Importance Of Diversity In Feminist Research example essay topic

In the first section of essays the authors discuss how and why feminist scholars do research is grappled with in each selection. The authors / feminist scholars discuss the importance of research and methodology. Sandra Harding asserts in her essay, "Is There a Feminist Method?" Harding argues that it is "difficult to define a distinct feminist method because method and methodology have been intertwined with each other and with epistemological issues". (2) Moreover, it is, she argues difficult and potentially dangerous to identify anything as a distinctive method-her argument is that " it is not by looking at research methods that one will be able to identify distinctive features of the best feminist research methods". In other words it is dangerous to mystify feminist research because it locks researchers, students, scholars and critics into rules and ideas that don't necessarily encompass all facets of feminist scholarship and the efforts that are made to understand it. The idea of there being a single "feminist method" assumes that there is a single thing, or several concrete things / ideas feminist scholars must be searching for.

Harding's argument is supported by author's Greene, Khan in "Feminist scholarship and the social construction of women". Greene / Khan assert-that "feminist scholarship undertakes the dual task of deconstructing predominately male cultural paradigms and reconstructing a female perspective and experience in an effort to change the tradition that has silenced and marginalized us... feminist scholars work to expose and the collusion between ideology and cultural practices". (1) She asserts that there are two premises about gender, the first is, "the inequality of the sexes is neither a biological given nor a divine mandate, but a cultural construct", and the second is, "the male perspective has dominated fields of knowledge shaping their paradigms and methods". Here the authors are illustrating the constraints ideology and methodology place on feminist research and substantiating the claim that ideology and methodology are emblems of constraint in the feminist discipline because of their universal assumptions and dependence on the paradigm for the purposes of legitimizing their claims.

The authors, Greene, Khan, Harding, and Cannon all deal with the issue of being tied down to methodology and method that would define feminist work, and solidify its direction while at the same time not allowing it to be fluid enough to evolve as a legitimate academic discipline. As it the issue is raised in "Race and Class Bias in Qualitative Research on Women" that it is far more difficult to do a comprehensive study of all women because poor women and women of color are almost always over-looked in research projects because of the extra effort it takes to cultivate participants in a particular study. "In order to get black women or women of color to participate researchers had / have to pursue subjects in more labor-intensive recruitment strategies. Often black women required face to face contact in order to get involved in the research".

(107) After the difficult recruitment of participants women of color are good and active subjects. "When black women felt assured that the research was worthwhile they were eager to participate". (107) In both the Cannon piece and the Greene / Khan piece the authors stress the importance of diversity in feminist research, but that it is difficult while working within constructs of "legitimate knowledge". Cannon asserts, .".. diversity makes the task of identifying common patterns almost impossible. Unfortunately, as a result, much of the newly emerging scholarship on women excludes women of color and working-class women of all races". (115) While Greene / Khan emphasize its importance, .".. a deconstructive feminist criticism is potentially revolutionary.

In order to understand the collusion between literature and ideology - to become myth deciphers' - we need to evolve a theory and practice true to the most radical implications of our positions. Only in this way can feminist scholars hope to change the tradition that has silenced and marginalized us". (26) The argument then is that feminist scholars will never be able to develop a deconstructive revolutionary criticism if they must operate within the academic and universal constraints having a concrete method, methodology and ideology, which would be founded upon the very ideas that have placed women in the world of symbolic signifies in which they remain to this day. "The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house". Aud re Lorde.