Making feminist sense of the "anti-globalisation movement": Some reflections on methodology and method

Global Society

Volumn 20, Issue 2, 2006, Pages 115-136

  Maiguashca, Bice ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF EXETER   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

FEMINISM; GLOBALIZATION;

EID: 33645580214     PISSN: 13600826     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/13600820600576357     Document Type: Article

References (86)

1. Arundhati Roy, Speech made at the "Women against War" plenary, World Social Forum, Mumbai, India (18 January 2004).
2. Anne Phillips, Feminism and Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 4.
3. Quoted in Chris Corrin, Feminist Perspectives on Politics (London: Longman, 1999), p. 10.
4. Ibid., p. 6.
5. See Verta Taylor, "Gender and Social Movements: Gender Processes in Women's Self-help Movements", Gender and Society, Vol. 13, No. 1 (1999), p. 25.
6. See Chandra Mohanty, "Feminist Encounters: Locating the Politics of Experience", in Anne Phillips, Feminism and Politics, op. cit., pp. 254-273
7. Bernice Johnson Reagon, "Coalition Politics: Turning the Century", in Feminism and Politics, pp. 242-254.
8. Donna Haraway, "A Manifesto for Cyborgs", in Tracey Strong (ed.), The Self and Political Order (New York: New York University Press, 1991), p. 243.
9. Bernice Johnson Reagon, "Coalition Politics: Turning the Century", in Anne Phillips, op. cit., p. 245.
10. See Nancy Hartsock, "The Feminist Standpoint: Developing the Ground for a Specifically Feminist Historical Materialism", in Sandra Harding (ed.), Feminism and Methodology (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1987), pp. 157-180
11. and Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1999), p. 179.
12. Despite a common starting point revolving around the relationship between knowledge and experience, feminist standpoint theory does not represent a unified position and has developed along a number of trajectories. See Hartsock, ibid.
13. and Hartsock, "Comment on Heckman's 'Truth and Method: Feminist Standpoint Theory Revisited': Truth or Justice?", Signs, Vol. 22, No. 21 (1997), pp. 367-374
14. Sandra Harding, "Comment on Heckman's 'Truth and Method: Feminist Standpoint Theory Revisited': Whose Standpoint needs the regimes of truth and reality?", Signs, Vol. 22, No. 21 (1997), pp. 82-91
15. Dorothy Smith, "Comment on Heckman's 'Truth and Method: Feminist Standpoint Theory Revisited'", Signs, Vol. 22, No. 21 (1997), pp. 392-397
16. Alison Jagger, Feminist Politics and Human Nature (Totowa, NJ: Rowman & Allenheld, 1983)
17. Hilary Rose, "Hand, Brain and Heart: A Feminist Epistemology for the Natural Sciences", Signs, Vol. 9, No. 1 (1983), pp. 73-90
18. Liz Stanley and Sue Wise, Breaking Out Again (London: Routledge, 1993)
19. and Jane Flax, "Postmodernism and Gender Relations in Feminist Theory", in Linda Nicholson (ed.), The Second Wave: A Reader in Feminist Theory (London: Routledge, 1997), p. 56.
20. See Ien Ang, "I'm a Feminist but... 'Other' Women and Postnational Feminism", in Kum-Kum Bhavnani (ed.), Feminism and "Race" (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 394-409
21. Patricia Hill Collins, "The Social Construction of Black Feminist Thought", in Feminism and "Race", pp. 184-203
22. Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan (eds.), Scattered Hegemonies: Postmodernity and Transnational Feminist Practices (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994)
23. bell hooks, "Postmodern Blackness", in Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman (eds.), Colonial Discourse and Post-colonial Theory: A Reader (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), pp. 421-428
24. Chandra Mohanty, "Feminist Encounters: Locating the Politics of Experience", in Anne Phillips, Feminism and Politics, op. cit.
25. Chandra Mohanty, "Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses", in Feminism Without Borders (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), pp. 17-42
26. Chandra Mohanty, "Under Western Eyes Revisited: Feminist Solidarity through Anti-capitalist Struggles", in Feminism Without Borders, pp. 230-250
27. Aihwa Ong, "Colonialism and Modernity: Feminist Re-presentations of Women in Non-Western Societies", in Kum-Kum Bhavnani (ed.), Feminism and "Race", op. cit., pp. 108-118
28. Chela Sandoval, "US Third World Feminism: The Theory and Method of Oppositional Consciousness in the Postmodern World", in ibid., pp. 261-277
29. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, "Can the Subaltern Speak?", in Colonial Discourse and Post-colonial Theory, pp. 66-111
30. Julia Sudbury, "Other Kinds of Dreams": Black Women's Organizations and the Politics of Transformation (New York: Routledge, 1998).
31. Chandra Mohanty, "Under Western Eyes Revisited", op. cit.
32. Chandra Mohanty, "Feminist Encounters: Locating the Politics of Experience", in Anne Phillips, op. cit., p. 269. Bat-Ami Bar On has questioned this notion of epistemic privilege, arguing that all practices of resistance bear the marks of oppressive relations.
33. See Bat-Ami Bar On, "Marginality and Epistemic Privilege", in Linda Alcoff and Elizabeth Potter, Feminist Epistemologies (London: Routledge, 1993), pp. 82-100.
34. Ien Ang, "I'm a Feminist but... 'Other' Women and Postnational Feminism", in Feminism and "Race", op. cit., p. 407.
35. Christine Sylvester "Empathetic Co-operation: A Feminist Method for International Relations", Millennium: Journal of International Studies, Vol. 23, No. 2 (1994), pp. 315-336.
36. Alison Jagger, "Love and Knowledge: Emotion in Feminist Epistemology", in Alison Jagger and Susan Bordo (eds.), Gender/Body/Knowledge: Feminist Reconstructions of Being and Knowing (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1992), p. 146.
37. Patricia Hill Collins, in Feminism and "Race", op. cit., p. 192.
38. See, for example, Nancy Golberger, Jill Tarule, Blythe Clinchy and Mary Belenky, Knowledge, Difference and Power: Women's Ways of Knowing (New York: Basic Books, 1996).
39. Susan Bourque and Jean Grossholtz, "Politics as Unnatural Practice: Political Science Looks at Female Participation", in Anne Phillips, Feminism and Politics, op. cit., p. 24.
40. Irene Diamond and Nancy Hartsock, "Beyond Interests in Politics", in Anne Phillips, ibid., p. 197.
41. See, for example, Sasha Roseneil, "The Global, the Local and the Personal: The Dynamics of a Social Movement in Postmodernity", in Pierre Hamel, H. Lustiger-Thaler, J. Nederveen Pieterse and S. Roseneil (eds.), Globalization and Social Movements (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), pp. 89-110.
42. Sara Ruddick, "Maternal Thinking", Feminist Studies, Vol. 6, No. 2 (1980), pp. 342-367.
43. Vicky Randall, "Feminism and Political Analysis", Political Studies, Vol. 39, No. 3 (1991), pp. 513-532.
44. Geeta Chowdhry and Sheila Nair (eds.), Power, Postcolonialism and International Relations (London: Routledge, 2004)
45. Chandra Mohanty, "Under Western Eyes Rivisited";
46. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, "Can the Subaltern Speak?"
47. Julia Sudbury, "Other Kinds of Dreams", op. cit.
48. Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan (eds.), Scattered Hegemonies, op. cit, p. 17.
49. Sandra Harding, "Is there a Feminist Method?", in Sandra Harding, Feminism and Methodology (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1987), p. 7.
50. Sandra Harding, Whose Science? Whose Knowledge? (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1991), p. 145.
51. Ibid.
52. Chandra Mohanty, "Under Western Eyes Revisited", p. 231
53. Peggy Antrobus, The Global Women's Movement (London: Zed, 2004).
54. Selya Benhabib, Judith Butler, Drucilla Cornell and Nancy Fraser, Feminist Contentions: A Philosophical Exchange (London: Routledge, 1995).
55. The number of edited collections addressing different aspects of feminist theory from contrasting points of view is striking. See, for example, Kum-Kum Bhavnani and Donna Haraway, "Shifting the Subject: A Conversation between Kum-Kum Bhavnani and Donna Haraway", in Kum-Kum Bhavnani and Anne Phoenix (eds.), Shifting Identities, Shifting Racisms (London: Sage, 1994)
56. and the Signs special issue, (22(21) 1997) op. cit., for a vigorous debate about standpoint theory.
57. See, for example, Liz Stanley and Sue Wise, Breaking Out Again, op. cit.
58. For a discussion of this meaning of the concept see Anne Oakley, "Interviewing Women: A Contradiction in Terms", in Helen Roberts (ed.), Doing Feminist Research (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981), pp. 30-61.
59. See also Shulamit Reinharz, Feminist Methods in Social Research (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 67-71
60. and Kathleen Blee and Verta Taylor, "Semi-structured Interviewing in Social Movement Research", in Bert Klandermans and Suzanne Staggenborg (eds.), Methods of Social Movement Research (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), p. 97.
61. While this line of inquiry is most often associated with the hermeneutical tradition in the philosophy of the social sciences, I am not claiming here to defend the philosophical basis of this school of thought. In other words, I am not arguing that it is possible to have a direct and unmediated access to the thoughts and motivations of human subjects or that historical social analysis should deal primarily with this type of inquiry. For the purposes of this paper, both the "insider's" view and the "outsider's" view are interpretative in nature and serve only as a heuristic device which reminds us to see social movements not only from a critical safe distance, that is, an "objective" perspective, but also from a "subjective" one, that is, from their own point of view.
62. The importance of this kind of inquiry is emphasised by Kathleen Blee and Verta Taylor in "Semi-structured Interviewing in Social Movement Research", in Bert Klandermans and Suzanne Staggenborg (eds.), op. cit., p. 95.
63. Aihwa Ong, "Colonialism and Modernity", in Kum-Kum Bhavnani (ed.), op. cit., p. 115.
64. I would argue that, at least in IR, both critical theorists and poststructuralists have tended to conceptualise politics in general and social movements in particular from an outsider's perspective, that is, primarily they have been preoccupied with debating about the material and discursive context in which they emerge and operate and have neglected to explore the self-understandings of these movements and the way in which they can be seen as producers of knowledge.
65. See Donna Haraway, "Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective", Feminist Studies, Vol. 14, No. 3 (1988), pp. 575-599.
66. Chandra Mohanty, "Under Western Eyes Revisited", op. cit., p. 230.
67. Verta Taylor, "Feminist Methodology in Social Movements Research", Qualitative Sociology, Vol. 21, No. 4 (1998), p. 360.
68. Catherine Eschle, "Skeleton Women", Signs, Vol. 30, No. 3 (2005), pp. 1741-1770.
69. I attended the Florence ESF alone. Furthermore, at the time of writing, I had just returned from the most recent WSF, which took place in January 2005 in Porto Alegre, and therefore decided not to include examples from this trip as I had not had time to process my materials or reflections.
70. For a discussion of the role of emotions in other women's movements see Verta Taylor, "Gender and Social Movements", op. cit., p. 20.
71. The "Women against War" plenary session which took place on the evening of 18 January 2004 attracted several thousand spectators and featured several prominent women and feminists including Nawal el Sadawi, Arundhati Roy, and Irene Khan, among others. Indeed, it should be noted that many of the speakers at the big plenary sessions at the Mumbai WSF were women.
72. Given that one of the goals of our research project is to map women's activism within the socalled "anti-globalisation movement", rather than the WSF process, we decided that we had to interview local women activists who saw themselves as part of this broad movement, whether or not they attended the WSF. Limiting our interviews to only those women we could find at the WSF would have meant excluding women who did not have the funds to travel to Mumbai and, thereby, privileging transnational feminists and practices over more local efforts.
73. More recently, however,my co-researcher and I have discussed the possibility of producing and publishing an anthology which features the political writings, speeches, poetry and statements of those interviewees who wish to participate. In this way, we hope to give them a more direct voice as well as a more active role in the project.
74. See Ann Phoenix, "Practising Feminist Research: The Intersection of Gender and 'Race' in the Research Process", in Kum-Kum Bhavnani (ed.), op. cit., p. 204.
75. Damaris Rose, "Revisiting Feminist Research Methodologies: A Working Paper", available: .
76. For one example of how this is done see Julia Sudbury, "Other Kinds of Dreams", op. cit., pp. 35-36.
77. Kathleen Blee and Verta Taylor, "Semi-structured Interviewing in Social Movement Research", in Bert Klandermans and Suzanne Staggenborg (eds.), op. cit., p. 100.
78. Donna Haraway, "Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective", in Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), pp. 183-203.
79. Liz Stanley and Sue Wise, Breaking Out Again, op. cit., p. 169.
80. Kathleen Blee and Verta Taylor, "Semi-structured Interviewing in Social Movement Research", in Bert Klandermans and Suzanne Staggenborg (eds.), op. cit., p. 97.
81. For an assessment of the impact of race and gender on the interview process which comes to a similar conclusion see Ann Phoenix, "Practising Feminist Research: The Intersection of Gender and 'Race' in the Research Process", in Kum-Kum Bhavnani (ed.), op. cit., pp. 203-217.
82. In the United Kingdom the Research Assessment Exercise is the means by which university research output is judged and, thereby, university funding is distributed.
83. For Harding's discussion on historical relativism and the need to produce epistemological standards to reject judgmental relativism, see Sandra Harding, "Strong Objectivity and Socially Situated Knowledges", in Sandra Harding, Whose Science? Whose Knowledge?, op. cit., pp. 138-164.
84. Naomi Klein, "Democratising the Movement", in Fences and Windows (London: Flamingo, 2002), p. 204.
85. Sandra Harding, "Rethinking Standpoint Epistemology: What is 'Strong Objectivity'"?, in Linda Alcoff and Elizabeth Potter (eds.), Feminist Epistemologies (New York: Routledge, 1993), pp. 49-82.
86. Michelle Fine, "Dis-stance and Other Stances: Negotiations of Power Inside Feminist Research", in Andrew Gitlin (ed.), Power and Method: Political Activism and Educational Research (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 24.