The Promise and Failure of Ethnomethodology From a Feminist Perspective:

Despite the significance of Garfinkel's ethnomethodology, it is vulnerable to a criticism that seriously undermines its claims for itself. Mary Rogers's article implicitly and to some extent explicitly reveals the fundamental weakness, the Achilles heel, of Garfinkel's ethnomethodology. Her article can be read as providing the grounds for a powerful critique of ethnomethodology from a feminist perspective. The critique is that ethnomethodology is guilty of doing, without recognizing it, precisely what it criticizes traditional social science for doing. Ethnomethodology criticizes social science for not recognizing the ongoing methods by which all actors, including social scientists themselves, go about creating reality or producing their world, which is identical, according to Garfinkel, to making their world accountable (Garfinkel 1967, 1). Ethnomethodology seeks to de-reify the social phenomena that positivist social science as well as commonsense members treat as constituting a given, objective, thinglike reality. Garfinkel's analysis of the case of Agnes represents a groundbreaking work in sociology with respect to the social construction of gender; it was followed by ethnomethodologically influenced feminist works (e.g., Kessler and McKenna 1978; West and Zimmerman 1987). The ethnomethodologlcal approach has proved significant to feminist scholarship, and that scholarship has contributed to the significance of ethnomethodology, but the two are by no means Identical approaches to doing research or producing knowledge.