advance-
ments in women's studies. In Fields of Play (1997), Richardson creates a
"pleated text" of essays and papers written over a ten-year period, accom-
panied by "writing stories" about their production. She uses time as a
framework to explore the contexts and pretexts of her texts and contex-
tualizes her knowledge claims and her changing sense of self within her
discipline, her academic department, her political commitments, and her
personal history and longings.6
In Feminism and Method (2003), Naples
presents us with reflections on her substantial body of work, paying close
attention to the theoretical and epistemological underpinnings of the
methods she has found helpful as a feminist researcher--including eth-
nography, discourse analysis, and activist research.
Feminists involved in critical race studies have become increasingly
reflexive about the ways that race constitutes research. In Racing Research/
Researching Race, France Winddance Twine and Jonathan W. Warren
(2000) offer us a collection of methodological writings in the field of
critical race studies that both incorporates and expands the work of fem-
inists. These authors focus our attention on race less as a topic and more
as a methodological dilemma. Their selections illustrate how the meth-
odological dilemmas arising from racial subjectivities, racial ideologies,
6
Richardson has written extensively about writing as a methodology. Her essay "Writing:
A Method of Inquiry" (2000) is one of the most cited essays on this topic in the field of
qualitative research. Her latest book, Travels with Ernest: Crossing the Literary/Sociological
Divide (Richardson and Lockridge 2004), a collaboration with her novelist husband Ernest
Lockridge, is an experimental text that explores the relationship between literary and eth-
nographic writing. For an overview of the methodological implications of writing, see Behar
and Gordon 1995; Ellis and Bochner 2000.
2220  Fonow and Cook
and racial disparities have analytical, ethical, emotional, and methodolog-
ical import. The collection addresses these dilemmas not only in terms of
how race is studied but also regarding who is allowed to "have race"; it
foregrounds for critical analysis what it means to be conscious of race
when one is doing research. Twine argues that, because racial standpoints,
racial fields, and racial discourses are not unitary or fixed, the instability
and unevenness of racism can have methodological consequences for qual-
itative researchers, even when their research is not about race or racism.
Contributors reflect on these racialized fields with brutal honesty about
their experiences. How does one handle blatantly racist remarks in the
research process? What if they are made by members of one oppressed
group about another? What happens to researchers when they treat
whiteness as a race? What is the difference between studying whites and
studying whiteness? How does "color blindness" about race function in
the field? How do you design a study of covert and dangerous white
extremist groups?
Other feminist scholars, drawing on earlier notions of the researcher as
an object of inquiry, have conducted innovative participatory research pro-
jects in which subjects are active in the construction of knowledge about
their lives and researchers attempt to be more transparent about their roles.
In Troubling the Angels, a book about how women with HIV make sense
of their lives, Patti Lather and Chris Smithies (1997) provide a novel ap-
proach to the representation of research that reveals the triangulated, col-
laborative, and reflexive impulse of feminist research. In one section of the
book, interview transcript material is presented on the top half of the page
while the bottom of the page contains sections from one of the authors'
research journals, capturing the reflexive process that is often ignored. This
experimental text also captures women's multiple realities of living with
HIV/AIDS. For example, one woman's poetry is presented beside national
statistics from the Centers for Disease Control, along with drawings that
illustrate overarching themes. These different methods sometimes yield re-
sults that are contradictory or lead to only partial understanding, yet the
authors do not view this as negative. Instead, competing knowledge serves
as an opportunity to uncover new knowledge.
On the other hand, Brenda Jo Brueggemann (1996) reflects on research
she conducted about how deaf college students acquire English literacy
skills, reminding us that there are limits to reflexivity and to subjects'
willingness to be enlisted as research collaborators: "I don't think it is
entirely ethical that we unequivocally assume that they want to be involved,
to collaborate, to respond, to co-construct representations with us"
(Brueggemann 1996, 33). She is critical of viewing reflexivity as the an-
S I G N S Summer 2005  2221
tidote to the crisis in representation and legitimization. She suggests that
"self-reflexivity, turning as it does on issues of representation, risks turning
reflexivity into a solipsistic, rhetorical position in which the researcher (the
self)--ah, once again--usurps the position of the subject (other)" (19).
Crisis in representation
The "crisis in representation" has deepened considerably since the pub-
lication of our anthology, and this has influenced the development of
feminist methodology. Earlier social science had been "naturalist" in its
assumptions and claims (i.e., that, with the right method it was possible
to accurately represent reality) and generally did not take as its task re-
flection on its own representations, whether in the form of written, verbal,
or visual (e.g., film/video, charts/graphs, photography) accounts of social
life. When we assembled our collection, feminists were beginning to chal-
lenge the idea that data exist in a one-to-one relationship with the social
reality that is being studied. Since then, poststructuralist feminists have
made us more aware that the product of any research process is a con-
struction of, not a reflection of, what the reality is about. Feminist re-
searchers have written extensively on this topic, and we refer readers to
the Handbook of Qualitative Research (Denzin and Lincoln 2000) for
review essays concerning many of the debates associated with the crisis in
representation and the value of reflexivity.7
Postmodern researchers have
challenged modernist claims to the intelligibility of the social world by
using methodological devices that consciously enhance and emphasize
textuality. Their challenge constitutes a rereading of the relationship be-
tween the social, the reader, and the writer.
Recent scholarship in women's studies employs intertextuality as a
method of deconstructing representations. Intertextuality, the study of how
the symbolic codes in one text are related to those in another, allows the
researcher to compare and contrast similar themes within or among different
genres or media. In a study of race and maternity in U.S. visual culture,
Ruby Tapia (2002) affirms the co-constitutive relationships among appar-
ently separate sites of visual culture to examine the symbolic images that
go into producing the maternal body as a racialized intertext. She examines
maternal visual objects and texts in different media genres ranging from
film, documentary television, and popular journalism to photographic art
7
This crisis is more than a crisis about truth and accuracy. For many feminists, the crisis
is also about politics and the stakes we all have in wanting our knowledge claims to be
relevant for the liberation of women and all oppressed people.
2222  Fonow and Cook
installations and public health posters in order to illustrate the specific role
of the visual in the racialized construction of the maternal body.
Feminist concerns about the ethical and political implications of rep-
resenting the "other" are an important part of the crisis in representation.
A new generation of social scientists has taken this critique as a starting
point but still works empirically with observation and data. In The Intimate
Economies of Bangkok (2004), anthropologist Ara Wilson argues that fem-
inist researchers must be aware that they are often entering fields of study
that are hyperrepresented--as is the case with sex industry workers in
Thailand. She contends that the research design should take into account
the discursive field it enters; otherwise feminists risk reinscribing dominant
power relations. In some cases, the researcher may conclude that the best
way to study prostitution may include the decision not to study prosti-
tution or to study it differently. In her case, Wilson resolves the issue by
using a multisite ethnographic approach in which she regards the sex
industry as but one of a number of local labor markets in Thailand in
which gender and the forces of globalization collide. Juxtaposing the sex
industry with retail, direct sales (Avon and Amway), and telecommuni-
cations opens the discursive field and avoids reducing Thailand to the land
of exotic sex tours with women cast either as victims or as liberated icons.
Wilson's knowledge of the language, her description of multiple sites, her
reflexivity about her own social position, and her participation in a local
sex-worker-rights nongovernmental organization help her to navigate the
power imbalances within the field she studies.
Leela Fernandes (1999) examines how representations develop in one
national context and circulate in another--particularly when power dis-
crepancies exist in the production, consumption, and context of such
representations. Rather than searching for the perfect method that will
"get the real right," or abandoning the possibility of ever representing
the subaltern at all, she proposes that the solution lies in analyzing the
textual strategies of representing the real (124). Fernandes compares two
very different strategies for representing the life of Indian political activist
Phoolan Devi--one a commercial film, Bandit Queen (1994), and the
other a testimonial, I, Phoolan Devi (Devi 1996)--to highlight the meth-
odological issues at stake when the focus of analysis is expanded beyond
the production of representations to their circulation and consumption
across transnational sites.
The crisis in representation has led to greater experimentation in how
we think about methods and how we represent our findings. Lather (2001)
contends that we cannot solve the crisis but only trouble any claims to
accurate representation. One collection that takes this task seriously is
S I G N S Summer 2005  2223
Working the Ruins by Elizabeth St. Pierre and Wanda S. Pillow (2000).
The contributors to this volume, who are ethnographers and theorists,
are "working the ruins" of humanism, methodology, and education after
the postmodern turn. They try to make sense of humanist research after
the critique of its methods, and they raise provocative questions about
what counts as data; how such data will be collected, analyzed, and val-
idated; how best to represent research findings; whose political interests
are at stake; and the link between research and praxis. Skepticism and
failure incite new challenges and possibilities for knowing and for what is
knowable. Lather sees the potential of working the ruins for ethnography;
she writes, "I look for the breaks and jagged edges of methodological
practice from which we might draw useful knowledge" (2001, 200).
Social action and policy
Feminist approaches to research have always emphasized action and social
change. This action orientation is reflected in the articles and topics (social
movements, activism, policy, political consciousnesses) in Beyond Method-
ology and in their focus on the purpose and rationale of authors' research
projects, the choice of method, the involvement of subjects, and the dis-
semination strategies. An original thrust of feminist research was women's
liberation, and this was construed as anything from the radical transfor-
mation of patriarchy (sometimes all of capitalism) and the corresponding
empowerment of women to the more liberal insistence that specific at-
tention be paid to the policy implications of research on women. Most
of us believed in one way or another that, to study and understand change,
one had to be an active participant in political struggle (Mies 1983).
Feminists today are still concerned with these issues. For example, those
conducting participatory action research (PAR) involving subjects as co-
researchers continue to argue that this approach can empower disenfran-
chised groups and create research agendas with immediate implications
for social change (Cook and Wright 1995; Cancian 1996). Participatory
action research can also help to reduce the widely divergent power dif-
ferentials between the researcher and the researched, allowing multiple
subjectivities to define the problem and its solution.8
In Tangled Routes,
Deborah Barndt (2002) uses this approach to trace the production, dis-
tribution, and consumption of the tomato through the North American
Free Trade Agreement chain to explain the gendered nature of globali-
8
See Kemmis and McTaggart 2000 for an overview of PAR. For classic work on femin-
ism and PAR, see Maguire 1987.
2224  Fonow and Cook
zation. She uses PAR and photographic analysis to show how women
workers make sense of globalization and its impact on their lives.
The vexing question of women's agency continues to be an important
component of the action orientation and a fruitful avenue for theory and
scholarship. Feminists no longer seek one consciousness-raising event that
will inspire all women to action, for agency has become increasingly com-
plex. We know that women consent to, resist, and reshape the social
relations of power within a complex matrix of domination and subordi-
nation. Our collection focused on the resistance side of the equation. In
"Learning from the Outsider Within," Collins (1991) showed that self-
conscious black women's everyday behavior constituted personal resis-
tance and social activism. She has extended and complicated this argument
in Fighting Words (1998) and Black Sexual Politics (2004).
In Methodology of the Oppressed, Chela Sandoval (2000) calls for fluid
methodologies that recognize the decolonizing possibilities of U.S. third-
world feminist criticism. She excavates the multiple locations and shifting
sites of differential consciousness and identifies the methodological im-
plications of a mobile consciousness born in opposition. She focuses on
how such a consciousness can be closely read within the texts of U.S.
third-world feminists and how these texts are engaged by critical theorists.
By placing such texts in dialogue, we find the language of possibility that
can help us develop more sophisticated concepts of political agency and
new ways of organizing social movements.
In Decolonizing Methodologies (1999), Linda Tuhiwai Smith offers both
critique and hope in her analysis of imperialism, research, and knowledge
production by and about the Maori in New Zealand. By reexamining the
colonizing effects of research and by reclaiming research as a tool for
survival, Smith shows how the spaces of marginalization have become
places of hope and resistance. In these spaces, indigenous academics and
researchers are continuing to develop research methodology. Smith dis-
cusses what an ethical, respectful, and useful research agenda would look
like and outlines twenty-five indigenous research projects with themes
such as cultural survival, healing, and self-determination. Her book is
designed to help indigenous people research their own experience.
These authors suggest that resistance and power reside in many dif-
ferent locations and arrangements and that agency is always an ongoing,
changing accomplishment.9
Women's activism emerges within organiza-
9
Feminists continue to be very interested in the study of social movements and have
been publishing in the University of Minnesota series on social movements, protest, and
contention (Ray 1999; Fonow 2003; Klandermans and Staggenborg 2003; Kurtz 2003;
Raeburn 2004).
S I G N S Summer 2005  2225
tions, movements, and social groups and in everyday social settings. It is
constructed on the local, national, and transnational levels as well as in
the movement between these levels. This can require more complicated
research methodologies, including designs that are multisited and trans-
scalar, and can capture the ways political subjectivities constitute discourse,
structure, and the material environment. It will take interdisciplinary teams
of feminist researchers in different locations to carry out the types of
research that our new conceptions of agency and activism demand.
Feminist scholars have also come to understand that women can be
complicit in the exploitation and oppression of other women and men,
and there is a growing body of scholarship about the role of women in
right-wing movements throughout the world. In Right-Wing Women,
Paola Bacchetta and Margaret Power caution us against perceiving women
on the right as lacking in agency: "Women in the right are neither dupes
of right-wing men nor less powerful replicas of them. . . . Rightist women
consciously choose to support and help build the projects of which they
are a part" (2002, 3). The authors argue for a transnational understanding
of the oppositional social movements and submerged social movement
networks that women on the right use to mobilize participants for various
conservative and extremist causes, an understanding critical to fashioning
a feminist resistance.
We believe it is imperative for feminists to develop the analytic skills
and intellectual strategies to see through right-wing social policies and
smoke screens such as "compassionate conservatism." Fundamental Dif-
ferences, a new collection edited by Cynthia Burack and Jyl J. Josephson
(2003), begins to take on this challenge. Here, feminists confront con-
servative social thinkers about their values and ideas, exposing their in-
tellectual and political strategies. The authors grapple with conservative
analyses and recommendations regarding family formation, sexuality, gen-
der, socialization, and education. They critique the methodologies used
by conservatives and disassemble their tactics for achieving scholarly le-
gitimacy. Burack and Josephson pay attention to the ways in which con-
servatives represent themselves and their opinions in the marketplace of
ideas, examining the impact that conservatives have on the ways policy is
framed and on feminism itself.
Globalization and the neoliberal policy agenda have produced new
discourses, created new sites of political action, and changed the nature
of feminist claims on the state for gender equity and women's rights. As
a consequence, feminists have expanded their policy focus to include con-
temporary policy issues (national security, militarization and armed con-
flict, and free-trade agreements) while searching for new ways to respond
2226  Fonow and Cook
to earlier feminist policy concerns (domestic violence, poverty, employ-
ment discrimination and pay equity, and political representation). The
emerging interdisciplinary field of feminist policy studies is gaining mo-
mentum through its focus on bringing together researchers from a variety
of perspectives and diverse methodologies. Some of this work, such as
Nancy D. Campbell's (2000) study of gender, drug policy, and social
justice, was not even possible before the theoretical advances of the last
decade. Campbell examines law-enforcement practice and discourses of
criminology, pharmacology, psychiatry, and popular culture to disclose
how normative expectations about women's responsibilities for social re-
production shape both government policy toward women and citizens'
willingness to accept drug policies that are counterproductive as well as
unjust and unfair to women. She calls for an explicit commitment to social
justice as a principle of drug policy.
Quantitative methods
In the early 1990s, the use of quantitative approaches in feminist research
was far from rare, as illustrated by the articles we included in our collection.
What set these approaches apart from their nonfeminist counterparts was
the researchers' attention to the ways in which key concepts were oper-
ationalized, the careful matching of statistical techniques to research ques-
tions, the transparency with which the researchers presented their data
and analysis, and the focus of the analysis on disenfranchised groups and
salient policy issues.
A review of current writing on feminist quantitative research reveals
the continuation of these trends along with new advances and insights in
applying quantitative analysis as a feminist method. This body of schol-
arship shows that, while the gulf between qualitative and quantitative
methods is still wide, it is often feminists who have sought to bridge it
through their collaborative impulse, their critical stance, their search for
more inclusive and nuanced ways to measure complex social phenomena,
their location on the continuum of political activism, and their desire to
create research that can be used to promote social change.
Perhaps the largest body of feminist writing about the use of numerical
data and quantitative analysis concerns its potential to influence public
policy at local, federal, and international levels. This is predicated on the
understanding that governments and policy makers are less attentive to
the concerns of individuals, as reflected in qualitative work (Westmarland
2001), and that quantitative research is needed to measure the extent of
social and political problems (Rose 2001) as well as their prevalence
S I G N S Summer 2005  2227
(Thorne and Varcoe 1998). Large-scale surveys have the power to alter
public opinion in ways that a smaller number of in-depth interviews do
not (Kwan 2001). Recognizing that statistics are needed to formulate
legislation, feminist survey researchers employ statistical analyses that can
best represent the phenomena under study at the highest level of rigor,
selected explicitly for policy impact (Westmarland 2001). This involves
acknowledging that abstraction is necessary to enhance political under-
standing on a personal level, by refusing to equate abstraction with its
masculine expression (Sprague and Zimmerman 1989).
Feminist scholars also use quantitative methods in new ways to under-
stand women's everyday experiences. Geographer Mei-Po Kwan (2001) has
developed sophisticated quantitative measures of spatial and temporal re-
strictions on women's daily activities. Fixity constraint is the need to perform
activities at a fixed location or time, such as child-care drop-off. Time budget
constraint represents limitations on the amount of time available for daily
activities, such as time for housework before or after one's job. Using geo-
visual representations of complex cartographic forms in three-dimensional
space, Kwan shows that these levels of constraint depend more on one's
gender and sharing of household responsibilities than on conventional var-
iables such as the presence or number of children in the family.
Another focus of new quantitative feminist research is an emphasis on
quantification that is sensitive to women's experience (Westmarland
2001). This has led quantitative feminists to operationalize "with care"
(Kwan 2001, 165) by standardizing categories using women's rather than
men's locations in social structure and relationships (Risman 1993). This
theme is echoed by Judith A. Cook's (2003) analysis of gender biases in
disability assessments of women with depression. She shows how tradi-
tional disability assessments overrely on labor force participation, erro-
neously treating women's and men's employment patterns as if they were
similar; contain simplistic notions of role performance that neglect
women's complex, culturally bound social-role constellations; and fail to
measure or control for a series of comorbidities that are common among
depressed women, such as histories of childhood physical and sexual abuse,
intimate partner violence, and sexual harassment.
There is also a new sophistication in practicing and reflecting on tri-
angulation, now referred to by a number of terms such as mixed-method
research (Jenkins 2000) or experimental methodological pluralism (Rose
2001), and a growing appreciation of the various forms this approach can
take. First, the critical view of "multimethodism" acknowledges that such
projects may not emphasize all methods equally, making one method
predominate in importance, and that a project's major research question
2228  Fonow and Cook
itself may promote the primacy of one method over another (Rose 2001).
One resolution to this dilemma is to design research projects that include
a number of equally important, complementary questions, such as Susan
Hanson and Geraldine Pratt's (1995) work combining census data, survey
data, and in-depth interviews to investigate links in occupational seg-
mentation by gender in local labor markets.
Another aspect of multimethodism acknowledges the recent blurring
of the distinctions between qualitative and quantitative methods as fem-
inist researchers rethink the quantitative-qualitative debate. Damaris Rose
(2001) notes the growing tendency of qualitative researchers to collect
and report quantitative data on their subjects, such as education and in-
come levels, in order to better reflect the particular, subjective features of
the women they study. At the same time, it is taken for granted by many
feminist survey researchers that their work must be informed by comple-
mentary in-depth qualitative analyses (Kim 1997; Jenkins 2000; Kwan
2001).
Responding to those who critique the limited interaction between re-
searcher and subject in quantitative analyses, Sally Thorne and Colleen
Varcoe (1998) point out that lengthy in-person interviews can carry con-
siderable "subject burden" and note the value of shorter surveys, which
obtain higher response rates and thereby offer greater representativeness
and inclusivity. Marlene Kim (1997) reports on a project to train and
employ low-income women as interviewers in an evaluation of the effec-
tiveness of Job Training and Partnership Act programs designed to return
poor people to work. While the federally funded evaluation involved poor
women only as respondents and focused primarily on the programs' short-
term training outcomes, the feminist evaluation focused on the needs of
the poor and used the insights and queries of its low-income interviewers
to broaden the nature of the inquiry. The traditional evaluation found
that significant short-term increases in employment rates and earnings
evaporated over time. The feminist evaluation showed how short-term
gains were negated by the poor quality of low-paying, entry-level jobs
that hampered trainees' ability to establish longer-term economic self-
sufficiency. Thus, while the traditional evaluation tracked changes in wage
and work status, it could not explain the evaluation results--a central aim
of the feminist evaluation.
Infrastructure and support
Substantial capacity has developed for feminist scholars in academic settings
and through the women's research centers movement. This capacity was
S I G N S Summer 2005  2229
early in its formation when we began to write about feminist methodology.
It now includes the institutionalization of interdisciplinary women's studies
graduate programs and departments, significant contributions of feminists
to their disciplines and to interdisciplinary fields, a proliferation of academic
journals and presses publishing feminist scholarship, and the creation and
expansion of regional feminist policy and research centers.
Today, a feminist research infrastructure serves as the site for the de-
velopment of innovative feminist methodologies, and it is here that many
of the dilemmas of feminist research practice will be resolved. For example,
the National Council for Research on Women (NCRW), founded in 1981,
has grown from twenty-nine research and policy centers to a network of
three thousand individuals and organizations, including policy makers, the
media, governmental and nongovernmental agencies, educators, research-
ers, and activists concerned with advocacy for women and girls. Ninety-
two research centers and institutes focus on women and girls. The NCRW
serves as a bridge across traditional divides separating research, policy
formulation, activism, and practice.
Member centers of NCRW continue to grow and develop, and some
are playing important roles in the effort to influence policy. The Institute
of Women's Research and Policy in Washington, DC, under the direction
of Heidi Hartmann, continues to advance our understanding of women's
economic and policy issues and to publish policy documents that help
feminists disseminate ideas to policy makers and to the public. Women's
research and policy institutes have also been formed at regional levels,
focusing on particular local policy issues or the issues of specific geographic
regions.
Three of our contributors (Lynn Weber Cannon, Elizabeth Higgin-
botham, and Marianne L. A. Leung [1991]) were founding members of
the Center for Research on Women at Memphis State University. This center
has become a leading institution dedicated to research on women and social
inequality in the U.S. South and among women of color. The center's
research is action oriented, emphasizing feminist and antiracist theories and
methodologies that illuminate the structural relationships among race, class,
gender, and sexuality and that relate regional developments to national and
international developments. Another contributor, Ronnie Steinberg, is the
executive director of the recently established Women's Social Policy and
Research Center at Vanderbilt University, where she also served as director
of women's studies. The center facilitates research on the impact of federal
and state policy on women's social and economic status in Tennessee and
surrounding states. Researchers are attempting to define and measure the
value of a living wage for women in Nashville and are examining the impact
2230  Fonow and Cook
that tax reform proposals being considered by the state of Tennessee would
have on women.
Conclusions
As scholars who benefited from maturing in environments that allowed
and even rewarded challenges to the epistemological foundations of
knowledge, it remains important for us to acknowledge our responsibility
for advancing this tradition. At this time in the United States, traditional
methodologies remain highly valued, while many other countries rely
more on qualitative and consensus studies in setting their public policy
agendas and enacting corresponding legislation. As of this writing, the
2004 U.S. Congress is calling for, and in some cases requiring, very narrow
"scientific" research designs and protocols that focus on "proving" cause
and effect--a troubling and obviously political move.
At one time, feminist researchers were on the outside looking in, but
now many feminist scholars of our generation have become the gate-
keepers (Cook and Fonow 1984) of a much richer array of resources that
are needed to produce and distribute feminist knowledge. We are training
the next generation of feminist researchers and deciding who will receive
grant funding, who will publish, and who will be awarded tenure. This
is both an important responsibility and a valuable opportunity to advance
the field by championing and mentoring the work of newer scholars, some
of whom are questioning the feminist work--including our own--that
came before them.
We are encouraged by the growth of writing about feminist method-
ology and hope that researchers will continue to critique, expand, and
invent new ways of doing feminist research and of theorizing about fem-
inist inquiry. Such efforts cannot move forward independent of advances
in feminist theory. Feminists have moved well beyond the analysis of bias
and exclusion and toward more contextual forms of theorizing about the
intersection of gender with other categories of social difference and with
place and time, and this, inevitably, has led to more sophisticated discus-
sions about methods.
The introductory article to our anthology was titled "Back to the Fu-
ture" (Fonow and Cook 1991a), and in preparing this new article we find
that the process of looking back at what feminist scholars have struggled
to achieve and how that has served as the foundation for subsequent efforts
has brought the future into clearer focus. It remains our task to preserve
the tradition and the history of feminists engaged in the conduct of in-
quiry, being ever mindful of its limitations and presuppositions yet focused
S I G N S Summer 2005  2231
increasingly on its consequences and the limitless potential for transform-
ing human lives.
Women's Studies Program
Arizona State University (Fonow)
Department of Psychiatry
University of Illinois at Chicago (Cook)
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