ABSTRACT
This chapter critically examines developments in feminist research and raises questions about the problematic relationship between gender, power, method and epistemology. As assertions of ‘knowledge’ frequently both produce and guarantee domination and power, there is a problem as to how feminism can legitimately claim to be a site of knowledge about the oppression of women, without reproducing the power relations it questions. This produces tensions for feminist researchers. Participation in the social research industry can require a certain amount of collusion with the values that traditionally underpin it. In the market economy of the academy, this also involves a tacit acceptance of the juxtaposition of the economic with the aesthetic and intellectual. As a feminist academic, I share Fine’s anxiety about ‘how best to unleash ourselves from our central contradiction-being researchers and being active feminists’ (1994, p. 13).
