4/1/2014

James King (1999) asks an intriguing question: “Can men use feminist theory” (p. 487)? An attempt to answer the question, I am afraid, needs to consider the positionality of the researcher, values of the inquiry, and organizational dynamics of the research community. King finds researchers’ accommodations and appropriations to be a matter of positionality in that researchers need to define who feminists are and who are crossing the border (p. 487). The current scholarship, according to King, is inadequate to account for the complexity in the relationship between researchers and participants. For this relationship to be legitimate and ethical, as Ellen Barton (2000) would argue, the distance between researchers and participants should be considered as necessary in some situations (p. 404). It seems rather naïve if researchers claim that feminist positionality is essentially collaborative and reflective. Men, according to this default methodological model, will find it impossible to conduct any feminist research because they cannot participate fully in the participant community by “apprenticing” or “envisioning” (p. 487) feminist identity. They do not have to, if they accept Barton’s assumption that empirical methodologies are not in conflict with feminist research, among other methods endorsed by the field of rhetoric and composition. If it is methodologically legitimate to observe the participant objectively from a distance, researchers may only need to show “an emphatic understanding of the other” with “an attention to assume, for some interpretative time span, the position of the other” (King, pp. 486-87). This objective stance makes sense because it is not always demanded by participants that researchers be part of their community. Deep down in this stance is the possibility of knowing at least something that is not constructed in the interaction between researchers and participants. We should ask if all knowledge is socially constructed and move on to differentiate what knowledge is socially and collaborative constructed and what not.

The complex positionality of the researcher calls for an alert to the cultural and political values in methodology. King (1999) warns us that liberatory politics in Marxist criticism is deceptive (p. 482). Intending to represent “the voice of all marginalized,” liberatory politics favors a collective voice that subsumes individual voices (p. 482). The liberatory intention is corrupted by the methodological erasure of the individual. Applied to the male feminist question, liberatory politics privileges an ethical claim that is inherently flawed in its methodology that disrespects the individual, that is, the participant from a feminist community. Like other traditions of critical inquiry, Marxist criticism is focused on naming the hegemonies (p. 486) and, in so doing, fails to address the individual that is the basis of interpretative democracy. If we accept that the fundamental value of feminist inquiry is democracy, we should be aware of the cultural and political consequences in such demand that male researchers be feminists to be able to conduct feminist research. We should applaud King’s position that all researchers have a “dialectical relationship with their research” (p. 485). Naturally, the insider/outsider binary is not necessarily a reasonable question if we take the democratic relationship to mean full respect for the participants’ choice to be represented as they are, with empathetic, not sympathetic, understanding from the researcher. Researchers will be condescending should they choose to identify with or become participants from feminist communities. Being participatory is not necessarily more ethical than keeping an objective distance from the research.

At the center of the ethical consideration of researchers’ positionality to their research and participants is the issue of turns in the field of composition and any other academic community. Why should any field take a turn to make knowledge more legitimate? Is an ethical turn (Barton, 2000, p. 400) more productive than the social turn in composition or the linguistic turn in science? While it is apparent that any such turn is largely academic politics, we should be mindful of the methodological implications. Does an ethical turn make research more productive in terms of knowledge-making than in terms of politics? I fully agree with Barton that the ethical stance is detrimental to efficiency and effectiveness in research (pp. 399-400). I’d suggest we look at the fundamental values that define our field, rather than chasing turns of community attention. Barton is right in worrying that such turns divert our attention from research that is essentially about how people write and think (p. 407).