ABSTRACT
Constructing a feminist base to knowledge which is ‘objective’ and ‘true’ has been a major concern of feminists working in academia in the last twenty years or so. In recent years, Black feminists have pointed out that this project has perpetuated a white middle-class bias that has ignored or marginalized differences other than gender such as race, sexuality and class.1 ‘Objectivity’ and ‘truth’, however, continue to be the hallmarks that guarantee and legitimize the production of knowledge in academia. As doctoral students undertaking traditional academic apprenticeships that will legitimize our own status as professional knowledge producers, we would like to propose that a degree of personal reflexiveness is an important part of the process of knowledge production. Many feminist knowledge producers have tried to base their research in women’s experiences, but that experience has often been narrowly defined in terms of gender, and has tended to ignore other differences that are equally significant in the construction of subjectivity. Academe’s demands for objectivity in the research process also means that it is difficult to account for the role and experience of the researcher, who shapes and moulds the experience of others into forms of knowledge. In this paper we take up a position that claims all knowledge is a form of cultural production, and that the ‘truth’ of any knowledge is therefore integrally connected both to the institution that produces it and to the particular historical moment in which it has been constructed. Rather than aspiring to the production of universalizing ‘truths’ that apply to all women, a stance which often masks the standpoint of the knowledge producer, we
will argue that personal biographical factors play an important role in the production of knowledge.2 It is this relationship, between personal biographies and knowledge production, that we seek to explore through a self-reflexive research practice. This means that our own research practice is a self-reflexive process where we try to situate ourselves and our work in open discursive frameworks. By this, we mean that the positions we take up are not fixed and unchanging but open to adjustment as we read and debate our work with others. We would like to suggest that feminist knowledge cannot become multivalent and multivocal until self-reflexive practices are more widely accepted.3
