ENGL4960/8866 Research and Writing Women's Lives Research Guide

The purpose of this Primer is to invite students to explore the range of feminist perspectives, including feminist empiricist, feminist standpoint, and postmodern perspectives in order to bridge the divide between theory and research methods.

Naples draws on different research topics, such as welfare, poverty, sexual identity, and sexual abuse, to illustrate some of the most salient dilemmas of feminist research: the debate over objectivity, the paradox of discourse, the dilemma of "standpoint," and the challenges of activist research. By linking important feminist theoretical debates with case studies, Naples illustrates the strategies she developed for resolving the challenges posed be postmodern, Third World, postcolonial, and queer studies.

Feminist research is a growing tradition of inquiry that aims to produce knowledge that is not biased by inequitable assumptions about gender and related categories such as class, race, religion, sexuality, and nationality. Rather than being concerned with particular techniques of inquiry, the interdisciplinary readings in this book address broad questions of research methodology.

Examines the practices of life history, ethnographic fieldwork, and interpretation of women's narratives, ultimately asserting the importance of self-reflexivity for feminist methodology.