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For all those who are interested or were unable to attend the workshop, Róisín has kindly shared the slides and references used in the lecture. You can download the slides from this link: Feminist and queer methods workshop – Ryan-Flood.

See below for the reference list, many of which can also be found in Silence and Secrecy in the Research Process: Feminist Reflections. 

References:

Finch, J. (1983) ‘It’s great to have someone to talk to’: ethics and politics of interviewing women’. In Bell, C. & Roland, H. (eds) Social Researching: Politics, Problems, Practice. London: Routledge.

Gilbert, M. (1994) ‘The Politics of Location: Doing Feminist Research at “Home”’, Professional Geographer, 46(1): 90-96.

Katz, C. (1994) ‘Playing the Field: Questions of Fieldwork in Geography’, Professional Geographer, 46(1): 67-72.

Kirsch, G. E. (1999) Ethical Dilemmas in Feminist Research: The politics of location, interpretation and publication. New York: SUNY.

Kulick, D. & Wilson, M. (Eds.) (1995) Taboo: Sex, Identity and Erotic Subjectivity in Anthropological Fieldwork. London: Routledge.

Lorde, A. (1984) ‘The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action’. In Lorde, A. Sister Outsider. California: The Crossing Press Feminist Series.

Maynard, M. & Purvis, J. (1994) Researching Women’s Lives from a Feminist Perspective. London: Taylor & Francis.

Mullings, B. (1999) ‘Insider or outsider, both or neither: some dilemmas of interviewing in a cross-cultural setting’, Geoforum, 30 (4): 337-50.

Newton, E. (1993) ‘My Best Informant’s Dress: The Erotic Equation in Fieldwork’, Cultural Anthropology, 8(1): 3-23.

Roberts, H. (ed) (1991) Doing Feminist Research. London: Routledge.

Patai, D. (1991) ‘US academics and Third World women: is ethical research possible?’ In Gluck, S. & Patai, D. (eds) Women’s Words: The Feminist Practice of Oral History. London: Routledge.

Ryan-Flood, R. & Gill, R. (eds.) (2010) Secrecy and Silence in the Research Process: Feminist Reflections. London: Routledge.

Ryan-Flood, R. & Rooke, A. (eds.) (2009) ‘Que(e)rying Methodology: Lessons and Dilemmas from Lesbian Lives’ [journal special issue], Journal of Lesbian Studies, 13(2).

Spronk, R. (2011) ‘Beyond Pain, Towards Pleasure in the Study of Sexuality in Africa’, in Lyons, A. P. & Lyons, H. D. (Eds.) Sexualities in Anthropology: A Reader. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.

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Last Friday 30th October 2015, I was lucky to attend and present at the ‘Feminist Research Methodologies: Challenges and Negotiations’ conference for postgraduate students at Sheffield Hallam University, brilliantly organized by PhD student Rachel Handforth. The atmosphere was just perfect: warm and supportive, challenging and inspiring – with papers offering stimulating insights from multiple disciplines and feminisms (see programme here). And on top of that a fantastic keynote by Jessica Ringrose (UCL Institute of Education) on ‘Boning up on Impact: Feminist intra-activist research assemblages’!

In my paper titled ‘Interrogating commercial women’s media: A solidary-critical feminist approach’, I explored some ethico-political issues and dilemmas pertaining to the analysis of 64 interviews I have conducted with editors and writers of women’s magazines. Drawing on integrated principles from the feminist ethics of care (e.g., Carol Gilligan 1983) and intention (Val Gillies & Pam Alldred 2012), along with Ros Gill’s (2007) notion of ‘critical respect’, I advanced a ‘solidary-critical’ approach as useful for my study, but also other social science research, with interests ranging from the practices of ‘cool corporations’ (Jim McGuigan 2009) to social justice activism. I likewise argued that in the contemporary heterogeneous terrain of reinvigorated and emergent feminisms, solidary-critical interventions have much to offer.

References

Gill, R. (2007) Critical Respect: The Difficulties and Dilemmas of Agency and ‘Choice’ for Feminism: A Reply to Duits and van Zoonen. European Journal of Women’s Studies 14(1): 69–80.

Gilligan, C. (1983) In A Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Gillies, V., and Alldred, P. (2012) The Ethics of Intention: Research as a Political Tool. In M. Mauthner, M. Birch, J. Jessop, & T. Miller (Eds.), Ethics in Qualitative Research. Second edition. London: SAGE.

McGuigan, J. (2009) Cool Capitalism. London: Pluto.

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On January 30 2015, Laura García-Favaro presented a paper entitled “The ‘truth’ cannot be sexist?: Postfeminist biologism in transnational technologies of mediated intimacy”. This was part of the Critical Sexology Seminar ‘Feminist Encounters with Evolutionary Psychology’, which was convened by Rachel O’Neill and took place at King’s College London.

This seminar examined the social life of evolutionary psychology from feminist perspectives, bringing into focus the historical, cultural, and political continuities between evolutionary psychology and contemporary postfeminism. With contributions from Professor Deborah Cameron (University of Oxford), Dr Celia Roberts (Lancaster University) and Laura García-Favaro (City University London), discussions facilitated at this event explored questions such as: In what ways do evolutionary narratives contribute to the naturalisation of sexual difference that has become a pervasive feature of postfeminist media culture? How, in particular, do evolutionary and biological logics manifest within and across sites of mediated intimacy, from Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus to Fifty Shades of Grey? Further, how might narratives from evolutionary psychology serve to consolidate market-orientated approaches to sex and relationships being elaborated under contemporary capitalism? Can the persistence of evolutionary psychology as a framework for understanding social life be mapped onto the broader conjuncture of neoliberalism? Are there unexamined continuities between evolutionary psychology and neoliberal rationalities, particularly with regard discourses of individualism, hierarchy, and meritocracy? Finally, how can feminists negotiate the double complexity of evolutionary psychology as both an academic field and a repository of popular narratives of gender and sexuality as they attempt to challenge relations of inequality and oppression? (O’Neill, 2014)

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GSRF Launch Event

On May 15 2014, we officially launched GSRF.  We were incredibly lucky to do so with a public lecture by the brilliant feminist sociologist Bev Skeggs. The lecture was followed by discussion and a wine reception.

Figures of fun, subjects of judgment in the making of proper persons

Since Francis Bacon’s sixteenth century ‘theory of monstrosity’ those with power have developed numerous symbolic methods to classify and judge the value of the powerless in order to force them to labour. For women judgment was usually based on their sexuality in relation to national propriety, purity and progress. The excessively sexual woman has both threatened and fascinated for centuries. This paper will explore how caricatures of female sexuality have developed over time ending with analysis from a recent research project on reality television, Reacting to Reality TV: Audience, Performance, Value, 2012. This research explores modern morality plays, where cartoon versions of this long history of judgment are spectacularly performed on our screens.

PIXIE photo

Beverley Skeggs is an ESRC Professorial Fellow in Sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London. She has also worked in the areas of Women’s Studies and Cultural Studies. Her main publications include The Media (1992), Feminist Cultural Theory (1995), Formations of Class and Gender (1997), Transformations: Thinking Through Feminism (2000), Class, Self, Culture (2004), Sexuality and the Politics of Violence and Safety (2004, with Les Moran, Paul Tyrer and Karen Corteen), Feminism After Bourdieu (2004, with Lisa Adkins), and Reality TV and Class (2011) and Reacting to Reality Television: Audience, Performance and Value (2012) (both with Helen Wood). She is the co-editor of The Sociological Review.

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