Feminist Methodology is an aggregate of disciplinary and cross-disciplinary methods that share many of the following ambitions and can take different positions on them. Not all feminist research will take up all the projects and principles listed here, but it will demonstrate a substantive awareness of them. In general, feminist methodology and its more local methods emphasize the connections among forms of oppression and the need for scholarship to resist them, with the goal of making societies more just.
1. Identifies and addresses the absence of the lives and work of women and sexual and gender minorities from dominant cultural and academic narratives.
2. Seeks to uncover and to understand past and present patterns of power at a variety of scales (local, regional, national, transnational) specific to gender, sexual, race and class oppression; acknowledges the intersectional nature of subjectivities across a variety of social and political and other formations.
3. Questions normative assumptions about gender, sexuality, identity, and subjectivity; explores the history of gender categories and employs a broad and inclusive understanding of genders.
4. Engages in dynamic relationships with and learns from activism and the work of people outside the academy.
5. Encourages different and often experimental genres of scholarship and teaching, some of which may blur distinctions between the academic and the activist.
6. Shapes and is shaped by feminist pedagogy and a commitment to compassionate and challenging teaching that takes account of power imbalances within the classroom and beyond.
7. Commits to addressing and reducing the power imbalance between researcher and research participants, often incorporating forms of researcher self-reflexivity.
8. Rejects white supremacist and extractive genealogies of scholarship, insisting upon just citational politics – especially of scholars from the Global South and Black, Indigenous, and People of Color scholars – whose work and ideas are too often appropriated without adequate acknowledgement.
9. Recognizes and values different qualitative and quantitative methods, approaches, and genres/forms, including but not limited to:
a. Archival research
b. Close Reading
c. Ethnography and Autoethnography
d. Experimental/Multi-media Forms
e. Formal Modeling
f. Memoir/Personal Narrative
g. Metadata analysis
h. Narrative Analysis
i. Oral Histories
j. Statistical/Demographic Analysis
k. Visual Analysis
10. Engages feminist concepts from a variety of fields, acknowledging and building on prior frameworks while developing new ones. These include but are not limited to:
a. Engaged Research
b. Environmentalism
c. Intersectionality
d. Materialism
e. Performativity of identity
f. Situated knowledge
g. Others (we will always be inventing/theorizing more...)