ABSTRACT
Despite the popularity of post-structuralist approaches to feminism during the past few decades, this chapter will posit the usefulness of adopting an alternative philosophical approach – critical realism – as a framework for empirical feminist research. Drawing on concrete examples from a study of Canadian farm women’s work, it will demonstrate the analytical role of abduction and retroduction within critical realist research. By using these modes of reasoning, the aforementioned study identified two causal mechanisms that explain the demi-regularities detected within the data, and which significantly affected the lives of farm women in Canada: gender ideology and neo-liberal corporatisation in agriculture. Furthermore, by building on the critical realist tenet that social systems of beliefs and values are real and causal, this chapter will suggest that critical realism can facilitate feminist anti-essentialism without succumbing to either the relativism of interpretivist approaches or the rejection of a reality to lived experience that is characteristic of post-structuralist work. Following a detailed description of the abductive and retroductive processes used in the farm women study, the chapter will argue that gender ideology – a social, but very real, causal mechanism – has greater explanatory power than biological explanations, and that critical realism facilitates effective explanatory critiques of gender inequality in the social world.
