Abstract
In this article, we use three case studies of conservative field sites to consider the dilemma faced when feminist analytic perspectives clash with observations. We note that feminism can operate as a blinder, limiting our ability to see and interpret empirical realities that do not conform with feminist expectations. Using our research on orthodox Jewish women’s practices of menstrual purity, evangelical ex-gay ministries, and state-sponsored marriage promotion programs as examples, we discuss our shared experience that unreflexive feminist critiques of seemingly antifeminist social practices, groups, and policies can impede our ability to understand how feminism has influenced nonfeminist spaces. We use our cases to reflect upon a tension that informs all progressive social change research: the tension between our political sensibilities and goals and our intellectual mission to produce reliable knowledge. In responding to that tension, we argue that feminist researchers should incorporate institutional reflexivity on feminism itself as part of their ethnographic practice.
Feminist researchers encounter a dilemma that is rarely discussed but is central to feminist research: what do you do when your feminist politics clash with your empirical findings (Chapkis 2010)? How do you interpret spaces and communities that feminism considers conservative, misogynist, and/or antifeminist when your findings—and especially your subjects—complicate those understandings? What happens when feminist theories and your feminist sensibilities limit your ability to make sense of gendered practices that belie feminist expectations? Can feminists speak of this dilemma without diluting feminism’s analytic strength and political salience?
This feminist ethnographer’s dilemma is a product of a fundamental tension within feminism itself: feminism is simultaneously a prescriptive project, loosely defined by critiques of unjust gendered institutions, practices, and social arrangements and an analytical project that strives to explain the social world (Mahmood 2004). This tension generates two distinct imperatives: a political commitment to advance progressive social change through research and a methodological commitment to prioritize our subjects’ voices. The first imperative equips feminist ethnographers with vision, interpretive strategies, conceptual frameworks, and broad political goals. The second imperative engenders a core respect for the words, perspectives, and worldviews of people whose social positioning often renders them less audible, less visible, and thus less able to shape the structures influencing their lives. Feminist researchers typically envision these imperatives as complementary. Social change, the argument goes, is advanced when those historically without voice are able to shed light on social injustices and participate in making change (Alexander and Mohanty 1997; Moya 2002; Reinharz 1992). But sometimes these imperatives contrast, competing for our allegiance. The dilemma ensues when our feminist political commitments clash with our subjects’ worldviews, forcing us to reconcile our perspectives with those of respondents who do not share our understanding and valuation of rights, opportunities, liberation, and constraints, but whose views we have a responsibility to interpret and represent accurately and fairly.
This paper explores how we, as feminist researchers, negotiated this dilemma in fieldwork projects we conducted in ostensibly nonfeminist communities. We examine how our fieldwork raised this dilemma for each of us, forcing us to reflect on the feminist institutions in which we operate and the orthodoxies they generate, a process we refer to as institutional reflexivity. Institutional reflexivity critically interrogates how feminist theoretical and methodological frameworks both constrain and enable interpretations of the social world. We argue that feminist scholarship is strengthened when its political imperatives are reflected upon as part of the research process and are bracketed and tempered by an “epistemology of contradictions” (O’Brien 2010) grounded in a commitment to our research subjects. This approach can enable feminist scholars to see other (potentially feminist) ways of understanding social spaces and groups that feminism defines itself against, thereby strengthening feminism’s analytic project and creating a stronger foundation for its political one.
The historical development of feminism is, in large part, a story of feminists disrupting feminist conventional thinking and theories, or feminist orthodoxies. Feminists of color and lesbian and queer feminists have articulated critiques, largely targeting white, liberal, heterosexual feminism, that question who and what feminist theory includes and excludes, how, and to whose benefit. These questions continually challenge feminism’s tendency to universalize from specific, often privileged, social positions (Alexander and Mohanty 1997; Collins 2000; Moraga and Anzaldua 1981; Lorde 1984). Our exercise in institutional reflexivity builds on this line of feminist scholarship. Yet these disruptions maintain the feminist commitment to the interdependence of scholarship and activism (Collins 2000; Lugones 2003). They also typically share an interest in expanding feminist discourses and feminist movements to make them habitable for a wider range of people. By contrast, the institutional reflexivity we call for emerged out of our fieldwork with individuals in conservative social spaces, some of whom are unlikely to seek livable space within feminism, either because they are not favorably disposed toward feminism or because they operate in social contexts structured by feminism’s opponents. The institutional reflexivity we practiced is a response to questions that our fieldwork experiences raised, especially in regard to how the merging of political and analytic aims affects our ability to make sense of feminism’s political and cultural opponents.
While our case studies are analytically, geographically, and conceptually distinct, they all focus on practices, institutions, and social arrangements that feminism deems misogynist, and/or antifeminist; we call these conservative social spaces. They include a study of orthodox Jewish women’s practices of menstrual purity (Avishai); the ex-gay movement (Gerber); and a state-sponsored marriage promotion program (Randles). This paper is a product of shared reflections on the expectations we felt as feminist researchers to interpret our cases in accordance with prominent feminist theories about religion, masculinity, family, agency, and/or the welfare state. These expectations did not emerge from specific mentors or peers. Rather they arose from our deep personal immersion in feminist institutional spaces and our theoretical and political commitments to existing feminist knowledge. In each case, we thought that existing theories did not do explanatory justice to our findings, but we felt concerned that challenging these theories was somehow “unfeminist.” Through conversations we identified our individual struggles as part of a systemic dilemma that characterizes feminist ethnography; this article names the dilemma and discusses the challenges it poses for feminist ethnographers. The goal of this exercise in institutional reflexivity is to provide other researchers tools to identify this dilemma and overcome it.
By making this dilemma and feminist institutional ambivalence about it our focus, we also contribute to the larger conversation on reflexivity in feminist methodology. Reflexivity can provide a bridge between feminist analytical and political projects by encouraging the recognition of the researcher’s particular social positioning and its impact on research. Discussions of reflexivity have been central to discussions of feminist methodology. However, recently reflexivity has largely focused on the social location of individual researchers and subjects. While important, this focus obscures systemic obstacles that constrain feminist ethnography, obstacles that impede our ability to recognize the partiality of feminist perspectives and rise to the political challenge of strengthening feminist analysis and building effective coalitions by working effectively with social difference (Jakobsen 1998; Lugones 2003). Building on feminists of color and queer feminists, this article emphasizes the importance of engaging in institutional reflexivity, which we understand as critical reflection on established feminist knowledge, the institutional conditions under which feminist knowledge is produced, the ways it shapes theory and analysis, and the unspoken pressures it generates for feminist researchers’ work to contribute to broadly defined feminist goals of promoting social justice. 1
In struggling with our dilemmas and reflecting on feminist knowledge production, we found ourselves increasingly focused on the meanings and interpretations of our research participants, an approach informed by the grounded theory tradition (Glaser and Strauss 1967). This inductive theoretical approach encourages ethnographers to maintain an attitude of skepticism as they seek to generate social theories by modifying existing analytic interpretations of social life based on new empirical discoveries in the field (Strauss and Corbin 1998). Hewing to grounded theory practices by staying close to our primary materials allowed us to identify the feminist ethnographer’s dilemma as we now understand it.
We begin with a review of the literature on feminist methodology, reflexivity, and feminist analyses of conservative social spaces. We then elaborate the feminist ethnographer’s dilemma through our case studies. In each case, we identify how feminist orthodoxies embedded in the theoretical and conceptual frameworks available to us limited our ability to adequately understand our respective topics. We then trace how rethinking those orthodoxies generated more nuanced analyses of our cases. Our reflections bring us to two conclusions. First, feminism, as institutionalized in the academy, while ostensibly championing the highest standards in qualitative research, can subtly encourage analyses that reinforce feminist orthodoxies. This encouragement can be especially seductive when trying to make sense of conservative spaces. Thus, we argue that feminist scholars need to be aware of institutional constraints to resist the temptation to replicate orthodoxies. Second, we argue that succumbing to this encouragement and privileging the political over the analytic can have the paradoxical effect of obfuscating how feminism has influenced nonfeminist communities and institutions. By replicating feminist orthodoxies, we may not recognize some of the subtle but significant ways in which feminist theory, practice, and movements have effected change in unexpected places and groups.
Some feminist researchers—especially those who fought hard to achieve legitimacy within the academy—may be alarmed by our claim that feminist research has generated its own set of orthodoxies. Yet feminists have long understood that methods are never free of epistemological assumptions (Collins 2000; Naples 2003). Reflecting on the institutionalization of feminist knowledge production and frameworks through specialized professional associations, journals, and academic departments and programs, Thorne (2006, 475) asked: “As feminist sociology becomes increasingly institutionalized as a subfield, how can its practitioners sustain a broad outlook and a critical edge?” Her answer was that we must continue to challenge disciplinary hierarchies and boundaries by sustaining a critical focus on the issues we seek to understand. Similarly, we argue that institutional reflexivity—understanding how feminist theoretical and methodological frameworks both constrain and enable particular interpretations of those issues—is essential for challenging the interpretive boundaries of feminist knowledge. We argue that feminism can sustain the critical edge that has long defined its epistemological and political goals only by maintaining a broad perspective that includes being reflexive about institutionalized interpretations of the problems and social spaces we seek to understand.
Our goal in this paper is to engage fellow feminist researchers in conversation about the institutional constraints that shape the process of feminist knowledge production. The case study strategy allows us to identify and name the feminist ethnographer’s dilemma as systemic, point to the dilemma’s origin in feminism’s duality as a political and analytical project, and suggest how feminist researchers can overcome this dilemma. 2 We strive simply to open a conversation; we hope that others will critique, refine, and further develop our call for institutional reflexivity, subjecting the framework we offer to broader empirical investigation.
Feminist Methodologies and Feminist Politics
Feminism’s Dual Commitments
Sociological inquiry requires that researchers break with habits of thought that do not allow them to adequately see or analyze the social phenomena they seek to understand. According to Pierre Bourdieu (1992), sociological understanding comes through an epistemic rupture, a dislocation from “commonsense” notions of how the social world works that allows the development of a more scientifically valid perspective. Scholars working in academic settings have a range of “common senses” from which they need to effect a rupture. As participants in the social world, researchers must contend with the everyday common sense that allows people to navigate it successfully. This practical sense of how the social world works is critical to take into account, but cannot be confused with rigorous social analysis. Academics also need to reflect critically on received scholastic common sense, the kinds of orthodoxies that reflect the outcome of power struggles within given fields and that seek their reproduction, eclipsing the development of new knowledge. A third kind of common sense may have itself been an important source of rupture at a different moment. Using Marxism as an example, Bourdieu (1992) suggests that critical tools of analysis can generate their own orthodoxies that social scientists need to disrupt in order to understand the social world adequately understand the social world.
Feminist research has been a potent source of epistemic rupture that has changed how social theorists think about gender and its place in social life. Emerging from a political movement that insisted on both the full social inclusion and equality of women and on the epistemic value of women’s experience in developing sociological analysis, feminism has given critical scholars a range of methodological tools and perspectives to help us see the world more clearly and work to improve it. But, like the Marxian theories to which they are intellectually linked (Harstock 1987), we argue that orthodox feminist political theories have at times become entrenched as analytical explanations in feminist scholarship because of feminism’s dual commitments as a political program and a system of knowledge production.
The concept of feminist research is somewhat elusive. Feminism cannot be reduced to a unified theoretical program, research agenda, or distinct methodologies. Indeed, it is impossible to completely distinguish between feminist research and other types of qualitative, field-driven research methodologies. Nevertheless, it is generally agreed that gender theory and feminist politics shape the type of research questions feminist researches ask, the types of materials they use, and how they define their relationships with their subjects. One defining feature of feminist research methodologies (and methods preferred by feminist researchers) is the extent to which they are intertwined with the legacy of the women’s movement. The concept of a feminist approach to social research emerged in the 1960s in the context of struggles for social justice (Naples 2003) and in tandem with feminist criticism of social science research, women’s (and other disadvantaged groups’) invisibility in it, and feminist theories about gender, intersectionality, agency, resistance, and social change. Feminist research was part of a larger feminist agenda to provide voice, representation, and, ultimately, power, to those whose interests, needs, and perspectives were occluded by traditional gendered norms. These political and analytic commitments made qualitative research methods that prioritize participants’ own interpretations of their social worlds, such as ethnography and grounded theory, particularly attractive to feminist researchers. Feminist scholars also generated insights about the research process itself—for example, the claim that positivist insistence on objectivity reproduces dominant groups’ experiences of the world and the notion of “conceptual practices of power” (Smith 1990)—that became central to feminism’s rewriting of existing social theories and its generation of new ones, changing how social scientists think about and do research (Harding and Norberg 2005).
Despite feminism’s impact, the question of what constitutes a distinctively feminist approach to research was and remains highly contested. Early feminist sociologists argued that core elements of feminist research include the centrality of feminist political projects, women’s authority as social knowers, and women’s agency as social actors. Reinharz’s early text on feminist methods (1992, 240) posited that a feminist approach to research “aims to create social change,” “strives to represent human diversity,” and “attempts to develop special relationship with the people studied.” Harding (1987) argued that feminist research was not marked by innovation in methods per se, but by expanding research agendas, rethinking the researcher’s role, and developing new sources of social knowledge, all of which would result from taking women’s perspectives more seriously (see also Harding and Norberg 2005). Harstock (1987), building explicitly from Marxian models, suggested parallels between both approaches’ political aims and their critical grounding in how underprivileged groups are made invisible by dominant sociological approaches. Feminists of color highlighted the intersections of various forms of social domination and the importance of the kind of experiential knowledge that can be developed by women located in those intersections (Anzaldua 1987; Crenshaw 1993; Moya 2002). Collins (2000), Smith (1987), Harstock (1987), Naples (2003), and Sprague (2005) all argue for a feminist standpoint perspective that develops feminist interest in the relationship between researcher and researched into a methodology. In each case, political, epistemological, and methodological concerns are deeply entwined.
Poststructural, postmodern, critical race, and postcolonial feminists further fused epistemological and methodological concerns in their reflection on the social circumstances of the genesis of feminist theory, pointing out its limitations, and coaxing a singular feminism toward the recognition and theorization of diverse feminisms. Poststructuralist and queer researchers challenged the very categories through which feminist knowledge proceeds, and questioned the stability of categories such as “male,” “female,” “gender,” and “sex.” Poststructural feminists argue that these categories are products of power struggles that feminist scholarship should undo rather than reinforce (Butler 1990, 2004). Postmodernists critiqued liberal feminism for focusing on creating equal socioeconomic opportunities and political rights, uncritically adopting Western liberal political frameworks and assuming a single, knowable truth that obscures competing understandings.
Third world and postcolonial feminists, as well as feminists of color, raised a range of questions about the moral, political, and ethical aspects of feminist research (Naples 2003, 5). These questions have challenged some early feminist orthodoxies and kept other ideas from crystallizing into orthodoxy. One of the most important interventions has been challenging the invisibility of race, class, and other vectors of domination in feminist work (Collins 2000; Crenshaw 1993; Moya 2003). Attention to these various forms of domination and their intersection is both more empirically accurate and allows a more robust feminist analysis than those that universalize the particular perspectives of (largely white) feminist theorists. These critics emphasize the inherent power imbalances between researchers and subjects in producing social knowledge and question whether feminists steeped in Western, often colonizing, academic disciplines are capable of seeing issues women face in radically different social contexts where gender is only one of a number of limiting social factors (Basu 1995; Collins 2000; Mohanty 1988; Zinn and Dill 1996).
In the twenty-first century, the distinction between feminist methods and other postpositivist approaches to social research methods has become less pronounced. Many edited volumes on ethnographic methods (Glassner and Hertz 2003) and special journal issues devoted to methods (see Journal of Contemporary Ethnography special issues on ethnographies of the Far Right in 2007 and epistemologies of contradiction in 2010) feature contributions from feminist scholars along with other critical ethnographers who voice overlapping concerns about fieldwork dilemmas. These volumes serve as a testament to the success of a generation of feminist researchers in transforming methodological considerations underlying social research. Nevertheless, the continued publication of books, articles, and journal issues on the topic (e.g., Naples 2003; Sprague 2005; the 2007 Signs special issue on new feminist approaches to social science methodologies; and the 2006 Social Problems follow-up symposium to Stacey and Thorne’s 1985 landmark piece on the missing feminist revolution in sociology) suggests that feminist researchers continue to ponder the merits and peculiarities of feminist methodology.
At the same time, the concerns in this literature seem to have shifted from attempts to define what constitutes a distinctly feminist approach to research (Reinharz 1992) to reflections on the obstacles to doing feminist research. This body of literature suggests that these obstacles are largely founded in the problematic relationship between researcher and subject. In one of the most oft-cited reflections on feminist methodology, Stacey (1988) challenged feminist researchers to ponder whether the inherent power imbalances between researcher and researched render the feminist commitment to truly egalitarian ethnography untenable. Heeding Stacey’s concerns, reflexivity has become a prominent feature in feminist research programs; feminists continue to be sensitive to the practical, epistemological, and political obstacles that are inherent to ethnographic methods in particular and to social science research more generally. Yet while feminist researchers acknowledge that reflexivity plays a key role in feminist knowledge production, the emphasis has been on personal reflexivity of the individual researcher in relation to her or his field site and research subjects.
Feminist researchers have noted the problematic power dynamics of speaking for others and explored ways to ease or eliminate this obstacle through participatory research, choice of research project, “studying up,” and simply being reflexive about the tensions inherent to research. These reflections on reflexivity are typically relegated to “back burner” status in appendices, or segregated into special collections or edited volumes dedicated to the topic. In her introduction to a recent special issue on feminist ethnography in the Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, O’Brien (2010) argues that rather than being relegated to the margins, contradictions between orienting concepts, existing theoretical frameworks, and experience in the field are fertile grounds for advancing social research and should therefore be mined for theoretical significance through reflexive practice.
We too believe that such tensions and contradictions are opportunities to shape our conceptual frameworks and interpretations. However, we extend this “epistemology of contradictions” by using the feminist ethnographer’s dilemma as a case of structural contradiction within feminism. We argue for critical reflexivity in relation to feminism, but with a specific focus on its dual commitments and how the conflation of feminist analytic and political projects impacts feminist ethnography. Rather than just being personally reflexive about our individual social locations vis-à-vis our subjects, we argue that we should be reflexive vis-à-vis the feminisms of the institutions within which we conduct research and develop our interpretive frameworks, the intellectual orthodoxies they may generate, and how they relate both to our research processes and the social spaces within which we conduct our research. In making this argument, we build on the challenges raised by feminists of color, third world, and postcolonial feminists, and queer theorists who have challenged a range of theoretical and analytic orthodoxies. Their wide-ranging methodological challenges to feminist theory and feminist research have given feminist scholars like us the tools and courage to question the production of feminist scholarship. At the same time, while feminists of color and queer theorists have changed feminist research methods in a range of ways, they too fuse analysis and politics (Collins 2000; Lugones 2003; Moya 2002). This fusion, we found, can easily become confusion when studying feminism’s political and cultural opposition.
The Feminist Ethnographer’s Dilemma in Conservative Social Spaces
Our experiences in the field in the context of our engagement with feminism’s analytic and methodological debates have led us to conclude that the feminist ethnographer’s dilemma is a structural issue in feminist research—one that is heightened when conducting feminist fieldwork in conservative communities. The contrast between feminism’s political project and its analytic one—particularly the call for attending to subjects’ experiences and interpretations of their social worlds—is unavoidable in these contexts. Feminist researchers can easily get in a position where they feel the need to choose between competing political and analytic impulses rather than using the tension between the two to fuel more innovative feminist analysis.
Feminist scholars have long been fascinated with nonfeminist women and antifeminist social movements, wondering why women would partake in them. The rise of the Moral Majority in the early 1980s sparked early feminist research and writing in this area, including Dworkin’s (1983) Right Wing Women which postulated fear of male violence to explain women’s conservatism. Radical second-wave analyses soon gave way to more nuanced accounts that emphasized diversity in women’s circumstances and experiences. Comparing two different types of patriarchal social structures, Kandiyoti (1988) introduced the notion of a “patriarchal bargain” to conceptualize how women negotiate gender structures that systematically disadvantaged them. The bargain is premised on an agreed upon set of gendered rules within which women could negotiate for personal advantage, as long as the general system was not challenged. This concept has become central to analyses of women’s apparent compliance with conservative social norms and practices.
The 1990s saw the development of a second strain in feminist scholarship in conservative spaces, an approach we call the duality approach. Those who took this position argued that appear to oppress women, deny their agency, or acclimate them to problematic social structures have liberatory potential, providing more space for women’s agency than previously believed (Abu-Lughod 1990; Griffith 1997; Macleod 1991). The paradigmatic example has been veiling: what might be viewed as a symbol of women’s submission to patriarchal religion also empowers women to venture outside their homes to seek employment and education by extending the cover of domesticity (MacLeod 1991) and symbolizes women’s political resistance to Western values (Göle 1997). Similarly, in her study of Women’s Aglow, an evangelical women’s ministry, Griffith (1997) found that submission became a form of empowerment, opening up spaces for women’s experiences and exercise of power.
A variation on this duality approach posits that women are strategic actors who navigate and appropriate a complex terrain of domestic, economic, and religious practices and expectations in meeting the demands of contemporary life. For example, in her study of low-income Syrian women, Gallagher (2007) noted how, in negotiating limited opportunities in the paid workforce, they used religious and cultural rationales to expand their autonomy while maintaining a semblance of deference. Striving to improve their access to paid employment while avoiding unattractive employment opportunities, they defined their economic activities as “not work,” allowing them to contribute significantly to the family economy in a society that prioritizes women’s domestic responsibilities.
Other studies focus on antifeminist and conservative women’s movements that claim to protect, rather than limit, women’s political and economic rights. According to Ehrenreich (1983), the antifeminist movement opposing the passage of the Equal Rights Amendment hinged on the claim that codifying full gender equality would negate many of the economic and social rights that women already had; namely, men would no longer be required to support female partners and children. Other examples include Luker’s studies of women pro-life activists (1984) and women sexual conservatives involved in public debates over sexual education in schools (2006). In both cases, women fought hard to maintain conservative laws and mores about sex, family, and marriage because they wanted to protect a sacred view of sexuality, a stable family life, and the social and economic security they believed to be associated with marriage.
Another strand of responses to the challenges conservative spaces pose to progressive values emphasizes the inherent value of learning from all groups who occupy cultural margins—including “repugnant others” (Harding 1991). Scholars who study individuals, groups, and movements associated with morally indefensible behavior—most notably Blee’s (2003, 2007) studies of racist white women—acknowledge the difficulties in maintaining professional ethics and personal integrity vis-à-vis such subjects. Blee (2007) resolves that tension by noting that learning from such others is defensible because, in preserving the integrity of research subjects’ stories and experiences, knowledge crucial to disabling these movements is generated.
In her study of the Egyptian piety movement Mahmood (2004) challenges such paradigms. Pushing the theoretical boundaries of notions of human agency to include “docility,” a concept that seems to run counter to orthodox feminist understandings of agency as resistance, Mahmood offers a pointed critique of Western feminist epistemologies that assume a liberal notion of personhood as the normative ideal for women’s lives while challenging feminists to separate their analytical and proscriptive projects. Feminist politics, she argues, are informed by an understanding of women’s agency based on a binary construct of repression versus liberation. “In doing so,” she writes, “this scholarship elides dimensions of human action whose ethical and political status does not map onto the logic of repression and resistance” (2004, 14). Her work has sparked a spirited conversation about the assumptions framing feminist theories about women’s participation in conservative religions. However, scholars have not investigated her broader critique of the conflation of feminism’s political and analytical projects and its implications for feminist research.
We offer our intervention at this juncture. We extend Mahmood’s challenge by reflecting on how feminism’s political project at times codifies interpretive strategies and theoretical frameworks that can compromise feminism’s analytic project. The limited understanding of agency in feminist discussions of practices such as veiling, which Mahmood critiques, is an example of what we call a feminist orthodoxy. We name the tension at the heart of her critique of Western feminist approaches to Muslim societies the feminist ethnographer’s dilemma and offer a roadmap to overcoming the dilemma that includes institutional reflexivity.
Feminist Adventures in Conservative Sites
This article stems from conversations among the authors about challenges we each encountered in our separate studies as feminist ethnographers of conservative, nonfeminist and, at times, antifeminist spaces. We came to our projects as feminist ethnographers trained at feminist-friendly institutions by highly skilled feminist researchers, equipped with feminist lenses, asking feminist questions, and committed to the feminist cause of social change through social research. Yet, as we conducted our fieldwork and analyzed our data, we began to question feminist orthodoxies. As we worked on our individual projects, we realized that the standard feminist solutions to our dilemmas—recognizing the duality of conservative spaces and attending to the power imbalances that defined the research project—did not suffice. In what follows, we each discuss how our field experiences in seemingly conservative communities generated critiques of orthodox feminism. We also discuss how we had to think past what we came to perceive as a standard feminist response to our cases, resist the temptation of a more standard analysis that we intuited would have garnered praise in our academic communities, and stick with our perceptions and experiences to develop analyses that confounded our expectations.
We should emphasize that it was our training in and attention to feminist methods and grounded theory that enabled and equipped us to recognize and confront the feminist ethnographer’s dilemma. Feminism’s insistence on privileging the voices and interpretations of those we study encouraged us to be institutionally reflexive about how the existing theories related to our topics did not adequately explain the particularities of our cases. That is, we came to appreciate the dilemma we describe because of, rather than in spite of, our feminist methodological training. This inspired us to recognize how our cases offered us opportunities to engage in critical and nuanced interpretations of what was happening in these social spaces in nuanced ways.
Case One: Religious Women’s Embodied Practices: Beyond Oppression, Empowerment, or Strategic Pursuit of Extrareligious Goals
Feminists have long considered conservative and fundamentalist religions antithetical to women’s interests and primary sites for articulating, reproducing, and institutionalizing gender inequality. Thus, feminists have often felt troubled by women’s willing participation in these religious communities (Avishai 2008). Avishai approached this question through a study that examined how Orthodox Jewish women experience and practice Jewish laws of menstrual purity, known as the laws of niddah. Codified by male authorities from Antiquity to the present, niddah prescribes an elaborate system of menstrual defilement and purification that regulates women’s behavior and dress throughout the menstrual cycle and organizes marital sexuality through a recurring cycle that demarcates periods of permitted and forbidden physical intimacy between spouses. Ritual purity and sexual availability are regained after a lengthy purification process that culminates in immersion in a ritual bath, the miqveh (see Zimmerman 2005 for an overview). Though little known outside Orthodox Judaism, Orthodox Jews consider compliance with niddah on par with observing the Sabbath and dietary laws. Critics, including some orthodox feminists, view niddah as an oppressive technology of power that sustains a patriarchal social order (Ner-David 2003; Steinberg 1997; Yanay and Rapoport 1997).
Avishai grew up in Israel as a nonpracticing (secular) Jew. Among secular Israeli Jews of her generation, niddah is viewed as the epitome of all that is wrong, backwards, and abhorrent about Judaism and a symbol of Jewish orthodoxy’s unrelenting attempts to enforce its ways on secular Jews. As a condition for performing the Jewish wedding ceremony, Orthodox rabbis routinely require all couples to schedule and conduct their weddings in adherence with niddah laws. Since religious authorities hold a monopoly on marriage licenses—the state does not offer the option of a civil marriage—this condition means that all brides are expected to report their menstrual cycle to a woman representative of state-run religious services and undergo the niddah purification process in the miqveh regardless of their religiosity. In protest of this status-quo, Avishai’s marriage ceremony was conducted outside the state of Israel.
Avishai’s intellectual journey from Tel Aviv University Law School (a symbolic bastion of leftist, antireligious secularism and progressive activism) to the Sociology and Women’s and Gender Studies Departments at an elite public university in the United States led her to reassess the prevailing perspective on niddah among her secular peers. In particular, she wondered whether feminist critiques that view women’s compliance with practices such as niddah as inherently antithetical to their interests obscure our understanding of practitioners’ experiences. Postcolonial critiques of Western feminism suggested that this might be the case; however, the sociological literature on women’s participation in conservative religions seemed to be framed by a “paradox approach” that is deeply ambivalent about women’s compliance and assumes that agency and religious adherence are incongruent (Avishai 2008).
Over the course of four years (2002-2006), Avishai interviewed a broad range of married, self-defined orthodox women about their experiences with niddah. Her sample included 52 women, ranging in age from early twenties to late sixties, from newlyweds to postmenopausal grandmothers, who reside in different types of locales (predominantly orthodox versus mixed cities), and who vary in their socioeconomic and educational backgrounds, level of observance, Jewish literacy, and family size. She asked these women detailed questions about their niddah practices. How did they observe niddah? What areas did they find particularly important? What areas did they find particularly difficult? How did they make sense of niddah? Did they enjoy it? Was it meaningful? How did they experience the transition from “forbidden” to “permissible” and back again? What terminology did they employ to think about and discuss the niddah cycle? Did the feminist critique of niddah resonate with them? Avishai’s own position as a secular woman raised in Israel was often an important topic of conversation.
Avishai found that her respondents’ narratives of observance clustered into three categories: unconditional observers exhibited little conflict about niddah, while at the other end of the spectrum were a handful of outspoken critics, whose concerns echoed those of reformist orthodox theologians and activists (Ner-David 2003; Ross 2004). The vast majority of her respondents, however, were ambivalent observers. They followed niddah, but not to the letter; they embraced the laws but rejected some of the meanings and vocabulary associated with the practice. Together, these women constructed a narrative of assent that affirmed niddah as central to their identities as orthodox Jewish women while legitimizing partial compliance that skirted official doctrine.
Avishai’s analysis suggested that for many orthodox Jewish women, niddah is a practice that asserts and affirms an authentic Jewish subjectivity, a realm of religious practice through which one becomes authentically orthodox. Key to this narrative of assent was a contrast Avishai’s respondents drew between “authentic Jewish women” who observe niddah and secular women like herself, who did not. In other words, Avishai found that orthodox Jewish women strategically used niddah to construct and affirm themselves as orthodox Jewish subjects.
The idea that religious women strategically embrace and invoke practices such as niddah to produce a distinctly religious subject challenged feminist critiques of religious practices that regulate women’s bodies as coercive and sociological theories that explain women’s compliance with such regulations. Avishai’s review of the literature suggested that sociologists and feminists who study religion generally work within the “paradox” frame and offer three standard explanations for women’s compliance with religious strictures. The first explanation is that seemingly restrictive religious practices are actually experienced as empowering and liberating given the structural forces that shape women’s lives (Bartkowski and Read 2003; Brasher 1998; Chen 2005; Chong 2006; Davidman 1991; Gallagher 2004, 2007; Griffith 1997; Hartman 2003; Macleod 1991; Manning 1999; Stacey and Gerard 1990). The second explanation is that what looks like compliance actually masks acts of resistance, subversion, and adaptation (Chen 2005; Gallagher 2003, 2004; Griffith 1997; Hartman 2003). The final and most dominant explanation is that women’s compliance is strategic; religious women appropriate religion to further extrareligious ends such as economic opportunities, domestic relations, political ideologies, and cultural affiliation (Chen 2005; Gallagher 2007).
In sum, Avishai’s analysis demonstrated how religious women are not passive targets of religious discourses, or strategic agents whose observance serves extra-religious ends. Rather, her analysis showed that observance is best explained by the notion of religious conduct as a mode of being, a performance of religious identity, or a path to achieving orthodox subjecthood in the context of threatened symbolic boundaries (in this case, boundaries between orthodox and secular Jewish identities). This analysis, which challenged existing literature on the topic, hinged on the articulation of a feminist orthodoxy—the paradox approach that views women’s participation in conservative religions as inherently problematic—and an alternative to this approach. Rather than asking why women comply, a more productive approach examines how religious women articulate and perform observance. Using this approach, Avishai shows that religiosity is a constructed status, and developed a “doing religion” frame that builds on interactionist, performative, and postcolonial theories of agency and locates agency in observance, thereby extending feminist knowledge and understanding of a key domain of gendered experiences.
Case Two: Gender Hegemony or Gender Innovation in Evangelical Christianity
Gerber’s case also addresses the question of gender and conservative religiosity—in this case, evangelical Christianity. Exodus International is the largest and most publicly visible “ex-gay” organization. Founded in 1976, in the wake of increased activism and political success on the part of gay liberation movements, this organization, as well as the ex-gay movement more generally, is founded on the notion that homosexual orientation can change, that heterosexuality can be achieved, and that Christian faith requires homosexuals to attempt it. Marginal within evangelical Christianity for much of its existence, the ex-gay movement came into increasing prominence in the mid-1990s when it made strategic alliances with institutional powerhouses in the Christian right.
The ex-gay movement believes that homosexual orientation is a reflection of inadequate gender identification, resulting in confusion between the desire to identify with members of one’s own gender and the desire to be sexually intimate with them (Moberley 1983; Nicolosi 2004b). Men become sexually attracted to other men, the argument goes, because they do not feel their own masculinity strongly enough. Erotic desire, in this view, tends toward that which one is not, and men who do not feel like men will come to sexually desire men in order to identify with their gender. The solution is exposure to the nonsexual company of men, preferably those who do not struggle with their sexual orientation. Such exposure supposedly facilitates gender identity. Once secure gender identity is achieved, desire should move again toward one’s designated gender opposite. This theory funds strategies for change that focus on practices that seem evidently regressive from a feminist viewpoint. Ex-gay participants are, at times, trained in norms of gender comportment, emotional response, and power relations. Gay men work explicitly on cultivating “masculinity” while lesbians focus on “femininity,” each attempting to “heal” by identifying more fully with their gender.
The ex-gay movement seems to reify traditional ideas about gender. Ex-gay leaders and members often see themselves as restoring God’s will and their rhetoric emphasizes traditional notions of masculinity and femininity. The ex-gay movement actively opposes the legal recognition of gay marriage. From a feminist perspective, the whole project appears to be an effort by men seeking to gain the privileges of masculinity by denying their sexual orientation. Rather than use their position as sexual minorities to challenge the gender order, ex-gay men seem to reinforce the binary distinction between genders and attendant hierarchical rankings that privilege men. For these reasons, feminist researchers have denounced the ex-gay movement as antifeminist (Robinson and Spivey 2007). 3 From a certain feminist perspective, these appeared to be men seeking to gain the privileges of masculinity by denying their sexual orientation and failing to use the opportunity of sexual minority positioning to challenge the gender order. By attempting to more fully identify as men, they seemed to reinforce the binary distinction between genders, their hierarchical rankings, and the privileging of the male position.
Gerber entered the ex-gay world expecting to have these expectations vindicated. She was drawn to the ex-gay movement as a comparative case in a project on evangelical Christianity, morality, and the body. Raised Jewish, in a community highly suspicious of evangelical Christianity for its proselytizing practices, she came to the project as an explicit non-Christian and a cultural outsider. Although not a lesbian, she was widely assumed to be one by her interview subjects, an assumption made clear in informal conversation and in expressions of surprise when she answered direct questions on the issue. At one Exodus event, for example, an older woman offered her mentorship, an offer Gerber declined. Her intellectual training took place in progressively oriented seminaries connected to major research universities, environments that prided themselves on their openness to LGBT people and their opposition to conservative gender politics. Finally, her background in progressive political organizing and feminist movements for change shaped a desire to vindicate progressive views on these ministries and their seemingly patriarchal gender practices.
Her research, which took place between 2005 and 2007, was based on qualitative methods, including participant observation at seven events sponsored by Exodus International or other Exodus-affiliated organizations, interviews with 28 current participants in Exodus ministries (17 men, 11 women) and 7 former participants (5 men, 2 women), and content analysis of ministry materials. Early in her research, Gerber attended Exodus International’s 30th annual conference where Jerry Falwell was the featured speaker. Much to her surprise, the conference included a workshop on identifying and challenging misogyny, public apologies for homophobia in the church, encouragement of emotional intimacy between men, and challenges to traditional notions of masculinity. As her work developed, it became clear that the ex-gay movement was not a simple case of the veneration and replication of traditional gendered ideas and practices. Rather, it was a site of critical gender interrogation that generated innovative, if not feminist, gender experiments with potential to undermine hegemonic gender norms.
In the course of her work, Gerber became increasingly fascinated with masculinity in the ex-gay movement, finding that the kind of masculinity it advocates is often quite distinct from hegemonic forms (Bird 1996; Connell 2005; Connell and Messerschmidt 2005; Donaldson 1993; Kimmel 1994). For example, rather than basing masculine identity on the sexual conquest of women, ex-gay men forcefully argued that masculinity, especially Christian masculinity, could not be legitimately founded upon sexual prowess. Indeed, some argued that ex-gay men made particularly good partners to women because they did not objectify them in the ways that other men would, and that their relationships were more likely to be founded upon friendship, trust, and mutuality than sexual exploitation. While this may be, in part, a pragmatic solution to the lack of heterosexual desire, it also reflects shifts in ideal conceptions of masculinity in the evangelical world (Bartkowski 2001; Gallagher 2003; Wilcox 2004). The masculinity that ex-gay ministries argued for was also surprisingly inclusive. Rather than criticizing traits and preferences traditionally marked as feminine and marginalizing men thought to display them, ex-gay leaders and members made space for a range of expressions within legitimate masculinity. At an Exodus workshop on masculinity, for example, an ex-gay man and a straight man performed a dialogue aimed at demonstrating that the former’s interest in shopping was as legitimate an expression of masculinity as the latter’s interest in hunting (Goeke and Mayo 2008). Finally, Gerber found that ex-gay discourse on masculinity countered hegemonic notions of masculine isolation and independence with a vision of male–male intimacy, emotional closeness, and mutual vulnerability. Reparative therapist Joseph Nicolosi, for example, writes, “the only way a man can absorb masculinity into his identity is through the challenge of nonsexual male friendships characterized by mutuality, intimacy, affirmation, and fellowship” (2004a, 100). These are notably not constitutive elements of hegemonic masculinity. Indeed, the ex-gay case, rather than evidencing the lure of hegemonic masculinity for those who have been deprived of it, challenges its coherence as an analytic tool.
Making sense of ex-gay masculinity using feminist tools was a struggle for Gerber, and grappling with her data led her to challenge the idea of hegemonic masculinity rather than affirm feminist arguments that ex-gay ministries were exemplars of it (Robinson and Spivey 2007). Listening to ex-gay men, hearing them speak, and observing their performances meant observing discourses and practices that explicitly challenged hegemonic notions of masculinity and attempted to carve new legitimized male spaces, roles, and subjectivities. These new subjectivities were not clearly hegemonic or nonhegemonic, traditional or progressive. Instead, they were complicated blends which required Gerber to bracket her feminist political impulse to criticize ex-gay masculinity as hegemonic, traditional, and antifeminist to account for her observations and maintain an empathetic relationship to her subjects. Throughout this process, she feared that she was at risk of undermining her feminist commitments and alienating progressive allies.
But in grappling with these complicated gender ideals and practices, Gerber also began to see how privileging feminism’s political opposition to movements such as the ex-gay movement can keep feminist scholars from recognizing the impact feminism and gender criticism have had in these locations (Stoltenberg 1999). The ex-gay movement, paradoxically, can be seen as a place where gender critique and experimentation thrive and as the realization of certain feminist ideals of gender innovation, play, and the attainment of a more livable space for people who are marginalized by the dominant gender order (Gerber 2008). Feminism can take some credit for creating that possibility throughout American culture, even in the conservative evangelical world, and can push that world even farther. But the imperative for political opposition and condemnation, and for scholarship that will support that position, can render these pockets of resistance to gendered norms invisible.
Case Three: Promoting Marriage as a Means to a Progressive Feminist End
In 2002, George W. Bush created the Healthy Marriage Initiative (HMI), a federal program responsible for distributing public funding for marriage promotion activities. The government has granted the vast majority of HMI funding to programs that coordinate relationship skills education courses that teach communication, conflict resolution, and empathy skills as the foundation of a healthy marriage. The government’s rationale for supporting marriage education activities is that because married families are less likely to be poor, encouraging marriage among poor, unmarried families is an effective way to reduce poverty and dependence on welfare programs.
Many have critiqued marriage promotion policy, especially feminists who condemn using public resources to promote a social institution traditionally founded on creating and sustaining gendered and heteronormative values, practices, and power differentials, especially in an effort to dismantle part of the social safety net for disadvantaged families (Cahill 2005; Coltrane 2001; Coontz and Folbre 2002; Hardisty 2008; Hays 2003; Heath 2009, 2012; Mink 2003; Moon and Whitehead 2006; Polikoff 2008; Solot and Miller 2007). Davis (2002) specifically calls this strategy “legislating patriarchy” and characterizes it as an attempt to privatize the social safety net for poor families and encourage the dependence of women and children on men through marriage, rather than dependence on the state through welfare. Overall, these critics argue that promoting marriage as an antipoverty stratis an ideologically misguided political tactic because it endorses patriarchal values, does not address the socioeconomic and gendered roots of poverty, and exerts undue influence over disadvantaged women’s marital preferences.
Randles was initially drawn to the topic because of the dearth of ethnographic research on marriage promotion programs for low-income families. Moreover, having recently experienced an economically and emotionally costly divorce as a relatively privileged, childless, white Ph.D. candidate at a prestigious public university, and skeptical of the ability of therapeutic interventions to mitigate relationship challenges, Randles wondered upon entering the field how marriage, much less communication skills, could meaningfully help poor families. How would the relationship skills approach to promoting family and economic stability, now codified in welfare policy, appeal (or not) to poor and low-income families who struggled with seemingly much greater problems than communication challenges? She wondered if her respondents, particularly the poor parents this policy was intended to help, would adopt a stance similar to that of feminist critics. This stance, which Randles initially embraced, presumed that marriage promotion programs would unduly influence the marital choices of people living in poverty, reinforce a heteronormative view of marriage and relationships, and promote a dubious message that marriage can prevent poverty.
During 2008–2009, Randles conducted an 18-month ethnographic study of an exemplary federally funded relationship skills program for unmarried, low-income couples who were either expecting or had a baby under three months old. The study included more than 150 hours of participant observain classes, pseudonymously called Thriving Families, and 60 in-depth interviews, including 45 with parents who completed the program, 9 instructors, and 6 program staff. Most of the parents she interviewed for the study lived well below the poverty line, had little formal education, and were racial and ethnic minorities.
Immersed in the feminist literature on marriage promotion that critiqued the policy as a form of governmental discipline and control, especially for poor women, Randles expected to observe classes that focused on teaching parents about the purported economic and social benefits of marriage as an inducement to marry. Yet Randles surprisingly found that instructors barely mentioned marriage at all in the Thriving Families classes, largely out of fear of promoting a message that might not be amenable to couples struggling to make ends meet on a daily basis. When faced with participants who overwhelmingly already wanted to marry, but reasonably insisted on being more financially stable first, this tactic proved effective. Though staff and instructors tended to be more optimistic than couples themselves about marriage’s ability to improve couples’ lives, no one believed that marriage would fully solve their economic problems. Moreover, they agreed that more compassionate and cooperative communication and problem-solving techniques would make the burden of facing those economic problems less onerous. Many couples also reported that the classes served as a form of “counseling” they would not have been able to afford otherwise. Most especially appreciated how the classes offered them a free and safe collective space to discuss romantic and parenting challenges with other couples experiencing the same relationship and financial difficulties. The classes helped to normalize their relationship conflicts, many of which were the result of financial strain. The social context provided by the classes—in which same-sex couples were certainly allowed, if not welcomed enthusiastically by all—enabled parents to understand that many of their struggles were not theirs alone, nor the result of personal or psychological shortcomings, but rather often the direct result of trying to raise a family and keep a relationship intact in the midst of poverty. Ultimately, foregrounding disadvantaged parents’ perspectives in her analysis led Randles to conclude that Thriving Families classes did not necessarily operate as a form of disciplinary control for low-income families. Rather, her findings led her to conclude that publicly funded relationship skills education could, depending on how it is implemented, alternatively operate as a valuable social service in a society in which marriage is increasingly becoming a privilege of those who are more economically secure and can most easily access relationship support services.
Moreover, messages about responsible fatherhood that emerged in the classes did not unequivocally promote traditionally gendered family responsibilities or directly encourage women and children’s dependence on men through marriage (Davis 2002). The staff and instructors Randles interviewed for her research recognized that if they are to revive marital commitment in poor communities, promoting a definition of men’s marriageability based on occupational and financial success—a very patriarchal and regressive view of masculinity and family life—was not going to be effective given the socioeconomic circumstances of the low-income and often unemployed parents targeted by the program. To encourage couples to reconceptualize what is necessary for marriage, the classes Randles studied actually promoted a somewhat gender-neutral division of family labor, a message that at least partially challenged traditional understandings of masculinity and gendered family responsibilities. In an era when men, especially minorities, are finding it increasingly difficult to live up to the ideal of the traditional family breadwinner, the classes reframed what it means to be marriageable, as in a marriageable man is not one who must necessarily be a stable economic provider, but one who contributes equitably to his family in whatever way, through housework, child care, or emotional affection and care. Though many instructors and staff believed that marriage would encourage low-income men to become more stable providers, pointing to a patriarchal understanding of marriage’s ability to prevent poverty, they did not foreground this message in classroom instruction.
Finally, central to the feminist critique of the Healthy Marriage Initiative—that it would encourage poor women to get married by erroneously presenting marriage as a golden stepping stone out of poverty —is the mistaken assumption that women would exercise little to no agency in asserting their marital preferences when faced with the government’s pro-marriage message. Though numerous parents she interviewed told Randles that the classes helped improve their relationships with their partners, in very few cases did the classes ultimately influence participants’ decisions about marriage. Only one woman told her the classes had a direct impact on her decision to get married, and it was primarily because they encouraged her fiancé to help more around the house. Two other women, however, told her that taking the classes, some of which focused on identifying the signs of a healthy marriage, helped them decide to break off unhealthy relationships with their children’s fathers while teaching them to negotiate the challenges of coparenting without being romantically involved.
Randles concluded that the feminist critique of the Healthy Marriage Initiative is problematic because it focuses almost entirely on the macro-level intent of the policy to the exclusion of a more nuanced understanding of the how the policy, once implemented, would be received and utilized by parents in poverty. By adhering to the feminist methodological commitment to foreground the voices of her respondents, she ultimately concluded that in pursuit of an ostensibly conservative political and social goal—reducing welfare dependence by promoting marriage—publicly funded relationship skills classes can actually be a vehicle for progressive, feminist-oriented social change. The feminist critique of marriage promotion as a patriarchal and coercive policy initially obscured her ability to see this on-the-ground potential. For Randles, resolving the feminist ethnographer’s dilemma involved relinquishing the critical and largely theoretical feminist perspective in favor of one that privileged her respondents’ practical understanding of the value of the classes to their everyday lives.
Conclusion
While theoretically and empirically distinct, the three cases described above are united by their focus on conservative social spaces characterized by practices typically regarded as antithetical to feminist political goals. In the preceding discussion, we have tried to wrestle with some important but vexing questions that arose for us during the course of our fieldwork. These questions include:
Must one seek to disable the conservative spaces under study to justify one’s research program and findings or to maintain one’s feminist credibility?
How often do we overlook the progressive potential in seemingly conservative social spaces in order to mark our political opposition?
Is the duality approach the only interpretive strategy to redeem cultural others while preserving feminism’s political core?
Conservative social spaces are important sites for investigating the feminist ethnographer’s dilemma because they require us to attend to social actors who do not identify with feminism’s political project, or ascribe to it selectively, but whose lives and life chances have been shaped by the possibilities and limitations feminism generates. Listening carefully to subjects who operate in changing gendered structures, even when they do not themselves work toward feminist ends, and resisting the temptation to understand them simply as feminism’s nemeses or unknowing supporters, allows us to stay attuned to the “messiness” of social life (O’Brien 2010). It also fosters more complex understandings of how feminism affects conservative spaces and gendered subjectivity within those spaces. We believe these outcomes are central to reconciling the tension we identified between our feminist common sense(s) and the realities of the field we encountered in the course of our projects.
Our individual cases led us to reflect on feminism’s institutional development and entrenchment. After decades of hard-fought (and, in many cases, hard-won) battles for intellectual and political legitimacy, feminist researchers now occupy influential positions in scientific, intellectual, and political networks. As Sprague argues “the most influential scholars in scientific networks occupy a relatively privileged standpoint. The concern is that researchers’ privilege can influence their choices, and that as a result, the knowledge they produce will be ideological” (2005, 56). To counter that we must continue the feminist tradition of interrogating commonsense assumptions about social life, as well as the critical race and queer traditions of questioning feminist commonsense assumptions, lest these assumptions too unreflexively turn into ideological knowledge. That is, if we continue to take seriously the notion that knowledge is constructed, we must consider the possibility that feminism can just as easily (and unnecessarily) operate as a set of orthodox blinders as other ideological commitments.
Many feminist scholars draw on variations of the duality construct to resolve tensions like those we encountered. Like Mahmood, we found that it helped us make sense of each of our case studies to a point: like veiling, niddah laws provide orthodox Jewish women with unparalleled control over the sexual marriage economy; ex-gay ministries both reinforce and challenge traditional gender norms; and marriage classes can operate to both preserve and transform the institution of marriage. However, the duality construct did not adequately resolve our interpretive dilemmas because it leaves unexamined the link between feminist epistemology and feminist politics. At issue, we each realized, were feminist concepts and interpretive frameworks that were intimately bound up in feminism’s political goals. Unfortunately, we experienced these concepts and frameworks as constraining rather than facilitating our understanding of the empirical realities we encountered. Thus, while we each found dualities in our projects, the more salient tension was our experience of feminism as an analytic orthodoxy generated by a tension between its analytic and political projects.
The tensions we have described are not unique to feminist research. The structural constraints we identify are shared by other progressive research programs, including Marxian class analysis, queer theory, and critical race theory. However, important variations have occurred in the formal and informal institutionalization of each of these research programs. Most crucially, we argue that it is imperative for progressive ethnographers to turn a critical eye towards the traditions within which they work. In the case of feminist research, we argue that these tensions need not be problematic, nor do they necessarily limit researchers’ abilities to conduct rigorous research. Rather, we believe that they represent feminism’s maturation as a discipline. But this maturation, in our view, requires recognizing how feminist ideas have been institutionalized in the course of feminism’s success. Doing so requires feminists to develop an institutional reflexivity that includes analyzing how future generations of feminist researchers are socialized, how feminist editors and reviewers engage in gatekeeping, and how certain ideas or political positions become unquestioned forms of “common sense” in feminist research.
Based on our shared reflections about our fieldwork experiences, we offer a roadmap composed of three interrelated components we believe are essential for a rigorous and reflexive feminist analysis. First, feminist ethnographers should resist the temptation to impose a priori, orthodox feminist interpretive frameworks. Instead, we should consider how our theories and categories generated in the name of feminism limit or enhance our potential to identify gendered power structures, agency, or social change and progress. Second, we should ensure that the theoretical frameworks guiding our interpretations are firmly grounded in empirical realities rather than fueled by political opposition to the community or practices under study. Here, again, we are indebted to both feminist and grounded theory approaches to fieldwork, which encourage us to privilege our respondents’ voices and modify received theory when it cannot fully account for new empirical discoveries. Finally, we should consider progressive possibilities, and seek to recognize feminist influences, in ideologies and practices that initially seem non- or even antifeminist without needing to recoup them as feminist or compatible with feminist orthodoxies. This consideration may prevent analytical errors. It can also allow us to see the full range of feminism’s effects in social life and its relevance to the largest number of people, “conservative” and “revolutionary” alike. This approach is especially important for feminism to embrace as it strives to evolve in response to a changing world and to be salient for more people in different social contexts.
Feminist and other progressive ethnographic training ostensibly offers clear direction in resolving the feminist ethnographer’s dilemma. We are told that good ethnographic practices, grounded in postpositivist methodologies and epistemologies and undertaken by researchers well versed in feminist theories, make for good feminist analysis. Follow the research case and trust that it will guide you to a fair interpretation that will generate knowledge, rewrite social theories, and ultimately, promote feminist goals. But this advice is often undermined by subtle and unspoken pressures to use and vindicate feminist orthodoxies with our research. Many feminist scholars will recognize the frequently unspoken, yet deeply felt, sense of resistance each of us experienced when our ethnographic findings challenged feminist orthodoxies.
Feminist academic institutions, we suggest, have developed an organizational culture that, subtly or overtly, encourages feminist analysis to proceed in accordance with orthodox feminist ideas or principles, even when its participants are formally instructed to follow the highest standards in qualitative methods. As social researchers, it should come as no surprise that the increased institutionalization of a discipline is accompanied by institutionalized ways of thinking. All processes of knowledge production are constrained and shaped by researcher position along with institutional constraints. These constraints are not so much biases or prejudices as they are conceptual toolkits, vantage points that we bring with us. Feminists are no less susceptible to these constraints than researchers working within paradigms feminists have historically criticized, be it structural functionalism or positivist methodology.
Some have expressed a concern that our argument implies that feminists cannot produce good, valid ethnographies. To the contrary: as we show in the article, working through the dilemma helped us to both produce rigorous analyses of our field sites and to identify the many ways feminism influences conservative social spaces. We do argue, however, that in order to produce valid research, feminists should be cognizant of the tension between feminism’s dual agendas as a political and analytical project and how the former must cede to the latter. Institutionalization of certain feminist ideas and analyses needs to be recognized and taken into account when doing (or assessing) feminist ethnography. Moreover, as part of a methodological commitment to reflexivity, feminist scholars need to reckon with the strengths and limitations of feminist intellectual culture. The imperative to honor and take seriously the experiences of those studied can often challenge feminist understandings of what progressive social change is, what social change is desirable, and what social change has or has not already been achieved. Rather than understanding the feminist ethnographer’s dilemma as an obstacle for feminist researchers we believe that recognizing and wrestling with it represents a maturation of our feminist tradition and an opportunity to expand an ever-growing feminist field of vision and influence.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
The authors, who are listed alphabetically, contributed equally to the research and writing of this article. Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the 2010 meeting of the American Sociological Association and at the 2011 Activism and the Academy conference at Barnard College. The authors wish to thank Barrie Thorne, Raka Ray, members of the Sociology of Gender Workshop at the University of California, Berkeley, the Beatrice Bain Research Group, Kent Brintall, Sarah Quinn, Margot Weiss, Tey Meadow, and anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments and helpful suggestions. We would like to extend a special expression of gratitude to Kent Sandstrom for his incredibly helpful editorial guidance and support.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The authors’ respective research projects were generously supported by the followsources. Avishai: the Association for the Sociology of Religion, Fichter Grant; the Center for the Study of Sexual Cultures, University of California, Berkeley; Magistretti Fellowship; and the Hadassah-Brandies Institute Research Award. Gerber: the Beatrice Bain Research Group, University of California, Berkeley. Randles: the National Science Foundation (grant no. 0903069); and the following of the University of California, Berkeley: Center for the Study of Social Change, Graduate Division, Institute for Governmental Studies, Center for Child and Youth Policy, and Sociology Department.