On the Distinctiveness of Feminist Methodology

One of the challenging tasks before feminist academicians in India is to build a strong rese­arch tradition grounded in a robust feminist methodology. The discourse on research methodology in the social sciences generally revolves around quantitative, qualitative, and mixed methods, and these variants of methodologies are quite popular among research scholars in universities in India. The feminist research methodology with its distinct ontolo­gical, epistemological, and theoretical underpinnings stands as an alternative research methodology for research scholars in general and feminist rese­arch scholars in particular. However, there is not much clarity on what constitutes the essence of a feminist methodo­logy. Quite often, research scholars (espe­cially those doing doctoral rese­arch) subsume feminist methodology under the qualitative methodology. It is true that most of the epistemological premises of qualitative research such as reality being subjective, participants as knowers, and minimised distance between the resear­cher and the researched are quite similar to the philosophy of feminist methodology.

However, the kind of questions that the feminist researchers ask, differ significantly from those social scientists who follow a qualitative research paradigm. It is important to note that all rese­arch on women is not feminist rese­arch, since “research about women” (in its social science version) is quite different from “research for women” (the feminist version of research). The research methods, which are basically tools and techniques of data collection, happen to be quite common across different methodologies—quantitative, qualitative, mixed, and feminist. But feminist methodology or, for that matter, any variant of methodology cannot be reduced just to its ­research methods, techniques, and tools. There is a need for efforts to establish feminist methodology as an indepen­dent and distinct research methodology. It is in this context that Maithreyi Krishnaraj’s article “The Feminist Methodology” (EPW, 25 December 2021) acq­uires significance as it tries to address certain fundamental issues about research methodology in general and feminist methodology in particular.