Venkat Parthasarathy

201401180
Assignment-3
This essay investigates whether there exists a particular type of enquiry that feminists employ to
conduct research. The author argues against the idea of such a method of research as the
method used to research must not overshadow some of the other important issues that
feminists investigate.
The article explores three main categories of collecting data. The first method is listening to
informants about their experiences. This method could be used to collect sufficient amounts of
quality data as we can inquire the informants but it is time-consuming. The second method of
data collection is observing behavior. This has the advantage of not requiring a particular
informant and therefore eliminating an additional source of bias. However, the quality of data
might not be that good. The third method is using history and making historical inferences.
The author goes on to contend that traditional theories in sociology have been applied
improperly leading to difficulties in actually understanding womens contributions to the society.
These have produced feminist versions of sociology theories. The author then defines
epistemology as a theory of knowledge and then asserts that traditional epistemologists,
whether intentionally or unintentionally, exclude the possibility that women can be agents of
knowledge and claim that the voice of science is masculine.
The author then calls for adding more women to the social science analysis scene. The author
explores two different types of women which can be added. The first type of women are the
existing social scientists and academics. The second kind of women are those women who
were subjected to egregious male dominance. Due to the insistence of inclusion of the first type
of women, academia have already started to appreciate womens contributions. Earlier,
womens works have been notoriously overlooked. The author cites one example of this
phenomenon as Rosalind Franklins work on DNA. Her Nobel Prize winning male colleagues
simply ignored her contributions. The author suggests that to overcome this obstacle,
researchers must look at womens contributions to public life. However, we are then susceptible
to choosing which activities or domains are worthy of appreciation and which are not again
leading to an existence of an inherent bias. Furthermore, it does not take into account womens
contributions towards enhancing their own public life but rather those domains which men deem
worthy.
A new focus of research has been proposed which studies women as victims of male
dominance. Some examples of male dominance include rape, incest, pornography, physically
abusing etc. Surprisingly, one might find that contemporary cultures have the highest statistics
for victimization of women. However, this type of research is a bit too extreme as it always
portrays women as only victims when in fact throughout women have resisted male domination.
The author then elaborates on how our account of traditional histories contains only male
experiences and historically we only raise questions about issues that affect males. This point is
critical as this is where feminist enquiry deviates from scientific enquiry. Scientific enquiry does
not concern itself with the origins of the questions themselves but rather how the question is
investigated. The author appropriately mentions this as in science there are no contexts of
discovery but rather there exists only contexts of justification. But feminist theory argues that
the questions asked and more importantly the questions that are not asked are as important (if
not more) as to understanding the total picture of the situation. Hence, feminist theory entails
that questions that are asked must be derived from experiences of females. These experiences
generate the reality against which hypotheses are tested. To propagate this, women should also
be present in the administration of institutions where distribution of knowledge takes place. This
will ensure that womens voice heard, the relevant issues are investigated and proper systems
of investigation into the issues affecting women are implemented.
Finally, the author concludes by adding that the repeated emphasis of female experiences in
feminist inquiry is neither biased nor does it espouse some kind of relativism but rather that
womens experiences have proved to be more reliable than men in these areas. Also, taking
both experiences equally into consideration might preserve the androcentric claims even in the
face of contradicting evidence. Another issue that might arise in the readers mind that the
author resolves is the question of whether men cannot contribute to feminist theory. The author
boldly claims that as feminist theory is constructed for and by women, men cannot contribute as
much as women can.