Promiscuous (use of) feminist methodologies: the dirty theory and messy practice of educational research beyond gender

Abstract

This editor’s introduction narrates how we as researchers trained in qualitative and feminist methodology came to read our own work as promiscuous and interpret the terms “feminist” and “feminism” through both practice and theory. It marks the circulation of the term “promiscuous feminist methodology” and registers its salience for educational researchers who risk blundering feminist theories and methodologies in chaotic and unbridled ways. The use of the phrase “promiscuous feminist” to describe methodology is not merely an attention-seeking oxymoron, though we hope that its irony is not lost. The sexism embedded in language is what makes the notion of “feminists gone wild” tantalizing, though what we put forth is how the messy practice of inquiry transgresses any imposed boundaries or assumptions about what counts as research and feminism. Because the theories we put to work “get dirty” as they are contaminated and re-appropriated by other ways of thinking and doing through (con)texts of messy practices, promiscuous feminist methodologies are always in-the-making and already ahead of what we think they are. Set in motion by anxieties, disappointments, and frustrations of feeling out of place in the academy and in feminism, we examine our personal, academic, and political engagement with these contradictions that became the springboard for this special issue.

Keywords:

• feminist methodology
• materiality
• promiscuity

Acknowledgements

In closing, we would like to thank Aparna, Becky, and Fran for participating in and supporting this different kind of process and intervention in the academy, and Rick and Maggie for thoughtfully and carefully reading our readings of feminist research. We are thrilled to showcase all of this work here. We would also like to acknowledge (in no certain order) folks who have provided encouragement, critique, and labor as friends, mentors, colleagues, and peer reviewers, all of which were integral to this process: Kimini Mayuzumi, Magda Lewis, Chinwe Okpalaoka, Lisa Mazzei, Tasha Smith, Jessi Hitchins, Chloe Brushwood Rose, Bernadette Baker, Crystal Laura, Wanda Pillow, Riyad Shahjahan, Kate McCoy, Alecia Youngblood Jackson, Kathleen Quinlivan, Magda Lewis, Nirmala Erevelles, Lisa Cary, Jerry Rosiek, Roland Sintos Coloma, and Nina Asher.

Notes

1. For example, as we finalized the editor’s introduction in January 2013, we became aware of a conference being held at Columbia University, New York, NY, USA in March 2013 entitled “Thinking Feminism at the Limits” which sets out to examine how feminist and queer thinkers are extending feminism beyond the limits of gender analysis. See http://irwag25.com/feminism-at-the-limits for more information.

2. In addition to this introduction, the issue includes Rick Voithofer’s opening remarks that offer a close reading of each article. His piece will orient the reader to the wide variety of promiscuous methodologies performed in this issue.

3. When a contributor is cited without a date, we are referring to the contributor’s work in this issue.

4. This panel included Childers, Daza, Sophia Sarigianides, Maggie MacLure and Rick Voithofer. We would like to acknowledge Sophia’s early contributions to the discussion of this idea.

5. According to Daza, “(Ab)-use” is a term employed by (Spivak, 1999, p. 142, note 43) that roughly translates “to use from below” but not be outside of; it is meant to convey more than simply “abuse” and to be distinct from other attempts to use the Enlightenment critically. According to Spivak, “the Latin prefix ‘ab’ says much more than ‘below.’ Indicating both ‘motion away’ and ‘agency, point of origin,’ ‘supporting,’ as well as ‘the duties of slaves,’ [the (ab)-use of European Enlightenment] nicely captures the double bind of the postcolonial and the metropolitan migrant … the public sphere gains and the private sphere constraints of the Enlightenment” (Spivak, 2012, pp. 3–4).

6. In her 1988 essay “Defining Feminist Ethnography,” Visweswaran (1994) argues that “the project of feminist ethnography [is] one that continually challenges the very notion of a canon” (p. 39). Here Visweswaran foreshadows promiscuity in offering “a series of experiments … for the practice of feminist ethnography” (p. 10). While women and gender remain objects of study, Visweswaran’s statement – “if I have not told you anything of the women with whom I worked, I have at least told you something of why it was that I attempted to work with them” – marks an epistemological shift “where gender ceases to hold the center of feminist theory” (pp. 112–113). Visweswaran argues that feminist ethnography based on the failure of feminist thinking and the failure of ethnography’s “fieldwork” “will not produce a substantially different (or ‘decolonized’) ethnography, but a feminist ethnography characterized by ‘homework’ might” (p. 113). For Visweswaran, the praxis of feminist ethnography is the result of the breaking down of conditions for producing an ethnographic monograph of practice, people, and context before the theoretical essay (p. 11), of when “experience directs us to ask certain questions of theory that theory alone may not enable us to ask” (p. 137). In the concept of “identifying ethnography,” she takes up “the difficulties and challenges that arise from being accountable to multiple audiences” (p. 11) as the problem of recognition both in/of genres and subjects (pp. 114–140).