Lynn A. Staeheli Victoria A. Lawson

Feminism, Praxis, and Human Geography

In this paper, we discuss the methodological implications of combining feminist and geographic research. In feminist research efforts, the0y,method, and purpose of research are inextricable. We examine the meaning of this blending for the language, conceptualizations, methods, and scale used in feminist geographic research. Through feminist geographic research, we can build a continuity of women and men as feminist writers inside the academy and in the community. The goal of this more inclusive research and knowledge is the transformation of gendered power relations. [in] feminist social analyses . . . it is not exactly alternative methods that are responsible for what is significant about this research. Instead, we can see in this work alternative origins of problematics, explanatory hypotheses and evidence, alternative purposes of inquiry, and a new prescription for the appropriate relationship between the inquirer and her/his subject of inquiry. One can think of these as part of the “method of feminist inquiry,” but to do so conflates research methods, methodologies, and epistemologies. (Harding 1987, p. vii)

By opening feminist meanings to geographers and geographic meanings to feminists, each stands to gain, for the two occupy much the same ground but have been standing with their backs to each other. It is my hope that geography and feminism will now turn around and communicate with each other face to face. (Hanson 1992, p. 571) Hanson’s (1992) Presidential Address to the AAG lays out substantive connections and complementarities between geography and feminism. In this paper we extend her analysis to discuss the methodological implications of this union. The implications of attention to feminism in geography include a substantive focus on gender and its construction, concerns with the ways in which the relationship between researcher and researched shapes the uestions posed, theoretical constructs, the nature of evidence, and the ways in w ich all of these feed into political strategies to effect social change. Many geographers question

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The authors thank Susan Clarke, Meghan Cope, David Hodge, Lucy Jarosz, John Paul Jones 111, Don Mitchell, Geraldine Pratt, Chola Witt, and anonymous reviewers for their comments and suggestions.

Lynn A. Staeheli is assistant professor in the department of geography and the lnstitute of Behavioral Science, University of Colorado. Victoria A. Lawson is associate professor of geography, University of Washington. Geographical Analysis, Vol. 27, No. 4 (October 1995) 0 Ohio State University Press

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the claim that feminism entails a distinct methodology. We agree that feminism has important commonalities with other approaches in terms of theory, method, and praxis. However, feminism’s substantive focus on gender and distinct political agenda differentiates feminism from other approaches such as positivism, humanism, and structuralism in important ways (McDoweI1 1992; Stanley and Wise 1990; Kobayashi 1994). Central to feminist research is understanding the social construction of knowledge, and its role in the explication and transformation of gendered power relations. These power relations are pervasive-for example, operating between women, between men, between women and men, within households, between races, in communities, in labor markets, and in the broader political and economic dimensions of our lives. Feminist analyses entail an ontological position that views the subjects of research as situated in complex webs of power relations that construct and shape those very subjects (McDowell 1993). These relations are taken as knowable and central to understanding the “real” world. Power relations also shape the research process, being implicated in the construction of research subjects, theoretical concepts, and language. The challenge in uniting feminism and geography is to understand how we go forward in analyzing the geography of gender relations. We argue that feminist research processes respond to this challenge through an emphasis on the connections between theoretical propositions, ways of knowing, and strategies of social change.l These connections are central to our paper. Connections between ontological positions, theoretical propositions, and social activism have also been a goal of researchers proceeding from other approaches such as those broadly (and often loosely) identified as positivism, humanism, and structuralism. However, positivist approaches generally take an atomistic ontological position in which the social position of the researcher is independent from the knowledge she or he produces ( G . Rose 1993), and in which the empirically observed world adequately represents the operations and mechanisms of the “real” world (Sayer 1984). Humanist research shares a concern with subjectivity and a substantive focus on individual experience and everyday life that, when centered on gender, intersects with feminism. However, humanist theory neglects the social construction of individual experiences through power relations that can be both known and changed. For feminists, one purpose of pursuing knowledge is to engage in intellectual and political struggles that address social constructions that oppress women. As Eyles (1993) has argued, feminists have taken the lead in highlighting the role of research methodology in understanding those constructions (D. Rose 1993; Dyck 1993; McDowell 1992). Structural approaches share a relational ontology and a commitment to praxis with feminism but do .not center gender relations and thus entail a different praxis. On the surface this may imply that feminism simply entails a different political agenda. However, taking seriously the social construction of gendered power relations and our knowledge of them implies that we reexamine the connections between theory, method, and practice in all research methodologies. It is through this combination of epistemological critique of the research process and substantive concern with the pervasive influence of gender that feminist analysis has the potential to transform our understandings of power relations simultaneously with the power relations themselves. ‘We do not see feminist methodology as a monolith, but rather as a complex characterized by differences and indeed conflict. It is not our purpose here to represent and inventory all feminist literature and thinking. A central goal here is to distill key ideas from a range of feminist work as these inform methodological debates centered on analyses of material social relations, expessions of unequal power, and constructions of masculinity and femininity.

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In this paper we explore feminist research methodologies. In keeping with feminist approaches (broadly), we do not separate theory, method, and practice in this paper, but in each section we center one of these. The first section highlights issues of theory such as concepts and language and the construction of difference. The second section features methods and analytical techniques for studying the gendered character of the social world, space, and place. The final section brings together elements of a feminist geographic methodology in praxis through which the purpose of research, theory, and method are united. THEORY CONSTRUCTION

The combination in feminism of a relational ontology and a substantive focus on gender has important implications for the process of theory construction. Just as gendered power relations structure the social world, they also pervade research practice and what we learn from research. Feminists bring to geography a focus on the gendered character of the social world and of knowledge as reflected in language, concepts, and theory. This opens the possibility for new ways of theorizing that will have implications for the substantive questions posed, the method employed to answer them, and the interpretation and use of research. Obscuring and Exposing Gender Relations through Concepts and Language

Theoretical concepts, and the language used to express them, define the limit of what is theorizable and so have implications for the process of framing categories, research problems, and of validating knowledge. In short, we cannot know our world outside of our ability to name it. The language we use can both obscure and expose that which we subsequently “see” theoretically, empirically, and politically. There is a dialectical relationship between concepts and language and the material social relations through which they are constructed. Our language is laden with power relations such that the theory constructed in language will bear the marks of these power relations even as theory and language are employed to transform these gendered relations. While we cannot escape the limitations of language and representations of the material world, we must use language to engage in political struggle. In this section we explore the double-edged potential of language. Theory, concepts, and language are inseparable from the social relations in which researchers are situated. Scott (1990, p. 135) argues for the mutual construction of language and social life in defining language as not simply words or even a vocabulary and set of grammatical rules but, rather, a meaning-constituting system: that is, any system-strictly verbal or otherthrough which meaning is constructed and cultural practices organized and by which, accordingly, people represent and understand their world, including who they are and how they relate to others. Because language is inextricable from theoretical understandings and social life, its role in understanding gender relations is problematic. On one hand, language is the central way in which we know gender relations, and on the other hand, language is implicated in constructing and obscuring those very relations. Early feminist critiques of scientific language were followed only inasmuch as they suggested we neuter our language. However, gender neutral language can also obscure unequal gender relations in our conceptualizations. As Bondi (1990, p. 160) argues,

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what amounts to a polite sanitisation of language is serving to obscure important issues.. . . My suspicion is that careful avoidance of obviously gendered language is in practice a new strategy for avoiding . . . the importance of gender in intellectual practice. The limited understanding of the feminist critique of scientific language is inadequate on two grounds. First, simply changing our language to gender-neutral pronouns allows power relations to go unchallenged. For gender-neutral language to have the desired effect, it would have to hold that the society inscribed in and described by that language was also gender neutral. While language will have some effect, the problem with gender-neutral language is the security it provides to some who think the world has changed simply by language’s sanitization. Gender-neutral language serves to obscure gendered social relations, thereby making it difficult to name, theorize, analyze, and challenge those relations. Second, and more importantly, our concepts need to be constructed to represent the gendered character of the social world. Within feminism, the focus on gender as an axis of analysis illuminates the ways in which people’s experiences in apparently distinct realms of life are fundamentally connected. We need theory, concepts, and language to express these material social relations. Consider the example of research on women’s labor-force participation. Employers and many researchers have often conceptualized women as “secondary wage earners” with the implication that they are working for pin money and lipstick [as analyzed by Joekes (1985) and Ong (1987)l. This concept denies gendered realities in two ways. First, a long history of research has exposed the inaccuracy of this label through demonstrating the importance of women’s wage-earning activity. In reality, many women are heads of households and/or primary wage earners whose incomes provide money essential to household survival (see, for example, Massey 1984; Christopherson 1989; Jones and Kodras 1990; Mulroy 1988; Oberhauser 1993). Second, the concept is narrow theoretically. Labor-force participation should always be understood in relation to other gendered divisions of labor that affect both women and men. These divisions of labor occur in households, communities, the state, and other social institutions (see, for example, Mackenzie and Rose 1983; McDowell and Massey 1984; Gibson and Graham 1992; Dyck 1993; Lawson 1993). Both the theoretical and material importance of these divisions of labor in the reproduction of daily life, and of capitalism, is obscured by narrowly conceptualizing work. This example demonstrates the power of focusing on gender to theorize the fundamental relations between production and re roduction. Feminist geographers are involveB in building relational theory that focuses on gender relations and practices to explicate the structure of the material world, the experience of living in that world, and the ways in which we interpret reality. Feminist geographic theories seek the connections between the activities and spaces of daily life in households, communities, workplaces, and political organizations. As examples, Hanson and Pratt (1988, 1991) demonstrate the ways in which locational decisions for work and residence are conditioned by constraints and resources provided through the household. Rather than focus solely on the public site of the workplace and transportation to an unexamined private space of the home, they demonstrate that behavior in each realm is shaped by the other; in highlighting these interconnections, they provide a richer, more nuanced theorization of residential location. Gibson and Graham (1992) examine relationships between the domestic division of labor and waged work to demonstrate the ways in which the household becomes a

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site of class struggle in which surplus labor is appropriated and distributed. In their view, class takes on multiple and diverse forms that must be recognized in order to understand the vaned forms and sites of resistance in which women are active. Schirmer (1993) explores the ways in which discourses of motherhood, sexuality, and women’s private reproductive roles are employed by the state to represent women as “mothers of the nation.” She examines the ways in which mestizas are able to appropriate gender ideologies constructed by the state, such as motherhood, to depoliticize (and so make less threatening, but more powerful) their voices as they confront the state over human rights abuses in the public arena. Finally, Staeheli and Cope (1994) investigate the ways in which gendered divisions of labor in the household and labor force exclude women from the traditional arenas in which citizenship rights are recognized and exercised. They also demonstrate the ways in which expertise gained at work and in the household is being used by women to overcome political exclusion. These scholars demonstrate the dialectical nature of language and the political potential of connecting realms of experience in order to analyze and transform gendered power relations. At the same time, these scholars demonstrate that strategies for resisting gendered oppression are conditioned by other dimensions of their research subjects’ identities. For example, Schirmer explores how ethnicity and gender interact as indigenous Guatemalan peasant women are unable to mobilize the same ideology used by mestizas to legitimize their protests over state-sponsored abuses of them and their families. The experiences of all the agents researched in these studies are differentiated in terms of race, class, sexuality, religion, and colonial history. Feminist research recognizes that gender is one important dimension, but not the only dimension along which experience, action, and political struggle is fractured. Theorizing Diference and Connection

The challenge in feminist theory is to theorize both connection and difference simultaneously. This stands in contrast with much social science research that constructs theoretical concepts and research categories based on the differences between people and between processes in the social world. As Parr (1990, p. 9) notes: We come from a long tradition in the west which finds meaning by specifylng difference, and clarity by concentrating and amplifylng presence and absence. We subordinate continuity and diversity so as to feature our world as a series of fixed oppositions, depending upon the differences between each part of each pair as our way to know the other. The fixed oppositions to which Parr refers are dualistic constructs. Dualisms rest on dichotomous or binary oppositions such as masculinelfeminine, blacklwhite, theoreticallempirical. These entail three conceptual problems. First, dualisms focus our thinking on the separation between social actors, practices, etc. on the basis of attributes rather than on the basis of the relations that define them (Scott 1990, p. 137). The subjects of research are thus categorized as A/not A, in terms of exclusive difference, wherein nothing can be both. In terms of gender, femininity has been constructed in terms of masculinity with a complete distinction in the sets of characteristics assigned to each. Second, the ways that dualisms are often operationalized imply that all who hold one common attribute are similar on other attributes (for example, that all women are the same in terms of the relationship between labor market participation and marital status). Finally, the significance of dualisms rests in that the terms

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gain their meaning only in relation to their difference from their oppositional counterparts . . . [Dlifference is not com lementary in that the halves of the dichotomy do not enhance each other. Rat ier the dichotomous halves are different and inherently opposed to one another. . . . [Sluch dualities rarely represent different but equal relationships . . . Thus whites rule Blacks, males dominate females, reason is touted as superior to emotion in ascertaining truth, facts supersede opinion in evaluating knowledge and subjects rule objects. (Collins 1986, p. S20) Thus in dualistic thinking, leading terms (white, male, reason, fact) are accorded primacy and their partners (black, female, emotion, o inion) are defined as derivative. This tendency serves to maintain the power re ations that construct difference (Scott 1990, p. 137). Feminists attempt to expose the ways in which dualistic concepts and language inscribe processes of gender domination and discrimination into theory, research practice, and daily life. The immediate challenge for feminists and others concerned with progressive social change is to develop theoretical constructs and categories through which we can research significant differences in the context of a particular research question and the relations that give meaning to a category. Feminists pay particular attention to the ways in which gendered cultural forms, practices, politics, or ways of life produce differences that are reflected in research. In so doing, several questions guide conceptualization and theorization. For example, in developing categories for research, do we imply relations or characteristics that are not intrinsic to the construction of the category (for example, motherhood to marriage, a secondary wage earner to women’s employment)? Is the cate ory meaningful for the research questions that we are asking (for example, w at is the relationship between the wife’s class position and her employment, using the husbands class position as the benchmark for the household)? And are other social relations significant to the question being asked (does the above relation differ when race is included in the analysis)? These questions force us to consider the multiple social locations, or multipositionality, of research subjects as they are situated within webs of power relations that constitute the social world. Feminist geographers are contributing in important ways to this retheorization of connection and difference. The volume Viva by Radcliffe and Westwood (1993) examines recursive relationships between gender, class, ethnicity, and citizenship as they structure political activism in Latin America. This volume connects the gendered character of political struggle across a series of case studies and simultaneously explores diversity in the practices, sites, and meanings of popular protest across genders, classes, ethnicities, and nations in Latin America. Through this project Westwood and Radcliffe (1993, p. 23-24) define a research agenda in which

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[I]t is . . . no longer possible to engage in a politics of the singular, for example the class struggle or the women’s movement.. . . [A] feminism organized around a unitary “woman” in effect privileged certain voices and marginalized others, especially those of minority women, black women, women of the south-which comprise of course, the majority of women.. . . Thus commonality and difference speak simultaneously and cannot be bound to a unitary view of woman or an overarching, transhistorical theory of patriarchy. Recent volumes by Chant (1993), Katz and Monk (1993), and Momsen and Kinnaird (1993) also illustrate the importance of conceptualizing connection and difference and of grounding research in the political, economic, social, and geographic contexts in which gendered power relations are expressed.

Lynn A. Staeheli and Victoria A. Lawson / 327 This process of conceptualization is difficult, even within feminist research. The challenge is to conceptualize relations in ways that do not imply that differences in one relation mean that people are similarly aligned on the other dimensions of their identity. Women and men are not defined, nor do they experience the world, solely on the basis of gender, but through all other elements of their social identity and location. As such, we need to theorize in ways that do not essentialize differences between categories. For example, black feminists and lesbians have identified a hegemony within feminist discourse in which the experiences of white, heterosexual, middle-class women-those who typically have written theory-were generalized to all women regardless of race, class, sexuality, religion, or colonial history (Childers and hooks 1990). Indeed, this is clearly signified in the presence and absence of adjectives to describe women. White women are rarely labelled as white, whereas we usually label black women and others identified above. Thus we need to develop a theory and concepts through which differences and sameness are expressed and understood and in which one element of identity is not privile ed over other elements. Essentialism is a pro lem beyond selective specificity in empirical and theoretical work; essentialist thinking has clear political implications in that all members of a category such as “woman” are assumed to have the same political agenda, the same ability to act, and the same sense of strategy. Drawing on the above exam le in which white women are universalized as “women” we implicitly ignoree!Jt position from which African-American women act. As Collins writes:

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denying Black women agency as subjects and treating them as objectified “others” represents yet another dimension of the power that dichotomous oppositional constructs have in maintaining systems of domination. (Collins 1986, pp. S2O-S2l) Moving geography away from dualistic and essentializing categories will enable the construction of concepts that reflect a social world that is interactive, constantly changing, and constitutive (that is, constructed through daily combinations of practices and experiences). In contrast to categories that construct “others,” many feminists attempt to construct theories that connect daily experience, context, and lived social relations and to allow these to vary in accordance with the historical, cultural, social, political, and economic contexts in which they are situated. The next section illustrates the implications of these issues for theory in geography.

Theorizing the Geographies of Diference Attention to these issues of dualistic thinking, essentialism, and othering are important for geography, as they can stren$hen theory, concepts, and practice within the discipline. Through feminist theorization and research practice, we can expose power relations embedded in geographic concepts, categories, and spaces (Bondi 1990). This in turn, allows us to better understand the gendered practices and power differentials that exist materially and ideologically, and then transform them. In our earlier discussion of women’s labor-force articipation, ed that feminist theorization expanded understandings o the connections etween production and re roduction spheres. This connection helps US we analyze how changing gender re ations in the home and in communities (increased labor-force participation of women, single-parent families, changing sexual divisions of labor within the home) are played out in the geography of places (Carney 1988; Moser and Peake 1987; Mackenzie 1989; Mackenzie and Rose 1983; Hanson 1992). At the same time, constructions of femininity and

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masculinity that emerge through place-based sociocultural relations, and the opportunities and constraints provided through places, serve to rework gender identities and relations (Domosh and Bondi 1992; Mackenzie 1989; Valentine 1993). As Massey (1992) notes, the focus on spatial variation in geographical research means that we deal not with essentialisms of men and women, but rather with the ways in which gender is constructed. In highlighting these issues, feminist theorization demonstrates the inseparability of social, political, and economic relations and spaces. This is ?n enormous substantive contribution to geography. Finally, feminist theory extends geographic debates through its emphasis on broader understandings of “location” than those commonly employed in geography. Feminists incorporate into their methodologies the multiple social locations simultaneously occupied by research subjects (Katz 1992; Kobayashi 1994). Gilbert (1994) for example, examines the ways in which survival strategies of poor women are shaped by their position with respect to race, household headship, and community as much as by gender. Her argument leads us to a more nuanced understanding of urban poverty than is provided by analyses that focus solely on income (that is, the underclass debate). Her purpose is to make visible those multiple locations as a necessary step in more inclusive social understandings. We explore these issues in the next section through a discussion of method, analytical techniques, and scale raised in feminist geographic research. ISSUES OF METHOD AND SCALE

Feminist methodologies analyze those unseen, gendered power relations that structure both the material and ideological realms, and that shape the research process itself. Feminist research connects the questions asked, the concepts and the categories employed, and the methods and types of evidence utilized in answering these questions. As we argued in the previous section, geographers can learn from feminist writings on methodology and on the relationship between the researcher, the researched, and the knowledge that is produced. In this section, we examine feminist positions on the acquisition and legitimation of knowledge. We begin by discussing the implications of the feminist critique of conventional scientific views of objectivity. We then examine the types of knowledge produced from a feminist perspective in which all knowledge is argued to be socially situated. Finally, we examine the implications of these issues in terms of methods employed and scales of analysis. Fundamental to feminist research processes is the relationship between the researcher and the researched. Most social science constructions set as an ideal the value neutrality of the researcher, that is, that the researcher’s choice of topic and methodology is not influenced by her/his values, experiences, or material conditions (Adam 1989, p. 460). Feminists challenge masculinist ways of defining knowledge and doing science in which truth and reality are fixed and only known through detached observation and testing. Critical theorists from a variety of perspectives have challenged this position, arguing that the “unmarked subject,” the universal subject of conventional social science, embodies “male, bourgeois and heterosexist assumptions” (McDowell 1992, p. 409). Feminists in particular have argued that subjective experiences of gendered oppression and social relations are valid bases for building knowledge, that the social world is open and mutable, and that accordingly, truth itself is subjective and interpreted differently depending on the subject position of the knower (Moss 1993; Haraway 1988). Feminists, along with postmodern and poststructuralist

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theorists, challenge conventional epistemologies and argue for social science to reevaluate who can be knower and what can be known. From this perspective experiences, values, and material conditions inevitably impinge on any project; understanding this challenges us to rethink objectivity. As scientists we participate in a social activity in which we are influenced by our colleagues, our research subjects, our disciplinary tenets, and the historical and social contexts in which we conduct our research. We need to acknowledge the ways in which the academy, the state, and other social institutions and contexts influence the values, understandings, interpretations, and goals that we bring to and take from our research. Geographers are thus challenged to build new concepts of rigor and objectivity that recognize there is no invisible, socially detached “authority.” Ideas are always embedded within, and thus interpreted through, historical, cultural, locational, and personal contexts (Westkott 1990, p. 62). Rigor and objectivity come from connecting the contextualized and partial knowledges that we all produce. As Haraway (1988, p. 590) argues: [Tlhe science question in feminism is about objectivity as positioned rationality. Its images are not products of escape and transcendence of limits (the view from above) but the joining of partial views and halting voices into a collective subject position that promises a vision of . , . living within limits and contradictions-of views from somewhere. Recognizing this has implications for analyt~caltechniques, forms of evidence, and scales employed in specific research contexts. The centrality of intersubjectivity for feminist researchers, as a means to open up the gendered construction of knowledge, has led to the development of women’s personal narratives (that is, accounts of women’s lives, experiences, feelings, and aspirations that are constructed cooperatively between the researcher and the women). Some feminists argue that it is particularly important to hear the voices of women because they have been silenced in the past. Thus one advantage of intersubjective approaches is that they provide access to women’s interpretations of gender relations and, therefore, women’s social positions (Personal Narratives Group 1989). Ethnographic and intersubjective methods, however, are also potentially problematic, and we return to this issue in our discussion of their use for accessing previously neglected scales of analysis below. In order to maintain the voices of women in these stories and to explore the voids created by dualistic thinking, nontraditional textual strategies are employed frequently in feminist research. For example, members of the Personal Narratives Group involve the women and men from the research in writing the narratives that are produced in their studies. Other researchers attempt to capture the situatedness of life with intellectual biographies [for example, contributions in Stanley (1990)], testimonials (Burgos-Debray 1984), nonlinear writing (for example, Mairs 1989), or by presenting research in a conversational format (for example, hooks and West 1991; Flax 1990). Many feminists argue that because gender is, in part, reproduced through concepts and language, a goal of feminist writing should be to construct new language forms in addition to new concepts and terminology (Gallop 1985). Telling the stories of women often involves incorporating previously neglected scales of analysis, such as interpersonal relations within the household, and demonstrating the ways in which these relations meaningfully influence social, political, and economic life. This goes beyond most social science inquiry, which has relegated “private” relations between women and men to the “non-

330 / Geographical Analysis scientific” or nonmeasurable. Feminist geographers argue that everyday life and gender relations are expressed simultaneously at a variety of societal and geographic scales. They further argue that the household is fundamental to the structuring of patriarchal relations (Carney 1988; Pratt and Hanson 1991; Bowlby 1990; Oberhauser 1993; Hanson 1992). This holds because domination of women occurs in the household through socially constructed divisions of labor, through control of economic resources, and also through domestic violence. While these same relations also occur in the workplace, political activity, and other social interactions, household relations have been designated “private” and frequently removed from scrutiny in mainstream geography. The reticence to look within the household is not simply a reflection of some disciplinary propensity to examine larger scales; the debates over locality and the importance of contextualized research have drawn the attention of many geographers to small scales. Nor is the ne lect of the household simply due to unfamiliarity with qualitative methods; cu tural geographers have championed immersing oneself through participant observation for years [for example, Parsons (1977), although we later discuss critiques of many of these attempts]. Rather, we argue that the lack of attention to the household as a meaningful scale of analysis reflects a social construction of knowledge in which it is held that the “big picture” can be understood without acknowledging gender relations and the sites and scales in which they are constructed. Instead of ignoring the household, we need to examine it and problematize it in much the same way that industrial geogra hers opened up the conce t of the firm (for example, Krumme 1969; Scott angstorper 1986; Storper andPWalker 1989). In their work, the firm is not viewed as internally harmonious, but as constituted by an internal politics and struggle which contribute to the transformation of the firm, organizationally and territorially. Further, the firm is not viewed as spatially bounded and scale specific, but rather as dynamic and as capable of transcending any particular locale through the incorporation of multiple workplaces in diverse settings, as articulated in the international division of labor literature (Massey 1984). The parallel between the household and the firm is important because it points to the fact that geographers understand the importance of individual agents and everyday activity to the regulation of social relations and transformation of larger-scale processes. For example, Enloe (1989) demonstrates the importance of household relations in development outcomes. International development projects, designed to enhance farm productivity, often assume that males are the primary cultivators. In Africa, however, women grow between 60 and 80 percent of all cro s. Thus the assum tions of develo ment agencies are misguided, and as a resu t, their technical a vice, credit, an seeds are typically provided to men (Jarosz 1991). Household “harmony” has been largely unexamined in development olicy fields, but recent research by Carney (1988) and Watts (1988) suggests t at distribution of resources within households is highly conflictual, involving labor withdrawal, sexual infidelity, and domestic violence. This has important practical and theoretical implications. At the practical level, the outcomes of international development aid rograms often are thwarted because only minor amounts of total aid go direct y to farming women. These cesses also restructure households themselves, as they become disruptel?; conflict and coercion. Future theoretical understandings of the failures of development initiatives will be hamstrung unless they incorporate household relations into their analyses. This example demonstrates the need to understand the ways in which seemingly global processes are reconstituted in the household through place-based and culturally specific gendered relations.

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Lynn A. Staeheli and Victoria A. Lawson / 331 Feminist geographers are demonstrating that household dynamics are as important as firm dynamics for understanding diverse processes such as industrial restructuring (McDowell and Massey 1984; Gibson and Graham 1992), the impact of debt crisis and structural adjustment (Beneria and Feldman 1993; Lawson 1993), the character of international migration (Chant 1993; Momsen 1993), and political transformation (Smith 1989; Kofman and Peake 1990). Feminist geographers, then, are arguing for opening up lower scales of analysis and, through this, for new opportunities to create theoretical abstractions and connections with processes in other realms and at various scales of analysis. Parr (1990, p. 231) notes that this should lead to better abstractions in addition to more nuanced understandings of daily struggle: Putting questions that tolerate s ecificity and diversity as answers is not to deny the existence of hierarchy or PO ‘tics. It is rather a way to begin to craft explanations that more fully comprehend both the access to power and the grounds upon which this access, successfully and unsuccessfully has been challenged.

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The need to incorporate interpersonal relations and the scale of the household into our analyses has implications for methodology. Given that processes operating at a variety of scales are relevant, researchers should be open to the potential for layering a variety of methods as we attempt to link interpersonal and household relations with community, national, and international processes and structures (for example, Radcliffe 1991; Katz 1992; D. Rose 1993; Kobayashi 1994). Such methods may include experiential methods, quantitative methods, and historical structural analyses. We note that these methodological implications compliment approaches advocated by other theoretical geographers. For example, realists argue for recursive theoretical and empirical research that combines methodologies as each round of research raises different questions (Sa er 1984; Lawson and Staeheli 1990). These questions may arise either at didrent eographic scales or at different levels of theoretical abstraction because o f t e interconnectivity of the social world. In this discussion, we note the attention in feminist geography to experiential methods such as participant observation, intensive interviewing, becoming personally involved with the researched, and using one’s own reactions and experiences to help understand the research problems. We do this for two reasons. First, experiential methods are used within feminist research to understand household relations that structure and transform gendered lives. Second, these methods are of increasing importance, and are the subject of growing debate, in geography as we develop analytical techniques to link processes across geogra hic scales, such as in the work of Katz (1991), Schoenberger (1991), Pratt an Hanson (1991), Moss (1991), and Sayer and Morgan (1987). In this and other research, experiential methods are used to better understand linkages across scales and to understand relations and decisions (gendered and otherwise) that underlie those linkages. Experiential methods are particularly important in feminist research because many of the crucial relations that structure women’s experiences are not accessible using other sources of data.2 Gender relations are constructed and reinforced in myriad ways within the private sphere of home and involve personal details of people’s lives. People respond differently to experiential methods in

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eOne of the problems of using secondary data for feminist research has been the endered composition of data categories. For example, many data are collected for the household ead (assumed to be a male if present) as representative of all household members. In the process, variation in behaviors, contributions, and experiences between household members are masked.

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which the researcher attempts to break down some of the power relations extant in highly structured interviews-with the interviewer presented as an expert. As Katz (1992) has noted, people respond to power relations in interpersonal communications, and in controlling the questions, the researcher may condition the responses and thus, information received. This is not to suggest that unstructured interviews can completely eradicate all issues of power between researcher and researched. Indeed, feminist geographers are arguing that there are dangers inherent in the assumption that women researchers can connect with women subjects through experiential methods [see methods and techniques section, Professional Geographer (1994)l. This assumption essentializes all women as “sisters” and neglects the very different positions within webs of power relations that structure our identities. For example, England (1994) raises the difficult ethical question of the extent to which researchers can understand the experiences of, and speak for, politically marginalized groups when they are not members of those groups. England argues that we cannot fully know and understand the experiences and politics of people in subject positions different from the researcher (different, for example, in terms of ethnicity, colonial history, sexuality, or class). Rather, feminist researchers are recognizing both the limitations of their partial understandings of those they research, but also the validity of those partial perspectives and situated knowledges (Haraway 1988). As we struggle with these ethical problems of attempting to speak “for” others, feminist researchers are moving toward cooperative work between those experiencing place-based gender relations and those theorizing connections to the broader processes shaping experiences (Katz 1994; Kobayashi 1994). For example, when Western feminists enter developing settings, they cannot escape the power relations that exist between those societies or between themselves as academics and their research subjects, even when they wish to do so. Western researchers are in a position of power by virtue of their ability to name the categories, control information about the research agenda, define interventions, and to come and go as scientists. Feminist researchers are acknowledging these power differentials in the research process and are striving to construct through their research a “space of betweenness” in which common understandings are communicated, and a common agenda for action constructed, to take advantage of the differences between researcher and researched (Katz 1992; England 1994). This is accomplished by recognizing that academics and research subjects each bring something to the research encounter. Rather than researchers observing, interpreting, and speaking “for” their research subjects, fuller understandings of the experiences of women, and the processes causing those experiences, can be achieved by layering experiential methods, which reveal some of the experiences of living in a particular place, with historically situated political economic analysis. This combination of understandings, constructed in the “space of betweenness” is crucial for social research since, as Gorelick (1991, p. 464) argues, “the very organization of the everyday world of oppression in modern capitalism obscures the structure of oppression.” These issues are illustrated with an example of research on female-headed households in Latin America wherein local women and feminist researchers made different and complementary contributions to their project (Moser and Peake 1987; Bolles 1986; Moser 1989). In the course of interactions between these two groups of women, new theoretical insights into the survival strategies of primary-wage-earning women were achieved. Specifically, low-income women in Latin America (and perhaps elsewhere) are now understood to be constrained by a triple shift that involves (i) income-generating activity, (ii) do-

Lynn A. Staeheli and Victoria A. Lawson / 333 mestic responsibilities, and (iii) community organizing. The feminist researchers who entered Latin American communities to work with local women brought an understanding of broader political economic structures through their positions as academics and as workers in international development agencies. The local women complemented and revised these understandings through their experience of everyday life, place-based social relations, and the identities they had developed in their communities. This geographic and feminist analysis of the triple shift brings together perspectives that provide new insights on the multiple scales, contexts, and sites in which gendered economic and political relations are constructed. Making these linkages between interpersonal relations and broader political economic structures leads researchers to employ a variety of methods (including in this case participant observation, intensive interviewing, and historical structural analysis) each of which can address different and complementary scales of analysis. Our example demonstrates ambiguity in the relations between gender and space in that gender relations are not simply reproduced. Rather, scale, context, and place are sites of struggle and of resistance (Marston 1990; Radcliffe 1991). Siting women’s struggle in social and geographic space complements current moves in geography toward articulating the sociospatial dialectic in contextualized research (Soja 1989). Not only is feminist geographic research more inclusive in terms of geographic scale and theories of processes such as patriarchy and capitalism, but also in terms of the people who are researched and their political projects. Through experiential methods in combination with political-economic analysis, the understandings emerging from the positions of both groups of women were united in praxis. PRAXIS: CONTINUING THE FEMINIST RESEARCH PROCESS

As we have argued throughout the paper, feminist research processes reconstruct theory, method, and scale with the goal of transforming gendered power relations. The importance of this praxis to feminist research processes cannot be overestimated. Feminist researchers are committed to transformation of gendered power relations. This commitment differentiates feminist work from other research in which the political intent is not acknowledged. For example, much work in this journal is used for management or planning purposes, but is not conducted with a goal of transforming social relations. Feminist praxis may also differ from other critical research in that feminist praxis is concerned with the ways in which gender relations are implicated in the various forms that oppression may take. Harding (1991, pp. 100-101) explains why the particular form of praxis is so important to feminists within the academy: We have claimed the historical realities of our lives as the places from which our thought and politics not only do begin, but also should begin. It has also taken courage to claim these identities for such purposes when the fathers of our intellectual traditions have insisted for centuries that we are exactly not the kinds of persons whose beliefs can ever be expected to achieve the status of knowledge. They still claim that only the impersonal, disinterested, socially anonymous representatives of human reason ... are capable of producing knowledge. Mere opinion is all that folks like us can produce. Proceeding from the realities of our lives, feminists seek to validate and legitimate knowledge of gendered power relations and to further political and social change based on that knowledge. The challenges raised in feminist writings on the research process, then,

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speak to the importance of understanding the social processes that operate in the construction of knowledge. This includes critically examining the relations between researcher and researched, the questions asked (and not asked), the interpretations of data, and the constructions of women as political agents. Feminists challenge us to democratize knowledge-in other words, to acknowledge the validity and importance of the partial knowledges we all produce-and to consider its potential for adding to geo raphic strategies for effecting social change. This challenge includes several e ements: involving many people and contexts in the research process, making the products of research accessible to a wide range of people, and breaking down the dualistic relation that often characterizes activists and academics. Feminist research processes work toward the democratization of knowledge in many ways. Just as there is no singular feminist theory or method, there is not a single means of addressing the political embeddedness of knowledge. In concludin this paper, we address the many ways in which feminist researchers have use$ their work to effect changes in gendered power relations. Democratization implies becoming more inclusive in the research process. Thus, we noted the importance of breaking away from dualistic thinking, examining scales and conceptual categories previously considered private or outside the realm of “science,” employing methods that give access to those scales, and recognizing the relational character of our ex eriences and the structures that shape them. In opening up language to inclu e people and relations previously ignored, and therefore relegated to the unproblematic status of objects and “others,” we highlight the implications for theorization and for political change. Feminist methodologies involve a creative tension between everyday experiences, place-based and spatial relations, and higher-level structures. Exposing the power relations that structure gender roles and experiences in ways that demonstrate the potential for their transformation is integral to feminist research processes. Through these means, avenues of action may be identified by researcher and researched in concert. In the process, the previous “objects” of study become subjects-with voice in theory formulation and agency in acting with researchers as both are guided by new theory. This praxis is arrived at through iterations between understanding everyday experiences and theorizing relations that give rise to those experiences. Democratization also implies greater accessibility to the products of our research. This involves writing in a variety of forms that are attuned to different audiences-academic, student, and activist-and considering the intelligibility of our language. For example, bell hooks describes her decision to write without footnotes so that her writing will not estrange Black working-class audiences. For hooks (Childers and hooks 1990, p. 74), reaching across classes is a question of language:

K

B

language is about empathetic identification . . . you can use language to connect with people. Since academia has not privileged our discourse as one that connects us, our verbal use of langua e to connect has been devalued. And in fact, often the work we [Black aca emics] do that is most valued is the work that will make the least connections across class.

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Working to make research more accessible involves other elements of praxis as well. It may be achieved through our teaching if we bring voices and perspectives to the classroom to which students might not otherwise be exposed (McDowell 1994). It may also be realized when we involve the subjects of research in the writing process. Finally, it may be achieved through choices of

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venues for publication. In the context of the academy and increasing pressures to publish in “the best” journals and to consider the theoretical issues of “greatest currency,” activism and careerism may reside together uneasily. Katz (1994), for instance, discusses both her personal dedication to fieldwork in Harlem and her reluctance to write about this work for academic journals. Her commitment to radical change is clear, but she notes that her work toward this seems marginal to what many academics want to hear and read. She notes, “We have theories about theory and practice, but practice takes a beating in the high stakes debates of academia.” Thus, feminist praxis comes at a cost-either personal or professional-for many in the academy. Finally, democratization of knowledge involves working to connect academic research to political activism and social transformation. Fundamental to this, and the other forms of praxis previously noted, is deconstructing the dualistic relation between activists and academics-in other words, blurring the boundaries between the two. A first step toward deconstruction is to recognize that we are always situated in the “space of betweenness” constructed between the academy and the field. As academics working to effect change, we strive to occupy a common ground with the people with whom we work (Katz 1992). In participating in and recording the lives and experiences of subject peoples, we can work with them in struggles against oppressive forces. This is not to say that we are united or joined as “sisters,” but that we can bring the resources of our differential access to publication and power to bear on gendered relations. At times, feminists may feel unease with this relation-wondering if participation in these projects is doing more to advance a career than to further the struggle of a group of people (England 1994; Gilbert 1994). These concerns reflect a real dilemma because the benefits of activism may be difficult to achieve, whereas the benefits of publication may be more immediate. Further, the very blurring of boundaries between the “field’ and the “academy” through praxis can make it difficult to identify the common ground of which Katz writes. For many feminist scholars, part of their effectiveness as activists can come from resources provided through the academy. As Kobayashi (1994, p. 78) writes, scholars can employ their “capacity for critical self-reflection, rather than their elite perspective, that provides academic researchers with a platen for social change as well as scholarly critique, and establishes a justification for combining the two.” The connections between feminist research, activism, and social transformation also involve a redefinition and broadening of political action. Specifically, rather than focussing on politics as an arena of action (such as political parties, labor unions, government institutions, etc.) we redefine political action in terms of the types of actions through which change is attempted and/or effected. This broad view of olitics incorporates new sites, agents, and substantive questions. These inch e actions within the household, community, region, and nation; elite and nonelite agents; and substantive concerns with distribution and process (Abrahams 1992; Young 1990; Staeheli and Clarke 1995). This redefinition of politics has emerged in feminist research and in turn, expands the horizons of academic activists working toward social change in a multitude of ways. In concluding, we reaffirm the political project of feminism. Feminist research is committed; that is, feminists seek to actively transform the lived realities they research. If, as Sayer argues, the purpose of science is to reduce illusion (1984, p. 229), then efforts to understand gender relations are an important component of that endeavor. As Addleson and Potter (1991, p. 275) write:

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336 / Geographical Analysis Feminist practice can render permeable the boundaries between classrooms and communities, research and lived experience, academic and everyday knowers. Feminist inquiry must be based on understanding our own places in our communities and societies. It is a heritage we must enact in our lives so we may pass it on to those who will make history when we are gone. LITERATURE CITED Abrahams, N. (1992).‘‘Towards Reconceptualizing Political Action.” Sociological lnquiy 62,327-47. Adam, B. (1989).“Feminist Social Theory Needs Time. Reflections on the Relation between Feminist Thought, Social Theory, and Time as an Important Parameter in Social Analysis.’’ The Sociological Reoiew 37,458-73. Addleson, K., and E. Potter (1991).“Making Knowledge.” In (En)Gendering Knowledge: Feminists in Acudeme, edited by J. Hartman and E. Messer-Davidow, pp. 259-77. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press. Beneria, L., and S. Feldman (1993).Unequal Burden: Economic Crises, Persistent Pouerty, and Women’s Work. Boulder, Col: Westview Press. Bolles, L. (1986).“Economic Crisis and Female-headed Households in Urban Jamaica.” In Women and Change in Lutin America, edited by J . Nash and H. Safa, pp. 65-83. Bergin and Garvey Publishers. Bondi, L. (1990).“Feminism, Postmodemism, and Geography: Space for Women? Antipode 22,156-67. Bowlby, S. (1990).‘Women, Work and the Family: Control and Constraints.” Geography 76,17-26. Burgos-Debray, E. (1984).I, Rigoberta Menchu: An Indian Woman in Guatemala. London: Verso. Carney, J. (1988).“Struggles over Crop Rights and Labor within Contract Fanning Household Gambian Irrigated Rice Project.”]ournal of Peasant Studies 15,334-49. Chant, S. (1993).Gender and Migration in Developing Countries. London: Belhaven Press. Childers, M., and bell hooks (1990).“A Conversation about Race and Class.” In Confiicts in Feminism, edited by M. Hirsch and E. Keller, pp. 60-81. New York: Routledge. Christopherson, S . (1989).“Flexibility in the U.S.Service Economy and the Emerging Spatial Division of Labour.” Transactions, lnstitute of Brittsh Geographers 14,131-43. Collins, P. (1986).“Learning from the Outsider Within: The Sociological Significance of Black Feminist Thought.” Social Problems 33,6,S14-S32. Domosh, M., and L. Bondi (1992).“Other Figures in Other Landscapes: On Feminism, Postmodemism, and Geography.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 10,199-213. Dyck, I. (1993).“Ethnography: A Feminist Method?” The C a d i a n Geographer 37,52-57. England, K. (1994).“Getting Personal: Reflexivity, Positionality and Feminist Research.” The Profesdona1 Geographer 46,80-89. Enloe, C. (1989).Bananas, Beaches, and Bases. Berkeley: University of Cahfomia Press. Eyles, J. (1993).“Feminist and Interpretive Method: How Different? The Canadian Geographer 37, 50-52. Flax, J. (1990).Thinking Fragments: Psychoarudysis, Feminism, a d Postmodernism in the Contemporay West. Berkeley: University of California Press. Gallop, J. (1985).Reading Lacan. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press. Gibson, K., and J. Graham (1992).“Rethinking Class in Industrial Geography: Creating a Space for an Alternative Politics of Class.” Economic Geography 68,109-27. Gilbert, M. (1994).“The Politics of Location: Doing Feminist Research at Home.” The Professional Geographer 46,90-96. Gorelick, S. (1991).“Contradictions of Feminist Methodology.” Gender and Society 5,459-77. Hanson, S. (1992).“Geography and Feminism: Worlds in Collision? A n d of the Association of American Geographers 82,569-86. Hanson, S . , and G. Pratt (1988).“Reconceptualizing the Links between Home and Work in Urban Geography.” Economic Geography 64,299-321. -(1991).“Job Search and the Occupational Segregation of Women.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 81,229-53. Haraway, D. (1988).“Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective.” Feminist Studies 14,575-99. Harding, S. (1987).“Introduction.” In Feminism and Methodology, edited by S . Harding. Blwmington: Indiana University Press.

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