The Politics of Feminist Research: Between Talk, Text and Action

For feminists engaged in research; historical, anthropological, literary, sociological or otherwise, there is really no problem about answering the question, ‘who do we do feminist research for?’ Yet to state simply ‘for women’, is to obscure a whole range of issues which invariably rise to the surface in the course of a research project. Exactly how these issues are handled plays an important part in shaping the entire research procedure. That is to say, when a politics, its theory and aspects of its practice (in this case feminism) meet up with an already existing academic discipline, the convergence of the two is by no means unproblematic. Often the urgency and the polemic of politics, all the things about which we feel strongly and which we desperately want are quite at odds with the traditional requirements of the scholarly mode; the caution, the rigour and the measured tone in which one is supposed to present ‘results’ to the world. Frequently we worry about the extent to which we, unwittingly, impose our own culture-bound frame of reference on the data, and about how, so often, our personal preferences surface, as though by magic, as we write up the research.