Maithree Wickramasinghe,Feminist Research Methodology: Making Meanings of Meaning-Making.

Reviewed by: Maryann Barone-Chapman, Cardiff University, Wales, UK

Maithree Wickramasinghe’s Feminist Research Methodology: Making Meaning of Meaning-Making, takes a micro look at the way in which Sri Lankan feminist activists consider the realities of women and society in their research. Her questioning of the way in which knowledge claims could be both authoritative and valid outside of a positivist framework takes three research typologies of feminist research activism in Sri Lanka, women, gender and feminism, to re-envision a new construct of feminist research methodology as a global paradigm. I felt there was the distinct possibility Dr Wickramasinghe could be attempting to queer feminist research methodology.

This ambitious work opens with a well-considered introduction, outlining the structure of the book, definitions and parameters of meaning, leading to rich methodological thought set out over two parts. In Part 1, Methodology Matters, Wickramasinghe offers a historical context pre-1975 through to the emergence of women-related writing and research, including the position of liberal, democratic and Marxist feminist agendas, before presenting a local context. Her tools are postmodern meta-theory, homogeneity and difference, to conceptualize subjectivity, ontology, epistemology, method, theory and ethics/politics. These have been diagrammed to show how the ingredients crosscut, intersect, overlap/or gap (p. 53) in the process of meaning making, before entering each in more depth in Part 2.

Part 2, Aspects of Feminist Research Methodology, consisting of Chapters 3 through 8, begins with Subjectivity: Reflecting on the Self as / in Meaning Making, and works under the author’s conceptualization of how subjectivity is both interplay and contestation among social, psychic, corporeal, ontological and discursive forces leading to a split subject fluidity (Foucault, 1980a). Reflexivity becomes a dialogical overarching act of conscious consideration from hypothesis to final outcome. Yet all the while there is the writer’s unconscious processes, making for an individual reflexivity of a researcher writing about herself or one based on collective reflexivity, a praxis with and among researcher and participants. Every conceptual, epistemological, and ontological point is presented in a style of critical contemplation situating the work in an emerging discovery process. Thus the work is situated and justified through reflexivity.

Chapter 4, An Ontology: Research Realities in Meaning-Making, explores the tensions between ontology, epistemology and aspects of feminism. What interested me was how the author would define a feminist research methodology, based on her own parameters outside of ‘a conscious, structuralist, theoretical positioning’ unified by ‘attributes among six components’, against any other methodology claiming to include the researcher’s subjectivity and self-reflexivity as a key ingredient. Reflexivity is not limited to feminism or feminist topics, though it is perceived as central to a feminist research (Tickner, 2005). As psychosocial research draws more from the psychoanalytical consulting room, a researcher’s reflexivity of affective states becomes a cohort in meaning making. But here the very use of the word feminist too easily connotes the patriarchal line of what the feminine does that is different from the masculine, automatically en-gendering a predictive androcentric subject; research on and by the oppressed (Routledge, 2007). Wickramasinghe’s conceptualization of feminist research methods provides a new structure to feminist empiricism, feminist standpoint theory and feminist postmodernism through a systemic use of reflexivity to bring more rigor to processes of justifying knowledge.

Feminist research began as non-academic research in community and government settings drawing from the experience of women living in a world where they were subordinate to men (Wadsworth, 2001). Wickramasinghe’s (p. 73) claim that ‘denigration of feminisms in Sri Lanka has often been based on the question where feminist knowledge comes from’ appears to have lead her into some of the domains of post-positivism, such as systematic inquiry, including interest in describing observable phenomena (Gortner, 1990) without the post-positivist belief in sensory and mental limitations (Routledge, 2007). Three questions underscore her theorization of ontology to create an epistemology that is at once credible and suitable to a time when new paradigms are emerging:

What are the ‘realities that are part of an impact on the research process?

Having established thus far why it is important for feminists to consider what knowledge is within specific contexts and circumstances (Harding, 1987; Stanley, 1990) she moves into Chapter 5, An Epistemology: Making Meanings of Being /Doing Gender. It is here Wickramasinghe’s authorial nexus on the current state of feminist research draws in every ingredient in her new paradigm; an argument for the necessity of the book in itself. She foreshadowed Chapter 5 in the introduction, ‘The chapter on epistemology will focus on gender because of the way that gender is conceptualized as going beyond mere theoretical interests into the epistemological: as an epistemology in one’s sense of being/doing (ontology) and knowing (epistemology)’ (p. 52). What caught my attention here was Wickramasinghe’s foray into gender through Immanuel Kant’s situating ontology as epistemology and coming out the other side with multiple, subjugated knowledges (Foucault, 1980b: 81–82) in order to counter positivist / empiricist paradigms. The foundation of a feminist epistemology or meaning making is based on the premise ‘It is being / doing women, which gives women privilege knowledge about gender as a construct / concept (savoir)…and the interpretations of realities (though often contested) form the foundations for feminisms, feminist knowledge and meaning making’ (p. 95). Underpinning the argument is the definition of feminist research having aspiration for political and social change citing Miens (1991) ‘the personal is the political and the political is the personal.’

Chapter 5 is drenched with feminist wisdom, realities, and contextual frames of resistance to gender as used to by patriarchy (which I see as genderless) to situate the work of women writers, researchers and those female participants who contribute to their work. Even if you are not a writer or researcher, Chapter 5 is worth the price of the book and is a high point, in my view.

The arc of her narrative then descends to earth, with A Method Literature Reviewing as Making Meaning (Chapter 6). While the author cites a dearth of ‘consistent writing on feminist research methodology’ (p. 113) I did not find the content as rich as I anticipated. The author makes interesting links between events and their feminist applications but as a methodology, Literature Reviews by their very nature of being a selective universe is subjectively informed by the intentions and oeuvre of the researcher. Advocating change for women, she points out, is not enough and I would agree. Her attempt to classify women’s research approaches – which include the empiricist bent, action research, theoretical arguments, and mixed-methods – concludes with the admission, ‘it may be difficult to define each classification in a concrete form’ (p. 123).

Where the chapter shines, however, is in her holistic attention to meaning making through parallel forms of knowledge, including research that ‘is widely influenced by researcher’s intuition, and is sometimes instinctive rather than a formal, theorised, methodological process’ (p. 112). However, I found a definition of feminist research methodology drawn from the DNA of ‘women’s intuition’ to be dichotomous with the clearly stated intent of the book to be evidence that feminist research methodology can withstand scrutiny from positivist /empirical quarters. Gendering intuition relegates it to a feminine stereotype, undermining the gender knowledge women researchers bring to the being/doing of women subjects. The argument throughout is attempting to hold a feminist line against the prioritization schemas of patriarchal epistemologies, but in so doing some premises become a willing target for criticism against a history of epistemology where feminine intuition has been viewed as hysterical and irrational behavior (Appignanesi, 2008).

In Chapter 7, Making and Unmaking Meaning in Theory, there are further classifications, intended to situate standpoints and intersects of knowledge (p. 132). The idea of ‘location’ as a fulcrum to how feminist theory and ideology is applied, are considered across a range of ontological/ epistemological factors. Dichotomies come with factors that are both paradoxical and intersected, which may include metaphysical realities, internalized psychological, cultural or political identifications as standpoints of the researcher. Here standpoints mean feminist concerns with subjectivity, identity politics and personal experience that express value for women’s way of knowing. I missed seeing the perspective of the particular knowledge a woman has of what it means to have a woman’s body. The element of questioning, linking, imagining and intuiting for and on behalf of women, reaching outside of gender stereotyping, remains a tension within a feminist research frame.

We come on to the pen-ultimate topic area with Chapter 8, Ethics-Politics Feminist Ethics/Politics in Meaning Making, which is all about location. In Sri Lanka, feminist ethics are linked to the politics of altruism, which diagrammatically appear to overlap to the left with Marxism and to a local version of right as Liberal Democracy. More knowledge of local political fractions outside of a feminist frame would have been helpful to understand them within a feminist perspective.

Overall the book is remarkable for its detail, but once the paradigms of innovative thinking are laid out in the first five chapters the rest of the book is left to the reader to extrapolate to global applications. So in some way the book is back to front. I would have preferred to get into local stories and issues first and from these have the paradigms emerge. I found Chapters 6–8 tenaciously dense and overly complex as if to make the study seem more authentic, perhaps due to the perception feminist research does not have enough credibility among scholars. It is a richly endowed book, albeit in two halves coming together in the final chapter, Conclusions Towards a Feminist Research Methodological Matrix – Making Meanings of Meaning-Making. Here Wickramasinghe illustrates the previous 169 pages with considerable detail in a Feminist Research Methodology Matrix. This alone is a remarkable exercise in feminist taxonomy, for at last FRM has a discipline of construction and applications.

Wickramasinghe uses many complex mirrors to explore the making of meaning based upon the cross-pollinating of postmodernist thinking with rigorous attention to methods of establishing subjectivity, ontology, epistemology and theory to articulate feminism and feminisms. In effect, she does for feminist research methodology what Butler (1993) did for gender identity. In this endeavor, feminist research methods lose some of its identity as purely feminine in origin. To her credit the intellectual muscle brought to bear might just mean feminist research methods have moved closer to being queered.