Feminist Methodologies

Paper Summary:

This paper briefly describes traditional feminist methodologies for analyzing cultural practices that are unfamiliar or challenging. It highlights the shortcomings of the methodologies and discusses potentially more appropriate methodology. The writer considers how the task of finding more appropriate methodologies is made more difficult for her by the fact that it frequently challenges her own culturally normative ideas about gender relations.

From the Paper:

"For many years Western feminists have positioned themselves within their own Western culture, assuming that they occupy higher ground, in the sense that the Western culture is liberal, individualist, and a lot less sexist than non-Western cultures. From this point of view, Western feminists have felt free to pity their non-Western sisters, and also to attempt to "save" them - for example, Abu-Lughod (2002) takes issue with the fact that Americans have taken it upon themselves to "save" women in Afghanistan from the Taliban and the burqa. Volp (date) sums it up, stating that Western women theorizing about non-Western women living within Western nations have erred because of their "conflation of racialised immigrant communities and regressive sex-subordinating culture in a variety of contexts, including female genital surgeries and so-called "cultural defenses" (p. 109). It has become clear that this way of analyzing other cultures has serious shortcomings. For one thing, as Narayan (1997) points out, it distorts analyses. When information is gathered about women in other countries, this information crosses borders, and loses much in the crossing. The information becomes distorted. Another problem is that culture is blamed for the problems of non-Western women, in a way that is never done for Western women, with the result that Third World women are deemed to have suffered "death by culture" (Narayan, 1997, p. 84). For example, a woman in the West who is shot or strangled by her husband is deemed a victim of domestic violence, but a woman in India who is burnt to death by her husband is deemed a victim of culture, because this method of murder is seen as exotic, and therefore culture-specific. One of the problems with this mode of analysis, as Narayan (1997) points out, is that the Western feminist is unable to even see the connection between domestic violence and dowry-murders - the connection is invisible to her. Moreover, many American feminists are unaware that at least 1,400 American women are killed by their domestic partners annually - but extremely aware of dowry-murder. However, what is the real difference, apart from a difference in choice of murder weapon? Guns are the weapon of choice in the USA because they are ubiquitous, while fire is the weapon of choice in India, because fires are ubiquitous there."

Sample of Sources Used:

• Abu-Lughod, Lila. (2002). Do Muslim women really need saving? Anthropological reflections on cultural relativism and its others. American Anthropologist, 104(3): pp. 783+.
• James, Stanlie M. (2002). Listening to Other(ed) Voices: Reflections around Female Genital Cutting. Genital Cutting and Transnational Sisterhood: Disputing US Polemics. Eds. Stanlie James and Claire C. Robertson. University of Illinois Press.
• Kogacioglu, Dicle. (2004). The tradition effect: Framing honor crimes in Turkey. differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, 15(2): pp. 119-151
• Narayan, Uma. (1997). Cross-cultural connections, border-crossings, and "death by culture": Thinking about dowry murders in India and domestic-violence murders in the United States. Dislocating Cultures: Identities, Traditions, and Third-World Feminism. Routledge, New York. pp. 83-117.
• Vincent, Louise. (2006). Virginity testing in South Africa: Re-traditioning the postcolony. Culture, Health & Sexuality, 8(1): 17-30.

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• Research Proposal # 111973 : "Feminist Science Fiction"

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