feminism research paper conclusion

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Feminist theory and its use in qualitative research in education.

• Emily Freeman Emily Freeman University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
• https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190264093.013.1193
• Published online: 28 August 2019

Feminist theory rose in prominence in educational research during the 1980s and experienced a resurgence in popularity during the late 1990s−2010s. Standpoint epistemologies, intersectionality, and feminist poststructuralism are the most prevalent theories, but feminist researchers often work across feminist theoretical thought. Feminist qualitative research in education encompasses a myriad of methods and methodologies, but projects share a commitment to feminist ethics and theories. Among the commitments are the understanding that knowledge is situated in the subjectivities and lived experiences of both researcher and participants and research is deeply reflexive. Feminist theory informs both research questions and the methodology of a project in addition to serving as a foundation for analysis. The goals of feminist educational research include dismantling systems of oppression, highlighting gender-based disparities, and seeking new ways of constructing knowledge.

• feminist theories
• qualitative research
• educational research
• positionality
• methodology

Introduction

Feminist qualitative research begins with the understanding that all knowledge is situated in the bodies and subjectivities of people, particularly women and historically marginalized groups. Donna Haraway ( 1988 ) wrote,

I am arguing for politics and epistemologies of location, position, and situating, where partiality and not universality is the condition of being heard to make rational knowledge claims. These are claims on people’s lives I’m arguing for the view from a body, always a complex, contradictory, structuring, and structured body, versus the view from above, from nowhere, from simplicity. Only the god trick is forbidden. . . . Feminism is about a critical vision consequent upon a critical positioning in unhomogeneous gendered social space. (p. 589)

By arguing that “politics and epistemologies” are always interpretive and partial, Haraway offered feminist qualitative researchers in education a way to understand all research as potentially political and always interpretive and partial. Because all humans bring their own histories, biases, and subjectivities with them to a research space or project, it is naïve to think that the written product of research could ever be considered neutral, but what does research with a strong commitment to feminism look like in the context of education?

Writing specifically about the ways researchers of both genders can use feminist ethnographic methods while conducting research on schools and schooling, Levinson ( 1998 ) stated, “I define feminist ethnography as intensive qualitative research, aimed toward the description and analysis of the gendered construction and representation of experience, which is informed by a political and intellectual commitment to the empowerment of women and the creation of more equitable arrangements between and among specific, culturally defined genders” (p. 339). The core of Levinson’s definition is helpful for understanding the ways that feminist educational anthropologists engage with schools as gendered and political constructs and the larger questions of feminist qualitative research in education. His message also extends to other forms of feminist qualitative research. By focusing on description, analysis, and representation of gendered constructs, educational researchers can move beyond simple binary analyses to more nuanced understandings of the myriad ways gender operates within educational contexts.

Feminist qualitative research spans the range of qualitative methodologies, but much early research emerged out of the feminist postmodern turn in anthropology (Behar & Gordon, 1995 ), which was a response to male anthropologists who ignored the gendered implications of ethnographic research (e.g., Clifford & Marcus, 1986 ). Historically, most of the work on feminist education was conducted in the 1980s and 1990s, with a resurgence in the late 2010s (Culley & Portuges, 1985 ; DuBois, Kelly, Kennedy, Korsmeyer, & Robinson, 1985 ; Gottesman, 2016 ; Maher & Tetreault, 1994 ; Thayer-Bacon, Stone, & Sprecher, 2013 ). Within this body of research, the majority focuses on higher education (Coffey & Delamont, 2000 ; Digiovanni & Liston, 2005 ; Diller, Houston, Morgan, & Ayim, 1996 ; Gabriel & Smithson, 1990 ; Mayberry & Rose, 1999 ). Even leading journals, such as Feminist Teacher ( 1984 −present), focus mostly on the challenges of teaching about and to women in higher education, although more scholarship on P–12 education has emerged in recent issues.

There is also a large collection of work on the links between gender, achievement, and self-esteem (American Association of University Women, 1992 , 1999 ; Digiovanni & Liston, 2005 ; Gilligan, 1982 ; Hancock, 1989 ; Jackson, Paechter, & Renold, 2010 ; National Coalition for Women and Girls in Education, 2002 ; Orenstein, 1994 ; Pipher, 1994 ; Sadker & Sadker, 1994 ). However, just because research examines gender does not mean that it is feminist. Simply using gender as a category of analysis does not mean the research project is informed by feminist theory, ethics, or methods, but it is often a starting point for researchers who are interested in the complex ways gender is constructed and the ways it operates in education.

This article examines the histories and theories of U.S.–based feminism, the tenets of feminist qualitative research and methodologies, examples of feminist qualitative studies, and the possibilities for feminist qualitative research in education to provide feminist educational researchers context and methods for engaging in transformative and subversive research. Each section provides a brief overview of the major concepts and conversations, along with examples from educational research to highlight the ways feminist theory has informed educational scholarship. Some examples are given limited attention and serve as entry points into a more detailed analysis of a few key examples. While there is a large body of non-Western feminist theory (e.g., the works of Lila Abu-Lughod, Sara Ahmed, Raewyn Connell, Saba Mahmood, Chandra Mohanty, and Gayatri Spivak), much of the educational research using feminist theory draws on Western feminist theory. This article focuses on U.S.–based research to show the ways that the utilization of feminist theory has changed since the 1980s.

Histories, Origins, and Theories of U.S.–Based Feminism

The normative historiography of feminist theory and activism in the United States is broken into three waves. First-wave feminism (1830s−1920s) primarily focused on women’s suffrage and women’s rights to legally exist in public spaces. During this time period, there were major schisms between feminist groups concerning abolition, rights for African American women, and the erasure of marginalized voices from larger feminist debates. The second wave (1960s and 1980s) worked to extend some of the rights won during the first wave. Activists of this time period focused on women’s rights to enter the workforce, sexual harassment, educational equality, and abortion rights. During this wave, colleges and universities started creating women’s studies departments and those scholars provided much of the theoretical work that informs feminist research and activism today. While there were major feminist victories during second-wave feminism, notably Title IX and Roe v. Wade , issues concerning the marginalization of race, sexual orientation, and gender identity led many feminists of color to separate from mainstream white feminist groups. The third wave (1990s to the present) is often characterized as the intersectional wave, as some feminist groups began utilizing Kimberlé Crenshaw’s concept of intersectionality ( 1991 ) to understand that oppression operates via multiple categories (e.g., gender, race, class, age, ability) and that intersecting oppressions lead to different lived experiences.

Historians and scholars of feminism argue that dividing feminist activism into three waves flattens and erases the major contributions of women of color and gender-nonconforming people. Thompson ( 2002 ) called this history a history of hegemonic feminism and proposed that we look at the contributions of multiracial feminism when discussing history. Her work, along with that of Allen ( 1984 ) about the indigenous roots of U.S. feminism, raised many questions about the ways that feminism operates within the public and academic spheres. For those who wish to engage in feminist research, it is vital to spend time understanding the historical, theoretical, and political ways that feminism(s) can both liberate and oppress, depending on the scholar’s understandings of, and orientations to, feminist projects.

Standpoint Epistemology

Much of the theoretical work that informs feminist qualitative research today emerged out of second-wave feminist scholarship. Standpoint epistemology, according to Harding ( 1991 , 2004 ), posits that knowledge comes from one’s particular social location, that it is subjective, and the further one is from the hegemonic norm, the clearer one can see oppression. This was a major challenge to androcentric and Enlightenment theories of knowledge because standpoint theory acknowledges that there is no universal understanding of the world. This theory aligns with the second-wave feminist slogan, “The personal is political,” and advocates for a view of knowledge that is produced from the body.

Greene ( 1994 ) wrote from a feminist postmodernist epistemology and attacked Enlightenment thinking by using standpoint theory as her starting point. Her work serves as an example of one way that educational scholars can use standpoint theory in their work. She theorized encounters with “imaginative literature” to help educators conceptualize new ways of using reading and writing in the classroom and called for teachers to think of literature as “a harbinger of the possible.” (Greene, 1994 , p. 218). Greene wrote from an explicitly feminist perspective and moved beyond simple analyses of gender to a larger critique of the ways that knowledge is constructed in classrooms.

Intersectionality

Crenshaw ( 1991 ) and Collins ( 2000 ) challenged and expanded standpoint theory to move it beyond an individual understanding of knowledge to a group-based theory of oppression. Their work, and that of other black and womanist feminists, opened up multiple spaces of possibility for feminist scholars and researchers because it challenged hegemonic feminist thought. For those interested in conducting feminist research in educational settings, their work is especially pertinent because they advocate for feminists to attend to all aspects of oppression rather than flattening them to one of simple gender-based oppression.

Haddix, McArthur, Muhammad, Price-Dennis, and Sealey-Ruiz ( 2016 ), all women-of-color feminist educators, wrote a provocateur piece in a special issue of English Education on black girls’ literacy. The four authors drew on black feminist thought and conducted a virtual kitchen-table conversation. By symbolically representing their conversations as one from the kitchen, this article pays homage to women-of-color feminism and pushes educators who read English Education to reconsider elements of their own subjectivities. Third-wave feminism and black feminism emphasize intersectionality, in that different demographic details like race, class, and gender are inextricably linked in power structures. Intersectionality is an important frame for educational research because identifying the unique experiences, realities, and narratives of those involved in educational systems can highlight the ways that power and oppression operate in society.

Feminist Poststructural Theory

Feminist poststructural theory has greatly informed many feminist projects in educational research. Deconstruction is

a critical practice that aims to ‘dismantle [ déconstruire ] the metaphysical and rhetorical structures that are at work, not in order to reject or discard them, but to reinscribe them in another way,’ (Derrida, quoted in Spivak, 1974 , p. lxxv). Thus, deconstruction is not about tearing down, but about looking at how a structure has been constructed, what holds it together, and what it produces. (St. Pierre, 2000 , p. 482)

Reality, subjectivity, knowledge, and truth are constructed through language and discourse (cultural practices, power relations, etc.), so truth is local and diverse, rather than a universal experience (St. Pierre, 2000 ). Feminist poststructuralist theory may be used to question structural inequality that is maintained in education through dominant discourses.

In Go Be a Writer! Expanding the Curricular Boundaries of Literacy Learning with Children , Kuby and Rucker ( 2016 ) explored early elementary literacy practices using poststructural and posthumanist theories. Their book drew on hours of classroom observations, student interviews and work, and their own musings on ways to de-standardize literacy instruction and curriculum. Through the process of pedagogical documentation, Kuby and Rucker drew on the works of Barad, Deleuze and Guattari, and Derrida to explore the ways they saw children engaging in what they call “literacy desiring(s).” One aim of the book is to find practical and applicable ways to “Disrupt literacy in ways that rewrite the curriculum, the interactions, and the power dynamics of the classroom even begetting a new kind of energy that spirals and bounces and explodes” (Kuby & Rucker, 2016 , p. 5). The second goal of their book is not only to understand what happened in Rucker’s classroom using the theories, but also to unbound the links between “teaching↔learning” (p. 202) and to write with the theories, rather than separating theory from the methodology and classroom enactments (p. 45) because “knowing/being/doing were not separate” (p. 28). This work engages with key tenets of feminist poststructuralist theory and adds to both the theoretical and pedagogical conversations about what counts as a literacy practice.

While the discussion in this section provides an overview of the histories and major feminist theories, it is by no means exhaustive. Scholars who wish to engage in feminist educational research need to spend time doing the work of understanding the various theories and trajectories that constitute feminist work so they are able to ground their projects and theories in a particular tradition that will inform the ethics and methods of research.

Tenets of Feminist Qualitative Research

Why engage in feminist qualitative research.

Evans and Spivak ( 2016 ) stated, “The only real and effective way you can sabotage something this way is when you are working intimately within it.” Feminist researchers are in the classroom and the academy, working intimately within curricular, pedagogical, and methodological constraints that serve neoliberal ideologies, so it is vital to better understand the ways that we can engage in affirmative sabotage to build a more just and equitable world. Spivak’s ( 2014 ) notion of affirmative sabotage has become a cornerstone for understanding feminist qualitative research and teaching. She borrowed and built on Gramsci’s role of the organic intellectual and stated that they/we need to engage in affirmative sabotage to transform the humanities.

I used the term “affirmative sabotage” to gloss on the usual meaning of sabotage: the deliberate ruining of the master’s machine from the inside. Affirmative sabotage doesn’t just ruin; the idea is of entering the discourse that you are criticizing fully, so that you can turn it around from inside. The only real and effective way you can sabotage something this way is when you are working intimately within it. (Evans & Spivak, 2016 )

While Spivak has been mostly concerned with literary education, her writings provide teachers and researchers numerous lines of inquiry into projects that can explode androcentric universal notions of knowledge and resist reproductive heteronormativity.

Spivak’s pedagogical musings center on deconstruction, primarily Derridean notions of deconstruction (Derrida, 2016 ; Jackson & Mazzei, 2012 ; Spivak, 2006 , 2009 , 2012 ) that seek to destabilize existing categories and to call into question previously unquestioned beliefs about the goals of education. Her works provide an excellent starting point for examining the links between feminism and educational research. The desire to create new worlds within classrooms, worlds that are fluid, interpretive, and inclusive in order to interrogate power structures, lies at the core of what it means to be a feminist education researcher. As researchers, we must seriously engage with feminist theory and include it in our research so that feminism is not seen as a dirty word, but as a movement/pedagogy/methodology that seeks the liberation of all (Davis, 2016 ).

Feminist research and feminist teaching are intrinsically linked. As Kerkhoff ( 2015 ) wrote, “Feminist pedagogy requires students to challenge the norms and to question whether existing practices privilege certain groups and marginalize others” (p. 444), and this is exactly what feminist educational research should do. Bailey ( 2001 ) called on teachers, particularly those who identify as feminists, to be activists, “The values of one’s teaching should not be separated sharply from the values one expresses outside the classroom, because teaching is not inherently pure or laboratory practice” (p. 126); however, we have to be careful not to glorify teachers as activists because that leads to the risk of misinterpreting actions. Bailey argued that teaching critical thinking is not enough if it is not coupled with curriculums and pedagogies that are antiheteronormative, antisexist, and antiracist. As Bailey warned, just using feminist theory or identifying as a feminist is not enough. It is very easy to use the language and theories of feminism without being actively feminist in one’s research. There are ethical and methodological issues that feminist scholars must consider when conducting research.

Feminist research requires one to discuss ethics, not as a bureaucratic move, but as a reflexive move that shows the researchers understand that, no matter how much they wish it didn’t, power always plays a role in the process. According to Davies ( 2014 ), “Ethics, as Barad defines it, is a matter of questioning what is being made to matter and how that mattering affects what it is possible to do and to think” (p. 11). In other words, ethics is what is made to matter in a particular time and place.

Davies ( 2016 ) extended her definition of ethics to the interactions one has with others.

This is not ethics as a matter of separate individuals following a set of rules. Ethical practice, as both Barad and Deleuze define it, requires thinking beyond the already known, being open in the moment of the encounter, pausing at the threshold and crossing over. Ethical practice is emergent in encounters with others, in emergent listening with others. It is a matter of questioning what is being made to matter and how that mattering affects what it is possible to do and to think. Ethics is emergent in the intra-active encounters in which knowing, being, and doing (epistemology, ontology, and ethics) are inextricably linked. (Barad, 2007 , p. 83)

The ethics of any project must be negotiated and contested before, during, and after the process of conducting research in conjunction with the participants. Feminist research is highly reflexive and should be conducted in ways that challenge power dynamics between individuals and social institutions. Educational researchers must heed the warning to avoid the “god-trick” (Haraway, 1988 ) and to continually question and re-question the ways we seek to define and present subjugated knowledge (Hesse-Biber, 2012 ).

Positionalities and Reflexivity

According to feminist ethnographer Noelle Stout, “Positionality isn’t meant to be a few sentences at the beginning of a work” (personal communication, April 5, 2016 ). In order to move to new ways of experiencing and studying the world, it is vital that scholars examine the ways that reflexivity and positionality are constructed. In a glorious footnote, Margery Wolf ( 1992 ) related reflexivity in anthropological writing to a bureaucratic procedure (p. 136), and that resonates with how positionality often operates in the field of education.

The current trend in educational research is to include a positionality statement that fixes the identity of the author in a particular place and time and is derived from feminist standpoint theory. Researchers should make their biases and the identities of the authors clear in a text, but there are serious issues with the way that positionality functions as a boundary around the authors. Examining how the researchers exert authority within a text allows the reader the opportunity to determine the intent and philosophy behind the text. If positionality were used in an embedded and reflexive manner, then educational research would be much richer and allow more nuanced views of schools, in addition to being more feminist in nature. The rest of this section briefly discussrs articles that engage with feminist ethics regarding researcher subjectivities and positionality, and two articles are examined in greater depth.

When looking for examples of research that includes deeply reflexive and embedded positionality, one finds that they mostly deal with issues of race, equity, and diversity. The highlighted articles provide examples of positionality statements that are deeply reflexive and represent the ways that feminist researchers can attend to the ethics of being part of a research project. These examples all come from feminist ethnographic projects, but they are applicable to a wide variety of feminist qualitative projects.

Martinez ( 2016 ) examined how research methods are or are not appropriate for specific contexts. Calderon ( 2016 ) examined autoethnography and the reproduction of “settler colonial understandings of marginalized communities” (p. 5). Similarly, Wissman, Staples, Vasudevan, and Nichols ( 2015 ) discussed how to research with adolescents through engaged participation and collaborative inquiry, and Ceglowski and Makovsky ( 2012 ) discussed the ways researchers can engage in duoethnography with young children.

Abajian ( 2016 ) uncovered the ways military recruiters operate in high schools and paid particular attention to the politics of remaining neutral while also working to subvert school militarization. She wrote,

Because of the sensitive and also controversial nature of my research, it was not possible to have a collaborative process with students, teachers, and parents. Purposefully intervening would have made documentation impossible because that would have (rightfully) aligned me with anti-war and counter-recruitment activists who were usually not welcomed on school campuses (Abajian & Guzman, 2013 ). It was difficult enough to find an administrator who gave me consent to conduct my research within her school, as I had explicitly stated in my participant recruitment letters and consent forms that I was going to research the promotion of post-secondary paths including the military. Hence, any purposeful intervention on my part would have resulted in the termination of my research project. At the same time, my documentation was, in essence, an intervention. I hoped that my presence as an observer positively shaped the context of my observation and also contributed to the larger struggle against the militarization of schools. (p. 26)

Her positionality played a vital role in the creation, implementation, and analysis of military recruitment, but it also forced her into unexpected silences in order to carry out her research. Abajian’s positionality statement brings up many questions about the ways researchers have to use or silence their positionality to further their research, especially if they are working in ostensibly “neutral” and “politically free” zones, such as schools. Her work drew on engaged anthropology (Low & Merry, 2010 ) and critical reflexivity (Duncan-Andrade & Morrell, 2008 ) to highlight how researchers’ subjectivities shape ethnographic projects. Questions of subjectivity and positionality in her work reflect the larger discourses around these topics in feminist theory and qualitative research.

Brown ( 2011 ) provided another example of embedded and reflexive positionality of the articles surveyed. Her entire study engaged with questions about how her positionality influenced the study during the field-work portion of her ethnography on how race and racism operate in ethnographic field-work. This excerpt from her study highlights how she conceived of positionality and how it informed her work and her process.

Next, I provide a brief overview of the research study from which this paper emerged and I follow this with a presentation of four, first-person narratives from key encounters I experienced while doing ethnographic field research. Each of these stories centres the role race played as I negotiated my multiple, complex positionality vis-á-vis different informants and participants in my study. These stories highlight the emotional pressures that race work has on the researcher and the research process, thus reaffirming why one needs to recognise the role race plays, and may play, in research prior to, during, and after conducting one’s study (Milner, 2007 ). I conclude by discussing the implications these insights have on preparing researchers of color to conduct cross-racial qualitative research. (Brown, 2011 , p. 98)

Brown centered the roles of race and subjectivity, both hers and her participants, by focusing her analysis on the four narratives. The researchers highlighted in this section thought deeply about the ethics of their projects and the ways that their positionality informed their choice of methods.

Methods and Challenges

Feminist qualitative research can take many forms, but the most common data collection methods include interviews, observations, and narrative or discourse analysis. For the purposes of this article, methods refer to the tools and techniques researchers use, while methodology refers to the larger philosophical and epistemological approaches to conducting research. It is also important to note that these are not fixed terms, and that there continues to be much debate about what constitutes feminist theory and feminist research methods among feminist qualitative researchers. This section discusses some of the tensions and constraints of using feminist theory in educational research.

Jackson and Mazzei ( 2012 ) called on researchers to think through their data with theory at all stages of the collection and analysis process. They also reminded us that all data collection is partial and informed by the researcher’s own beliefs (Koro-Ljungberg, Löytönen, & Tesar, 2017 ). Interviews are sites of power and critiques because they show the power of stories and serve as a method of worlding, the process of “making a world, turning insight into instrument, through and into a possible act of freedom” (Spivak, 2014 , p. xiii). Interviews allow researchers and participants ways to engage in new ways of understanding past experiences and connecting them to feminist theories. The narratives serve as data, but it is worth noting that the data collected from interviews are “partial, incomplete, and always being re-told and re-membered” (Jackson & Mazzei, 2012 , p. 3), much like the lived experiences of both researcher and participant.

Research, data collection, and interpretation are not neutral endeavors, particularly with interviews (Jackson & Mazzei, 2009 ; Mazzei, 2007 , 2013 ). Since education research emerged out of educational psychology (Lather, 1991 ; St. Pierre, 2016 ), historically there has been an emphasis on generalizability and positivist data collection methods. Most feminist research makes no claims of generalizability or truth; indeed, to do so would negate the hyperpersonal and particular nature of this type of research (Love, 2017 ). St. Pierre ( 2016 ) viewed the lack of generalizability as an asset of feminist and poststructural research, rather than a limitation, because it creates a space of resistance against positivist research methodologies.

Denzin and Giardina ( 2016 ) urged researchers to “consider an alternative mode of thinking about the critical turn in qualitative inquiry and posit the following suggestion: perhaps it is time we turned away from ‘methodology’ altogether ” (p. 5, italics original). Despite the contention over the term critical among some feminist scholars (e.g. Ellsworth, 1989 ), their suggestion is valid and has been picked up by feminist and poststructural scholars who examine the tensions between following a strict research method/ology and the theoretical systems out of which they operate because precision in method obscures the messy and human nature of research (Koro-Ljungberg, 2016 ; Koro-Ljungberg et al., 2017 ; Love, 2017 ; St. Pierre & Pillow, 2000 ). Feminist qualitative researchers should seek to complicate the question of what method and methodology mean when conducting feminist research (Lather, 1991 ), due to the feminist emphasis on reflexive and situated research methods (Hesse-Biber, 2012 ).

Examples of Feminist Qualitative Research in Education

A complete overview of the literature is not possible here, due to considerations of length, but the articles and books selected represent the various debates within feminist educational research. They also show how research preoccupations have changed over the course of feminist work in education. The literature review is divided into three broad categories: Power, canons, and gender; feminist pedagogies, curriculums, and classrooms; and teacher education, identities, and knowledge. Each section provides a broad overview of the literature to demonstrate the breadth of work using feminist theory, with some examples more deeply explicated to describe how feminist theories inform the scholarship.

Power, Canons, and Gender

The literature in this category contests disciplinary practices that are androcentric in both content and form, while asserting the value of using feminist knowledge to construct knowledge. The majority of the work was written in the 1980s and supported the creation of feminist ways of knowing, particularly via the creation of women’s studies programs or courses in existing departments that centered female voices and experiences.

Questioning the canon has long been a focus of feminist scholarship, as has the attempt to subvert its power in the disciplines. Bezucha ( 1985 ) focused on the ways that departments of history resist the inclusion of both women and feminism in the historical canon. Similarly, Miller ( 1985 ) discussed feminism as subversion when seeking to expand the canon of French literature in higher education.

Lauter and Dieterich ( 1972 ) examined a report by ERIC, “Women’s Place in Academe,” a collection of articles about the discrepancies by gender in jobs and tenure-track positions and the lack of inclusion of women authors in literature classes. They also found that women were relegated to “softer” disciplines and that feminist knowledge was not acknowledged as valid work. Culley and Portuges ( 1985 ) expanded the focus beyond disciplines to the larger structures of higher education and noted the varies ways that professors subvert from within their disciplines. DuBois et al. ( 1985 ) chronicled the development of feminist scholarship in the disciplines of anthropology, education, history, literature, and philosophy. They explained that the institutions of higher education often prevent feminist scholars from working across disciplines in an attempt to keep them separate. Raymond ( 1985 ) also critiqued the academy for not encouraging relationships across disciplines and offered the development of women’s, gender, and feminist studies as one solution to greater interdisciplinary work.

Parson ( 2016 ) examined the ways that STEM syllabi reinforce gendered norms in higher education. She specifically looked at eight syllabi from math, chemistry, biology, physics, and geology classes to determine how modal verbs showing stance, pronouns, intertextuality, interdiscursivity, and gender showed power relations in higher education. She framed the study through poststructuralist feminist critical discourse analysis to uncover “the ways that gendered practices that favor men are represented and replicated in the syllabus” (p. 103). She found that all the syllabi positioned knowledge as something that is, rather than something that can be co-constructed. Additionally, the syllabi also favored individual and masculine notions of what it means to learn by stressing the competitive and difficult nature of the classroom and content.

When reading newer work on feminism in higher education and the construction of knowledge, it is easy to feel that, while the conversations might have shifted somewhat, the challenge of conducting interdisciplinary feminist work in institutions of higher education remains as present as it was during the creation of women’s and gender studies departments. The articles all point to the fact that simply including women’s and marginalized voices in the academy does not erase or mitigate the larger issues of gender discrimination and androcentricity within the silos of the academy.

Feminist Pedagogies, Curricula, and Classrooms

This category of literature has many similarities to the previous one, but all the works focus more specifically on questions of curriculum and pedagogy. A review of the literature shows that the earliest conversations were about the role of women in academia and knowledge construction, and this selection builds on that work to emphasize the ways that feminism can influence the events within classes and expands the focus to more levels of education.

Rich ( 1985 ) explained that curriculum in higher education courses needs to validate gender identities while resisting patriarchal canons. Maher ( 1985 ) narrowed the focus to a critique of the lecture as a pedagogical technique that reinforces androcentric ways of learning and knowing. She called for classes in higher education to be “collaborative, cooperative, and interactive” (p. 30), a cry that still echoes across many college campuses today, especially from students in large lecture-based courses. Maher and Tetreault ( 1994 ) provided a collection of essays that are rooted in feminist classroom practice and moved from the classroom into theoretical possibilities for feminist education. Warren ( 1998 ) recommended using Peggy McIntosh’s five phases of curriculum development ( 1990 ) and extending it to include feminist pedagogies that challenge patriarchal ways of teaching. Exploring the relational encounters that exist in feminist classrooms, Sánchez-Pardo ( 2017 ) discussed the ethics of pedagogy as a politics of visibility and investigated the ways that democratic classrooms relate to feminist classrooms.

While all of the previously cited literature is U.S.–based, the next two works focus on the ways that feminist pedagogies and curriculum operate in a European context. Weiner ( 1994 ) used autobiography and narrative methodologies to provide an introduction to how feminism has influenced educational research and pedagogy in Britain. Revelles-Benavente and Ramos ( 2017 ) collected a series of studies about how situated feminist knowledge challenges the problems of neoliberal education across Europe. These two, among many European feminist works, demonstrate the range of scholarship and show the trans-Atlantic links between how feminism has been received in educational settings. However, much more work needs to be done in looking at the broader global context, and particularly by feminist scholars who come from non-Western contexts.

The following literature moves us into P–12 classrooms. DiGiovanni and Liston ( 2005 ) called for a new research agenda in K–5 education that explores the hidden curriculums surrounding gender and gender identity. One source of the hidden curriculum is classroom literature, which both Davies ( 2003 ) and Vandergrift ( 1995 ) discussed in their works. Davies ( 2003 ) used feminist ethnography to understand how children who were exposed to feminist picture books talked about gender and gender roles. Vandergrift ( 1995 ) presented a theoretical piece that explored the ways picture books reinforce or resist canons. She laid out a future research agenda using reader response theory to better comprehend how young children question gender in literature. Willinsky ( 1987 ) explored the ways that dictionary definitions reinforced constructions of gender. He looked at the definitions of the words clitoris, penis , and vagina in six school dictionaries and then compared them with A Feminist Dictionary to see how the definitions varied across texts. He found a stark difference in the treatment of the words vagina and penis ; definitions of the word vagina were treated as medical or anatomical and devoid of sexuality, while definitions of the term penis were linked to sex (p. 151).

Weisner ( 2004 ) addressed middle school classrooms and highlighted the various ways her school discouraged unconventional and feminist ways of teaching. She also brought up issues of silence, on the part of both teachers and students, regarding sexuality. By including students in the curriculum planning process, Weisner provided more possibilities for challenging power in classrooms. Wallace ( 1999 ) returned to the realm of higher education and pushed literature professors to expand pedagogy to be about more than just the texts that are read. She challenged the metaphoric dichotomy of classrooms as places of love or battlefields; in doing so, she “advocate[d] active ignorance and attention to resistances” (p. 194) as a method of subverting transference from students to teachers.

The works discussed in this section cover topics ranging from the place of women in curriculum to the gendered encounters teachers and students have with curriculums and pedagogies. They offer current feminist scholars many directions for future research, particularly in the arena of P–12 education.

Teacher Education, Identities, and Knowledge

The third subset of literature examines the ways that teachers exist in classrooms and some possibilities for feminist teacher education. The majority of the literature in this section starts from the premise that the teachers are engaged in feminist projects. The selections concerning teacher education offer critiques of existing heteropatriarchal normative teacher education and include possibilities for weaving feminism and feminist pedagogies into the education of preservice teachers.

Holzman ( 1986 ) explored the role of multicultural teaching and how it can challenge systematic oppression; however, she complicated the process with her personal narrative of being a lesbian and working to find a place within the school for her sexual identity. She questioned how teachers can protect their identities while also engaging in the fight for justice and equity. Hoffman ( 1985 ) discussed the ways teacher power operates in the classroom and how to balance the personal and political while still engaging in disciplinary curriculums. She contended that teachers can work from personal knowledge and connect it to the larger curricular concerns of their discipline. Golden ( 1998 ) used teacher narratives to unpack how teachers can become radicalized in the higher education classroom when faced with unrelenting patriarchal and heteronormative messages.

Extending this work, Bailey ( 2001 ) discussed teachers as activists within the classroom. She focused on three aspects of teaching: integrity with regard to relationships, course content, and teaching strategies. She concluded that teachers cannot separate their values from their profession. Simon ( 2007 ) conducted a case study of a secondary teacher and communities of inquiry to see how they impacted her work in the classroom. The teacher, Laura, explicitly tied her inquiry activities to activist teacher education and critical pedagogy, “For this study, inquiry is fundamental to critical pedagogy, shaped by power and ideology, relationships within and outside of the classroom, as well as teachers’ and students’ autochthonous histories and epistemologies” (Simon, 2007 , p. 47). Laura’s experiences during her teacher education program continued during her years in the classroom, leading her to create a larger activism-oriented teacher organization.

Collecting educational autobiographies from 17 college-level feminist professors, Maher and Tetreault ( 1994 ) worried that educators often conflated “the experience and values of white middle-class women like ourselves for gendered universals” (p. 15). They complicated the idea of a democratic feminist teacher, raised issues regarding the problematic ways hegemonic feminism flattens experience to that of just white women, and pushed feminist professors to pay particular attention to the intersections of race, class, gender, and sexuality when teaching.

Cheira ( 2017 ) called for gender-conscious teaching and literature-based teaching to confront the gender stereotypes she encountered in Portuguese secondary schools. Papoulis and Smith ( 1992 ) conducted summer sessions where teachers experienced writing activities they could teach their students. Conceptualized as an experiential professional development course, the article revolved around an incident where the seminar was reading Emily Dickinson and the men in the course asked the two female instructors why they had to read feminist literature and the conversations that arose. The stories the women told tie into Papoulis and Smith’s call for teacher educators to interrogate their underlying beliefs and ideologies about gender, race, and class, so they are able to foster communities of study that can purposefully and consciously address feminist inquiry.

McWilliam ( 1994 ) collected stories of preservice teachers in Australia to understand how feminism can influence teacher education. She explored how textual practices affect how preservice teachers understand teaching and their role. Robertson ( 1994 ) tackled the issue of teacher education and challenged teachers to move beyond the two metaphors of banking and midwifery when discussing feminist ways of teaching. She called for teacher educators to use feminist pedagogies within schools of education so that preservice teachers experience a feminist education. Maher and Rathbone ( 1986 ) explored the scholarship on women’s and girls’ educational experiences and used their findings to call for changes in teacher education. They argued that schools reinforce the notion that female qualities are inferior due to androcentric curriculums and ways of showing knowledge. Justice-oriented teacher education is a more recent iteration of this debate, and Jones and Hughes ( 2016 ) called for community-based practices to expand the traditional definitions of schooling and education. They called for preservice teachers to be conversant with, and open to, feminist storylines that defy existing gendered, raced, and classed stereotypes.

Bieler ( 2010 ) drew on feminist and critical definitions of dialogue (e.g., those by Bakhtin, Freire, Ellsworth, hooks, and Burbules) to reframe mentoring discourse in university supervision and dialogic praxis. She concluded by calling on university supervisors to change their methods of working with preservice teachers to “Explicitly and transparently cultivat[e] dialogic praxis-oriented mentoring relationships so that the newest members of our field can ‘feel their own strength at last,’ as Homer’s Telemachus aspired to do” (Bieler, 2010 , p. 422).

Johnson ( 2004 ) also examined the role of teacher educators, but she focused on the bodies and sexualities of preservice teachers. She explored the dynamics of sexual tension in secondary classrooms, the role of the body in teaching, and concerns about clothing when teaching. She explicitly worked to resist and undermine Cartesian dualities and, instead, explored the erotic power of teaching and seducing students into a love of subject matter. “But empowered women threaten the patriarchal structure of this society. Therefore, women have been acculturated to distrust erotic power” (Johnson, 2004 , p. 7). Like Bieler ( 2010 ), Johnson ( 2004 ) concluded that, “Teacher educators could play a role in creating a space within the larger framework of teacher education discourse such that bodily knowledge is considered along with pedagogical and content knowledge as a necessary component of teacher training and professional development” (p. 24). The articles about teacher education all sought to provoke questions about how we engage in the preparation and continuing development of educators.

Teacher identity and teacher education constitute how teachers construct knowledge, as both students and teachers. The works in this section raise issues of what identities are “acceptable” in the classroom, ways teachers and teacher educators can disrupt oppressive storylines and practices, and the challenges of utilizing feminist pedagogies without falling into hegemonic feminist practices.

Possibilities for Feminist Qualitative Research

Spivak ( 2012 ) believed that “gender is our first instrument of abstraction” (p. 30) and is often overlooked in a desire to understand political, curricular, or cultural moments. More work needs to be done to center gender and intersecting identities in educational research. One way is by using feminist qualitative methods. Classrooms and educational systems need to be examined through their gendered components, and the ways students operate within and negotiate systems of power and oppression need to be explored. We need to see if and how teachers are actively challenging patriarchal and heteronormative curriculums and to learn new methods for engaging in affirmative sabotage (Spivak, 2014 ). Given the historical emphasis on higher education, more work is needed regarding P–12 education, because it is in P–12 classrooms that affirmative sabotage may be the most necessary to subvert systems of oppression.

In order to engage in affirmative sabotage, it is vital that qualitative researchers who wish to use feminist theory spend time grappling with the complexity and multiplicity of feminist theory. It is only by doing this thought work that researchers will be able to understand the ongoing debates within feminist theory and to use it in a way that leads to a more equitable and just world. Simply using feminist theory because it may be trendy ignores the very real political nature of feminist activism. Researchers need to consider which theories they draw on and why they use those theories in their projects. One way of doing this is to explicitly think with theory (Jackson & Mazzei, 2012 ) at all stages of the research project and to consider which voices are being heard and which are being silenced (Gilligan, 2011 ; Spivak, 1988 ) in educational research. More consideration also needs to be given to non-U.S. and non-Western feminist theories and research to expand our understanding of education and schooling.

Paying close attention to feminist debates about method and methodology provides another possibility for qualitative research. The very process of challenging positivist research methods opens up new spaces and places for feminist qualitative research in education. It also allows researchers room to explore subjectivities that are often marginalized. When researchers engage in the deeply reflexive work that feminist research requires, it leads to acts of affirmative sabotage within the academy. These discussions create the spaces that lead to new visions and new worlds. Spivak ( 2006 ) once declared, “I am helpless before the fact that all my essays these days seem to end with projects for future work” (p. 35), but this is precisely the beauty of feminist qualitative research. We are setting ourselves and other feminist researchers up for future work, future questions, and actively changing the nature of qualitative research.

Acknowledgements

Dr. George Noblit provided the author with the opportunity to think deeply about qualitative methods and to write this article, for which the author is extremely grateful. Dr. Lynda Stone and Dr. Tanya Shields are thanked for encouraging the author’s passion for feminist theory and for providing many hours of fruitful conversation and book lists. A final thank you is owed to the author’s partner, Ben Skelton, for hours of listening to her talk about feminist methods, for always being a first reader, and for taking care of their infant while the author finished writing this article.

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• < Previous chapter

7 Conclusion: Revisiting the “We” of Feminism

• Published: March 2020
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The conclusion first shows that the dynamics of femonationalism should be explained while taking into account feminists’ political subjectivations, and the link between feminist whiteness and nationalism. It also explores how a feminist ethic of responsibility enables us to go beyond the critical question of the foundation of feminism—that is, who the “we” is in the name of which feminists make their claims. A feminist ethics of responsibility implies redefining the subject of feminism as relations among feminists rather than a “we women,” and defining the feminist project as a project of treating other feminists equally. Finally, the conclusion revisits the question of agency and emancipation. It argues that a feminist ethic of responsibility can help define emancipation outside of the liberal vocabulary of agency.

The “we” of feminism is not its foundation; it is an effect of the impressions made by others who take the risk of inhabiting its name. Of course, this “hopeful” narrative has another edge: the “we” of feminism is shaped by some bodies, more than others. — Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotions , 189

Throughout this book, I have defined feminism as a political and moral project, and I have explored its troubles and its reconfigurations in postsecular times. My aim has not been to settle feminist disputes over values such as gender equality, autonomy, or secularism—now debatably heralded as a feminist value as well. 1 Close Rather, I have sought to understand feminism’s trouble through an exploration of feminists’ variegated attachments to the feminist project, and of how these reproduce hierarchies of race and exclusions as well as provide terms for resistance to these exclusions. Indeed, my argument has been that if we are to understand how the recuperation of feminist values for nationalist and xenophobic agendas was made possible, and understand the intractable disputes over the subjects who may or may not be included, as equals, in the feminist project, we must comprehend how attachments to feminism are shaped by race, whiteness, class, sexuality and history, and we must consider their deeply moral nature.

The debates over Islamic veiling practices that have unfolded in the last two decades in liberal democracies, especially in Europe, have captured the imagination of the public with ready-made oppositions between secularism and religious freedom, national identity and religious faith, gender equality and Islamic practices. Ideas about gender equality and emancipation have figured prominently in these discussions, providing a convenient vehicle for modernity—as is often the case—as well as a convenient veil over postcolonial relations, racism, and Islamophobia. Logically, feminists have figured prominently in these debates, on various sides. Their disputes have reconfigured feminist movements in many contexts, creating new alliances and breaking up old ones.

At the same time, feminist discourses about gender equality have been enrolled in nationalist projects that have gained tremendous support in particular in Europe, in the context of the antimigrant politics that has consolidated since the “refugee crisis.” In that sense, in many national contexts, feminists’ inability to agree upon veiling policies has certainly played an important political role in the current recuperation of feminist discourses for xenophobic purposes. However, the active adhesion of a small or large fraction of feminist activists to secularist discourses and veiling bans—which is not to be understated—does not explain the rise of femonationalism, 2 Close that is, the appropriation of feminist values to pursue a nationalist and populist politics. Indeed, a vast majority of those very same feminists would openly oppose such a politics, and in fact, many feminists have actively resisted femonationalism and anti-immigrant politics. Rather, I argue that it is the inability to resist such a femonationalist discourse, and the ignorance of its roots and connections within the feminist movements themselves, that has paved the way to femonationalism, like the perfect epitome of the return of the repressed . In other words, the rise of femonationalism calls attention to the roads not taken, the alliances not forged in time, the foreclosure of critique, and the ignorance linked to privilege within feminism.

From that perspective, the sexularism debates provide an ideal vantage point from which to analyze the present—and future—of feminism as a political project. What is more, these debates also had profound echoes in feminist theory. Indeed, by placing religious Muslim women at the center of attention and discourses, a subject depicted as not liberal enough, the debates have encountered a stream of critical reflections, analyses, and anxieties about the feminist subject, understood as the subject to be emancipated by feminism. Indeed, multiculturalist feminist theory has grappled with the conundrum of reconciling the liberal premises of gender equality with minority rights, 3 Close while critical feminist theory has chastised the political ambitions of feminism to emancipate subjects whose form of life does not follow the political and moral grammar of liberalism. 4 Close These debates have revolved around the meaning of female agency and its role and centrality for feminist politics. 5 Close They have therefore provided a critical return on feminism’s liberal and modern premises, revealing the extent of the exclusions these perform, but they have also opened up a political and normative abyss—to be explored or to recoil from. It is no surprise, then, that sexularism debates have captured not only the public imagination in many European countries but also feminists’ imagination.

In this book, I have proposed to shift attention from female agency and emancipation—a subject at the heart of both the public debate on Islamic veiling and of numerous feminist theorizations—to feminists and the project they inhabit, to use Sara Ahmed’s metaphor in the epigraph of this concluding chapter. Instead of scrutinizing the ability of pious women to display agency even in religiously orthodox settings or the potential of religiosity as a medium of emancipation—a site of important empirical and theoretical developments 6 Close —I have proposed to explore feminists’ political subjectivations in the contemporary postsecular moment. The concept of political subjectivation I have forged aims at describing the process by which becoming a feminist implies not only adhering to a set of norms and political visions, but also tracing boundaries between “good” and “bad” feminist subjects, and entering into relations with these subjects accordingly. It thus captures the articulation between politics and morals that, I argue, is at the heart of the feminist project. This change in focus, from the subject of feminists’ attention —the nonliberal subject to be recuperated, or not, for the feminist project—to the subjects of feminism , responded first to a desire to understand the tremendous emotional charge that these debates triggered for feminists on different sides and what these emotions revealed about the nature of the feminist project. Indeed, while analyzing feminist discourses in the context of sexularism debates, I have argued relentlessly in this book that we must consider feminism not only as a political project of collective emancipation and subjective transformation, but also as a moral project. By creating and imagining political relationships, feminism also produces moral relations between its participants, envisioned as distant others to be saved or as possibly emancipated equals.

Second, this shift in focus responded to the ambition to explore Islamic veil debates as the return of the repressed in feminism, as the excluded domains coming back to haunt this project in various guises depending on the context. I have documented how whiteness and its privileges remain actively concealed, through universalist discourses in particular, and how whiteness shapes feminist politics vis-à-vis Islamic veil regulations. Finally, the focus on feminists’ political subjectivations aimed not only at operating a critical return on the repressed, but also, by outlining the moral dimension of the feminist project, at reflecting on how the ethical drive within this political project may be put in the service of an anticipatory-utopian moment, 7 Close reclaiming feminism’s imaginative and transformative powers. As I analyzed feminists’ discourses, I traced their moral dispositions—the contours of the ethical drive that characterizes this political project—and I reflected critically on the moral harms that feminists may perpetrate, as well as on the asymmetries of power and privilege that shape their relations and the ways in which subjects may inhabit feminism. I also argued that we may harness the potential of this ethical drive in the service of expanding the moral boundaries of the feminist project, in particular to disestablish feminist whiteness.

Feminist Whiteness and Femonationalism

My approach thus shifts our focus and our understanding of Islamic veil debates and femonationalism. While many artful commentaries and analyses of these debates have stressed how they have reconfigured secularism, gender, and sexual emancipation in racialized terms, 8 Close I have focused on the ways in which they trigger feminists’ moral discourses about “good” and “bad” feminist subjects, and how these discourses are shaped by race and postcolonialism, as well as religion and secularism. Seen in this light, Islamic veil debates display well-known features of “difference” debates within feminism. They reproduce what intersectional analyses of feminist movements have critiqued for decades—that is, the centrality of race and racism as mechanisms of privilege and exclusion within feminist movements, as well as the resulting invisibilization of multiple marginalized subjects and subjectivities from the feminist project. 9 Close

I also argue that these debates reveal new features as well. Indeed, because they revolve around issues such as female autonomy and emancipation, they elicit moral discourses that reveal the moral horizon and boundaries that feminism produces. By defining “good” and “bad” feminist subjects—subjects of equal respect and objects of benevolent care; subjects to be regulated, and abject subjects to be condemned—these discourses delimit who is to be part of the feminist project and benefit from its claims, and who is to be excluded. Doing so, they produce and reproduce power relations, hierarchies, and asymmetries in the very name of feminism, based on race, postcolonial relations, and Islamophobia.

My focus on the moral dimension of feminism, and how it connects with politics, has thus led me to complement intersectional approaches of feminist movements with an attention to whiteness and how it shapes the political subjectivation of white feminists. Indeed, in order to account for white feminists’ emotional reactions and their desire to regulate Muslim women’s subjectivities in the name of feminism, I have relied mainly on the concept of feminist whiteness. This concept designates how feminism is made white through the discourses of white feminists. These discourses vary depending on the context, and they also convey different moral relations. I have in particular distinguished between, on the one hand, feminist whiteness as it is expressed in a benevolent relation of care for racialized women—understood as objects of care, beneficiaries of feminist claims made in their names—and on the other hand, feminist whiteness that enforces the exclusion of those racialized subjects who claim their part as equals in the feminist project. Hence, feminist whiteness is shaped by the social context in which it is performed. It fashions feminism when it is conceived as a social project, one of taking care of vulnerable women and representing their needs, and it also fashions feminism understood as a political project creating political relationships among equals.

I argue that the approach focusing on feminist whiteness I have proposed in this book sheds new light on femonationalism and its political success. Femonationalism can be analyzed as resulting from a convergence of material interests in neoliberal times, 10 Close but it should also be understood as elicited by feminist whiteness; that is, as fueled by the political subjectivation of white feminists as white feminists. White ignorance 11 Close and white innocence 12 Close explain why many white feminists did not consider the implications that their claims in favor of veiling bans would have for Muslim women, and how they could be instrumentalized for right-wing and xenophobic political agendas. Indeed, I have argued that feminist whiteness is often predicated upon a denial of relationality with racialized subjects, a denial that fuels the possibility of moral and political irresponsibility. Hence, the political and moral relations with racialized feminists that have been refused, denied, or marginalized by white feminists have transformed into political claims that consolidate and rigidify the boundaries of the national community on the basis of race, class, migration status, and religion.

However, feminist whiteness may be displaced and debunked, for example through the discourse of intersectionality—when it is indeed adopted as an important principle of feminist intervention, as is the case to some extent in Quebec. Then issues of racism and white privilege become part of a more critical feminist practice. What is more, the feminist ethic of intervention in grassroots organizations, when it is critical of the power relations between the one providing service and counseling and the one receiving them, and considers that women should be listened to on their own terms, also provides a potential lever to critique white privilege by encouraging relationality and decentering feminist whiteness and its supposed epistemological superiority. Finally, the most important site of resistance to feminist whiteness is feminist activism and discourses by racialized feminists. Indeed, racialized feminists provide a trenchant analysis and critique of feminist whiteness within feminist organizations and feminist movements at large. Their discourses also reveal the deeply moral nature of feminism. Racialized feminists’ just resentment claims moral redress from white feminists. It demands that they be considered equal participants in the feminist project, and asks as a prerequisite that power relations and white privilege be acknowledged by white feminists. Racialized feminists’ moral address and their experiences of failed solidarity or of the promise of inclusion direct us to inquire more deeply into the moral bonds that the feminist promise holds. I explored those bonds, and the nature of the feminist project, in chapter 6 , arguing that we must develop and deepen what I called a feminist ethic of responsibility if we want to live up to the promise of caring for other feminist subjects that feminism entails and upon which it is based.

Feminist Trouble / Feminist Futures: Revisiting the “We” of Feminism

The question of foundations—of who is the “we” feminists claim to be, to represent, and to make claims about—has been a central one for feminist theory. 13 Close At the heart of antifoundationalist accounts of feminism is the premise that for feminism to be a transformative project, it cannot rest upon essentialist categorizations, especially when those have historically performed exclusions based on race, sexuality, or coloniality. While this claim has accomplished a critical return on the feminist project, contesting its boundaries and its normative horizon, it has not led to new ways to imagine what is the nature of the community that feminism claims to create. This anti-identitarian account of feminism has thus elicited what Judith Butler presents as a practice of critique, one that establishes a critical relation to norms “in the sense that it will not comply with a given category, but rather constitute an interrogatory relation to the field of categorization itself, referring at least implicitly to the limits of the epistemological horizon within which practices are formed.” 14 Close For antifoundationalist feminists such as Teresa de Lauretis, Judith Butler, and Linda Zerilli, the lack of foundation of the “we” is what constitutes feminism as a critical project, although for different reasons. For de Lauretis, feminist theory and practice is based on a paradox, that of being at once limited by its social circumstances and identities, and “excessive to them.” 15 Close For Butler, what constitutes feminism is precisely its critical relation to norms, a relation that is vital for any critical political project. 16 Close For Zerilli, feminism is a project of freedom, creating free relations, rather than a project based on a shared identity, and the question of the “we” is, in fact, irrelevant for this political project. 17 Close

However, can this critical relation to the normativity embedded in the “we” that feminism pretends to incarnate constitute the basis of an anticipatory-utopian moment for feminism? Or can feminism dispense with its utopian dimension? While I agree with the antifoundationalist perspective on the feminist subject wholeheartedly, I ask: can and should another “we” than “we women” emerge from this operation of critique? For some feminist theorists like Judith Butler, there is no other moment than the moment of critique. There is no outside of norms, and new normative projects must elicit new critical ethics. The “we women” must be understood as undecidable, open to reinterpretations, as “permanent openness and resignifiability.” 18 Close The practice of critique for feminism would then make visible the fact that there can be no anticipatory-utopian moment, only possibilities of mobilization produced by “existing configurations of discourse and power.” 19 Close

What type of political subject can then emerge from this critical practice? Two paths seem to have been opened by the antifoundationalist account of feminism. One is Judith Butler’s reflection on coalition based on vulnerability and on a shared precarious life. Indeed, in her recent work Butler has argued that our vulnerability in the face of death and mourning and our social living condition of precariousness are shared conditions of existence—rather than ontological claims—that may lay the antifoundationalist basis for collective action. The precariousness of life, the fact that living makes us dependent on others, is a shared human condition, but also a condition that is unequally distributed among us, with some of us being more exposed to vulnerability than others—a situation denied by those who are shielded from vulnerability by their privileges. Vulnerability is therefore a political relation and can thus lead to political action, in the form of coalitions, presented by Butler as copresence in the public space in the name of a “we” the people, a “we” that exists as copresence and shared vulnerability rather than as an identity. 20 Close

Can such an account of the “we” delineate the contour of a feminist “we”? I argue that Butler’s proposal remains incomplete, in particular because it does not allow us to distinguish between those who are close and those who are distant from us, and this distinction is central for ethical and political purposes. Although we are differently exposed to vulnerability, Butler does not reflect more precisely on how those differences might forge specific political relations, across and within those differences, and therefore constitute different collective subjects. More importantly, while Butler affirms that there is no normative horizon or foundation beyond critique, except a form of collective copresence in the public space to claim forms of protection from institutionalized vulnerability, the very act of claiming rights presupposes an outside of the “we,” an authority that one seeks to challenge and replace. There is, therefore, underlying critique, a desire—a utopia maybe—that the world could be different, that an authority could be replaced. Hence, some kind of anticipatory-utopian moment, unexamined in Butler’s claim, may be in fact shaping her critique. I agree here with Amy Allen’s important reminder that critical feminist theory needs to be both explanatory and anticipatory to be truly a critical project with political potential. 21 Close This anticipatory moment must be articulated if we want to be able to expose its possible exclusions and limits. What is more, my fieldwork and numerous critical accounts of feminists’ relationship to feminism indicate that commitment to this “we,” even if an undecided “we” that is exposed to resignifications, exceeds a pure moment of critique and negativity. Hence, this path toward a potential antifoundationalist political “we” remains only partially explored.

A second path that follows from antifoundationalist accounts of feminism is evidently queer theory on politics and identity, or rather on disidentification. 22 Close While here I will not do a close reading of the various approaches that queer theory has developed to think through the question of collective action without foundations, I want to underline two related concepts that open up a queer feminist theorization of politics. I purposely combine here the terms “queer” and “feminist” as one because, when it comes to antifoundationalist theorizing about politics, the two approaches have more similarities than differences and share the same genealogy. 23 Close Both José Esteban Muñoz and Bruno Perreau argue in similar ways that a queer conception of a political community implies a retrospective glance, a critical return on a political experience . Muñoz underlines the distinctive quality of queerness as an illumination, an ideality, a capacity for imagination especially, but not only, visible in queer aesthetics. 24 Close Hence, for Muñoz, queer politics cannot be encapsulated in the negativity of critique. We must recapture its ideality as a concrete utopia, one of actualizing potentialities. In particular, Muñoz insists on the desire evidenced in queer aesthetic, a desire for a future and a desire for queer relationality, a sharing of experiences and desires. Analyzing an instance of actualized queer potentiality, in the resistance to antiqueer politics in France, Perreau 25 Close also defines a queer political community beyond negativity, as a critical return on an experienced event. He argues that a queer politics not only challenges the norms established by the majority, the idea that communities need fixed boundaries, but that it also claims one’s belonging to a political community, a return on a shared experience.

I join these queer insights in arguing that we need critical imagination and potentiality—a more adequate reformulation of the anticipatory-utopian moment—for feminism as much as for queer politics, and that indeed, these projects are in many ways one and the same. I have proposed in this book an antifoundationalist account of the “we” of feminism that is not only critical of identities, but also, I argue, full of potentiality. Indeed, I have defined feminism as a political and moral project of caring for feminist subjects, understood as subjects who give an account of themselves as feminists, but also as those subjects who are put in relation with feminism through their claims or the claims made about them. The potentiality of these relations is what brings them into the scope of feminism and into the web of political and moral relations it creates. I contend that such an account of feminism can provide critical imagination, beyond the negativity of critique, because it centers on the ethical drive of feminism, on relationality and its inherent affectivity, dimensions that are crucial for utopianism.

One may then ask: if subjects who do not claim to be feminist but are put in relation with feminism are considered to be part of that political community, is that community indeed defined by feminism as a set of shared values and a transformative commitment? What does this claim imply for the political boundaries of feminism? Indeed, a risk lies precisely at this juncture. The critical imagination I propose for the feminist project implies that we extend our care, our relations, to subjects who lay beyond what have been identified as feminism’s shared values and “good” subjects. To take again the example given by Eirini Avramopoulou of a feminist coalition in Turkey, feminism meant here allying with religious Muslim women who do not define themselves as feminist, and “taking care” of each other. 26 Close However, is this in any way new for feminism? Historically feminism has always enrolled in its project subjects who do not define themselves as feminists—“women”—and has claimed to speak for them and in their names. What is more, there is, in fact, no agreement on shared values among those who identify as feminists: gender equality, autonomy, and emancipation are values feminists are fighting for and fighting over at the same time.

However, the risks of the critical imagination that I propose are, I argue, morally and politically worthier of taking. Indeed, the risks that feminists take when they claim to represent “women” and women’s interests are often no risk at all: speaking for and in place of distant others who cannot speak for themselves because they are not listened to may just be an iteration of privilege. What is more, the deep essentialist narrative that these claims fuel enacts closures all too well known. In its place, the risk I propose is a risk inherent to any moral relation because, as Emilie Hache surmises, to treat the other well is never a given. 27 Close It is a complex moral practice, especially, I would add, when we recognize that it is also a political act. Treating others equally is a deeply political action, as Jacques Rancière has carefully documented, but it is also the sign of a desire to treat them well, to be preoccupied by others and by my relation to them. 28 Close Hence, we may take the risk that what we have come to know and experience as feminism may be transformed, becoming in part unrecognizable to us. However, doing so, we might in fact recognize new subjects as part of this project and recognize them as equals—a risk worth taking.

Emancipation without Agency

I conclude this book with a last venture into one of feminist theory’s preferred and perilous topics, that of agency. In opening this book, I underlined that sexularism debates captured feminists’ political imagination in great part because they centered on the nature of agency and autonomy: could pious Muslim women be redeemed as agentic subjects? How could agency be redefined to account for practices of compliance—with conservative gender norms and what were perceived as patriarchal injunctions—rather than resistance? The debate over agency and how best to conceptualize it has provided us with some of the most insightful, innovative and complex reflections in contemporary feminist theory. This centrality to feminist thought is of course intimately linked with the centrality of emancipation in the feminist utopian project. 29 Close I argue, maybe provocatively, that, for the sake of feminism’s emancipatory promise, we do not have to and should not settle the question of agency. My aim in this book has been to decenter our inquiry from the subjectivities and life forms of “distant” others—not-liberal-enough and pious subjects—and to turn away from questions asking whether these subjects can be recuperated for the feminist project, or whether the project’s limits have been exposed, making it irrelevant for postsecular times. I have argued that we should rather focus our attention on the political subjectivities of feminists and what we can learn about the feminist project as the project of creating political and moral relations. Now, last, I argue that this decentering also opens up new ways of thinking about the connection between agency and emancipation.

Many feminist theorists have argued that only by transforming our conception of autonomy and freedom can we reconcile the feminist project with political subjectivities that fall outside the scope of liberalism. 30 Close I have argued, on the contrary, that we need not enter the debate over the definition of what counts as autonomous behavior, freedom, or emancipation in order to decide how we should address questions such as those about forms of Islamic veiling. Indeed, I have argued that the feminist ethic of responsibility that I propose can provide moral and political clues to help us more appropriately address the issues at stake for feminism in these debates because it can erode, or displace, the conflict over who embodies the “good” feminist subject, by shifting our moral inquiry away from the properties of “bad” or illiberal feminist subjects and toward the nature of our relationship with the “others” who are put in relation with us through feminist claims. Rather than asking, Can pious Muslim women—or any other type of eccentric feminist subject—display autonomous behavior? Can they be recaptured as potential emancipated feminist subjects? I propose to ask, How should my relationship to these eccentric feminist subjects be defined? What is its nature? Is it marked by power asymmetries? Do these asymmetries endow me with heightened moral responsibility to care for them as potential feminist subjects?

Now I return to the agency debate to also argue that, while the approach I propose sidesteps the question of agency, it does not leave us in a political vacuum from which emancipation has disappeared. Rather, I offer that we can productively think of emancipation without agency. Both Saba Mahmood and Amy Allen have argued for the need to suspend normative (liberal) feminist assumptions in the face of the consequences that these assumptions can have, and have had, for the illiberal or not-so-liberal (female) subjects regulated by postcolonial, neoliberal, and secular discourses. 31 Close Saba Mahmood’s critical appraisal of feminism’s normative liberal embrace of freedom leads her to ask the question of feminist responsibility—but not to provide us with a satisfying answer, other than sustaining the critique. She writes: “Do my political visions ever run up against the responsibility that I incur for the destruction of life forms so that ‘unenlightened women may be taught to live more freely?’ ” 32 Close This critique is a challenge to the feminist project as a normative project of emancipation. It is also a challenge to the liberal understanding of autonomy, and an affirmation that there is a paradox of subjectivation, one in which I may desire to inhabit norms that oppress me or constrain me. As Alison Weir notes, this is only a paradox from the point of view of the liberal understanding of autonomy. 33 Close From a more socially and historically astute and conceptually rich understanding of subject formation, such as the one developed by Foucault and which precisely inspires Mahmood’s reflections, it is no paradox at all but the very condition of subjectivation. However, a nonliberal understanding of autonomy, such as the conception offered by Mahmood of subjectivation as the practices of inhabiting social norms, does not provide a sound basis from which to think about the emancipatory potentiality of feminism. Indeed, Mahmood’s response to this critique and this challenge is placed on more personal terrain, that of the ethics of the anthropologist herself. As she attempts to give a more complex and comprehensive account of these forms of life, her proposal is to adhere to “a political imperative, born out of the realization that we can no longer presume that secular reason and morality exhaust the forms of valuable human flourishings. . . . A particular openness to exploring nonliberal traditions is intrinsic to a politically responsible scholarly practice . . . and a willingness to reevaluate one’s own views in light of the Other’s.” 34 Close Interestingly, I find here echoes between what Mahmood describes as the “politically responsible scholarly practice” 35 Close and the feminist ethic of responsibility I have defined, in that both seek to create a space of possibility for the Other. However, Mahmood does not apply her insights to feminism as a political and moral practice, and her profound reflections on the nature and limits of liberal and critical accounts of agency seem to offer no potentiality for feminism as a critical and utopian project, but rather to enjoin us to abandon not only feminism’s liberal premises but also its ambition to emancipate subjects.

Reflecting on Mahmood’s proposal, Amy Allen also endorses an approach that favors a continuing critical engagement with the identity categories that are mobilized by feminism, and a stance of humility toward the liberal norms that animate the feminist project. She remarks: “The endpoint of this line of questioning is the adoption of a stance of humility toward one’s own normative and political commitments, a stance that recognizes its own limits and contingencies and that is willing to have those commitments de-stabilized in the encounter with other forms of life.” 36 Close She therefore proposes to break with the normative certainties inherent to most of modern critical theory about the importance of freedom, autonomy, and reflexive rationality, as well as with the idea of a specific place for the Western Enlightenment within modernity, an idea defended by some prominent critical theorists such as Jürgen Habermas. Allen provides a full and complex picture of the challenges that arise for feminist theory if it is to adopt a critical stance toward its normative ideals because it recognizes that they are also the product of relations of power, of a history not only of enlightenment but also of colonization and racism. Her answer to this challenge first suspends the relation of necessity between feminism and any particular understanding of freedom as autonomy, 37 Close and, second, offers a negativistic conception of power, inspired by Foucault, that understands emancipation as “the transformation of a state of domination into a mobile, reversible field of power relations.” 38 Close Indeed, this negativistic conception of emancipation does not need to imagine a “power-free utopia” and therefore is based on a more complex understanding of power and of how it shapes agency in ambivalent ways. This proposal, by loosening the normative requirements that define what is emancipation, should open up feminism to subjectivities that are not regulated by liberal norms. Hence, Allen resolves the conundrum of agency and emancipation by proposing a figure of emancipation—a more versatile field of power relations—that can accommodate “thin” conceptions of agentic behavior. For Allen, this conception preserves the possibility of both moments—critique and anticipatory-utopian—because the conception of emancipation is rooted in a more realistic understanding of power and therefore of agency.

While it is important to base our normative endeavors on more realistic representations of power and agency, Foucault’s negativistic conception may fall short of satisfying a political project such as feminism that has always defined itself as transformative and collective . This negativistic conception gives us more appropriate lenses to make sense of how power shapes agency, and of what may fall under a broader scope of emancipatory practices. It gives us a concept that is more adjusted to identify emancipatory possibilities in the complex interweaving of subjectivation and social forces. While I think we must retain such a negativistic conception of emancipation in a critical feminist approach, I argue that it must also be complemented, because this conception is too focused on the individual as the locus of agency or power (and as the subject of power) to make sense of the role of relations in emancipation, and therefore it is too limited to capture emancipation as a collective project.

Among the reconceptualizations of autonomy outside of the premises of liberalism and individualism, relational accounts of autonomy have opened a theoretical space to think about autonomy as the product of social, emotional, and moral relations, rather than an attribute of the sovereign individual. 39 Close Alison Weir has developed this insight in her reflection on the articulation between identities and freedom, arguing that if we take seriously the idea that we are socially constituted, we cannot provide a definite answer to the question of whether we act as autonomous individuals . 40 Close However, this realization must not lead to feminist despair. Indeed, relationships provide us with a sense of identity, home, connections, freedom, and, importantly, possibilities for change. Some relations will foster my capacity for autonomy, and, reciprocally, freedom is also expressed in my ability to sustain the relations I choose to forge, in my ability to choose whom and what I choose to love. Among those relationships are, following Weir, relationships of solidarity and identification that feminists may choose to develop. While Weir’s vision of solidarity and shared values among feminists is, I believe, too optimistic, she does provide an important insight when she underlines, using María Lugones’s idea of feminist coalitions as a form of “traveling” toward the Other, 41 Close the transformative nature of solidarity relationships forged among feminists.

However, I have argued that such a transformation is not the product of a subjective imaginative capacity, that of “meeting” the “other” or putting myself in her shoes—even if halfway—as suggested, for example, by Iris Young. I also affirm that it cannot emerge from an “impulse” for solidarity between feminists, as suggested by Weir. Indeed, Weir suggests that identification with shared feminist values, and identification as/with women and as/with feminists, can provide a positive basis for feminist solidarity, forged in resistance and dissent. Contrastingly, I have documented in this book that agreements and identifications with feminist values do not lead to solidarity—as debates on Islamic headscarves have largely demonstrated—and I have also showed that identification with/as women or feminists is the result of a complex process of political subjectivation, which more often than not encloses the feminist subject along racial and religious lines. Hence, Weir’s proposal of a transnational feminist subject bonded by solidarity and identification, although both processes are understood as reflective, ethical, and political processes, remains insufficient to bring about the transformations of feminist solidarity she calls for.

The feminist ethic of responsibility I have proposed shares the premise that our freedom as political and ethical subjects is embedded in the relationships we may be able to forge and sustain, the collective feminist subject we may create. Moreover, I argue that this ethic can sustain a transformative collective project because it requires a political recognition of power asymmetries between feminists, and because it involves ethical practices of care that erode boundaries between “good” and “bad” feminist subjects, thereby contributing to disestablishing social hierarchies such as whiteness—but also, importantly, hierarchies based on good and bad sexualities or hierarchies based on ablebodiedness. 42 Close Caring for those subjects deemed improper and bad is not only an ethical practice that opens spaces of possibilities for the other: it is also both a political promise of equality—treating the other equally is one of the ways in which I treat her well—and a transformative practice challenging the very social hierarchies that sustain forms of oppression. It is in this sense that a feminist ethic of responsibility constitutes a project of emancipation, an emancipation without the prerequisite of agency.

A way to disrupt femonationalism, which is proliferating in Europe in particular, is to pay attention to those excluded subjects who are spoken for instead of spoken to, and to the boundaries of the moral world we create by making claims as feminists. National borders, citizenship regulations, religious and racial identities cannot serve as the limits of our communities. Nor can transnational feminist discourses that focus on distant others who are time and again spoken for. What is more, femonationalism, homonationalism, and other attempts to hollow out emancipatory projects to recuperate them in neoliberal agendas (think, for example, of business feminism ) not only pose a threat to these emancipatory projects, as the conflicts and divisions I described clearly show, they pose more broadly threats to democracy, by emptying political projects that help us imagine the world we have in common of their very ethical drive. What femonationalism does to feminism is not only align it with xenophobic and racist political agendas, but also empty feminism of its potential to create a political community of equals, to engender moral relations.

By contrast, by concentrating our attention on the concrete consequences of our actions and discourses, instead of on the values we say we uphold, we may make space for others in our feminist discourses and communities. Holding to feminism as a treasure in peril to be lost triggers defensive reactions, an abstract adhesion to a set of ideas and an imagined community that in fact forecloses the feminist subject. Instead we must conceive feminism, as Linda Zerilli proposed, 43 Close as a world-building activity, a work that creates feminist relations . Acknowledging that I am in relation with other feminist subjects, and subjects who are spoken for by feminism, rather than believing that I represent them or their interests, implies scrutinizing the type of relations that connect us: What are the hierarchies that structure those relations? How can they be undone? This is not an abstract proposal or a naïve project of promoting moral feelings such as love and care among feminists. In fact, promoting love and care as grounds for political relations can be a radical and revolutionary project. 44 Close It is a concrete project that we can apply in our contexts of work and mobilization. Who is concretely part of my project? What power does she have to voice her concern and be listened to? How are whiteness, racism, classism, ableism, and heteronormativity shaping the relations I create through feminism? What are the consequences of our actions on other subjects we enroll in our political project of community? Can we make a promise to treat the other well, and make amends when we did not?

I am indebted to theories of care that have helped me articulate a utopian vision of feminism rooted in the ethical drive of feminism. This drive is not limited to feminism, and the hierarchies that need to be disestablished, within feminism and beyond, are not limited to race and religion. Some of the insights we may gain from this investigation into feminist ethics and politics may be used to understand coalition politics that go beyond feminism. I do think that feminist theories and feminist ethics of care provide a specific normative vision of politics and democracy. This critical and normative potentiality must be harnessed to oppose the recuperation of feminism by nationalist and xenophobic discourses, and, more broadly by neoliberal political agendas. Rethinking the articulation between moral relations and the political community that feminists create is, I hope to have shown, at the heart of this project of femoresistance .

  Scott, Sex and Secularism .

  Farris, In the Name of Women’s Rights .

  Deveaux, Gender and Justice in Multicultural Liberal States ; Phillips, “Feminism and Liberalism Revisited” ; Hirschmann, The Subject of Liberty ; Mackenzie and Stoljar, Relational Autonomy .

Abu-Lughod, “Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving?”; Mahmood, Politics of Piety .

Lépinard, “Autonomy and the Crisis of the Feminist Subject.”

  Rinaldo, “Pious and Critical” ; Bracke, “Conjugating the Modern/Religious” ; Reilly, “Recasting Secular Thinking for Emancipatory Feminist Practice” ; Brandt and Longman, “Working against Many Grains.”

I borrow here Amy Allen’s distinction—which she borrows from Seyla Benhabib—between explanatory-diagnostic and anticipatory-utopian moments in political theorizing. See Allen, The Politics of Our Selves .

  Scott, The Politics of the Veil .

  Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins” ; Crenshaw, “Postscript” ; Townsend-Bell, “What Is Relevance?”; Emejulu and Bassel, “Whose Crisis Counts”; Bacchetta, “Décoloniser le féminisme.”

  Mills, The Racial Contract ; Sullivan and Tuana, Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance .

  Wekker, White Innocence .

The debate started at the end of the 1980s, with interventions such as those of Linda Alcoff, Teresa de Lauretis, and Denise Riley. See Alcoff, “Cultural Feminism vs. Poststructuralism” ; de Lauretis, “Eccentric Subjects” ; Riley, “Am I That Name?” . Since then, this debate has continued to shape feminist theorists’ understanding and reflections; see, for example, recently Weir, Identities and Freedom .

  Butler, “Contingent Foundations,” 1995 ; Butler, “What Is Critique?,” 216.

  de Lauretis, “Eccentric Subjects,” 116.

  Butler, “Contingent Foundations,” 1995 .

Zerilli, Feminism and the Abyss of Freedom .

  Butler, “Contingent Foundations,” 1995 , 50.

  Butler, “Contingent Foundations,” 1995 , 46.

  Butler, “Vulnerability, Precarity, Coalition.”

Allen, “Emancipation without Utopia.”

Muñoz, Disidentification .

See Jagose, “Feminism’s Queer Theory.”

Muñoz, Cruising Utopia .

  Perreau, Queer Theory .

Avramopoulou, “Crossing Distances to Meet Allies.”

Hache, Ce à quoi nous tenons , 31.

Rancière, Disagreement ; Hache, Ce à quoi nous tenons .

Amy Allen captures artfully this connection in “Emancipation without Utopia.”

Reformulations of freedom and autonomy are present in feminist critical theory, multiculturalist feminism, and feminist liberal theory. See Allen, “Feminism, Modernity and Critical Theory” ; Hirschmann, The Subject of Liberty ; Deveaux, Gender and Justice in Multicultural Liberal States ; Mackenzie and Stoljar, Relational Autonomy . For an analysis of the multiculturalist and proceduralist feminist accounts of autonomy and their limits for rethinking the feminist project, see Lépinard, “Autonomy and the Crisis of the Feminist Subject.”

Ratna Kapur provides a similar critique of the liberal assumptions of human rights discourse and its failure to account for subaltern subjectivities. She argues that this failure leads to the demise of that ideal; see Kapur, “In the Aftermath of Critique.”

  Mahmood, Politics of Piety , 197.

  Weir, Identities and Freedom .

  Mahmood, “Feminist Theory Embodiment, and the Docile Agent,” 225.

  Allen, “Feminism, Modernity and Critical Theory,” 278.

  Allen, “Feminism, Modernity and Critical Theory,” 279.

Allen, “Emancipation without Utopia,” 515.

See in particular Nedelsky, Law’s Relations .

Lugones, “Playfulness.”

  Inckle, “Debilitating Times.”

  Nash, “Practicing Love” ; Molinier, Le care monde .

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Conclusion: Feminist Decisions

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This study has shown how liberalism, in three different historically specific but overlapping forms, has been relatively successful in establishing forms of hegemony in modern Britain. It has taken the categories of liberalism as constitutive of contemporary social practices, notably of women’s undecidable position in relation to the crucial public/private distinctions now operative between the domestic sphere and the state/civil society and between the individual and society.

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Nash, K. (1998). Conclusion: Feminist Decisions. In: Universal Difference. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230372252_6

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