Joane Nagel. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography. Volume 42, Issue 4. April 2013.
In a recent radio interview, writer Will Self described his new stream-of-consciousness novel Umbrella as a challenge to traditional storytelling fiction with its linear “common points of reference—birth, love, triumph, death”:
People tend to think of their lives as having a dramatic arc … Nobody’s life majorly turns on a coincidence, the way that most plots do. It just doesn’t happen that way … But it’s enormously reassuring, and a good ordering principle for the kind of ghastly incoherent and largely inchoate mess that human consciousness is. (NPR 2013)
I expect that Self would find himself both familiar and dissatisfied with sociological theory and its opposing grand narratives of domination and resistance, conflict and integration, micro and macro. The causal stories we tell in our efforts to make sense of the social world reflect our personal and professional perspectives—humanism, progressivism, feminism, constructivism, materialism, structuralism, critical antiracism, rational choice, dramaturgy, phenomenology. We rely on one or another of these thematic structures to choose our research question, select our data, and interpret our evidence. We gaze through our particular conceptual and methodological lens to describe what we saw, offer our assessment, and generalize from it to some larger principle or process. We build an ordered universal out of the chaotic details of the specific case.
Human history often repeats itself in reassuring iterations that seduce us into having confidence in our theories. But when things change, we are constantly surprised—by the durability of fascism, overthrow of communism, social acceptance of same-sex marriage, scale of financial or sexual abuses, the putting on or taking off of veils by Muslim women in revolutions. Our paradigms are hard to abandon even when they don’t work. Many of us claim to be approaching our research deductively, searching for grounded insights. But we use what we deduce to make a case for the definitive last word. No matter how often we’re wrong. Like Self’s critique of the artificial tidiness inherent in plot-driven fiction, we keep looking for valid and reliable storylines. We use our often narrow models to theorize everything, no matter how complex, nonrational, accidental, or unintended. The quixotic nature of our quest seldom unifies us in adversity. We argue among ourselves and look for opportunities to expose one another’s biases, assumptions, presentism, and positionality. Our arguments are less often about invalid data than about improper interpretation.
Even competing sociological theories and perspectives are similar in the constraints and expectations they place on their adherents when they conduct research, interpret results, or present findings. I would argue that feminism is not exceptional in its demands. Are feminists any less committed to general explanation, less likely to be surprised by their data, more vulnerable to criticism for the evidence they gather or the interpretations they offer? In “The Feminist Ethnographer’s Dilemma,” Avishai, Gerber, and Randles (2013a) catalog their concerns about the capacity of feminism to serve simultaneously as a research perspective and a political movement. They argue that the demands of political feminism exert pressure on feminist researchers to find support for feminist hypotheses and discount data that are inconsistent with the feminist critique. They express hope that this tension can be resolved in a way that will advance both feminisms—political and sociological. I share their optimism, but I don’t share their concerns about the dangerousness or the uniqueness of their dilemma. Before I make my case about the extent of the feminist ethnographers’ dilemma, let me review the problem as I understand it.
Avishai, Gerber, and Randles affirm their commitment to feminist research approaches and feminist politics. They discuss the tension between their perspective as feminists and some of their research findings on conservative communities and practices. They hypothesized the likely negative effects of patriarchal and heterosexist practices and organizations on their subjects. Their data did not fit entirely or comfortably their hypotheses based in feminist theoretical models and predictions. Their article nicely summarizes their research and the challenges each presents, so I won’t revisit their projects in detail, but I will note briefly the focus of each study and its troublesome findings.
When she began her research, Avishai was aware of and shared the prevailing feminist critique of some traditional orthodox Jewish practices, such as niddah, a system of rituals and observances associated with menstruation. Based on this critique, she expected her research to document the humiliation of women whose bodily cycles were deemed needful of purification. Her interviews did not overthrow the notion that niddah is a weapon in the arsenal of patriarchal subjection, but many of her subjects reported they found meaning, power, and the affirmation of membership in the practice. Avishai could have interpreted this finding as evidence of the extent of hegemonic patriarchy’s distortion of these women’s assessment of niddah, but that would have required a denial of their agency. Hence the dilemma: was it possible that some women were using niddah to suit their own purposes and even were benefiting from the practice?
Gerber’s research on an ex-gay ministry affirmed the feminist expectation that the goals of the organization were based in a view of homosexual desire and practice as pathological and antithetical to Christian doctrine. In her observations and interviews, she found the ministry’s assessments of homosexual men to be consistent with the feminist critique. She was surprised by the model of masculinity advocated by the ministry. She did not find a full-throated embrace of hegemonic masculinity with its celebration of sexual conquest or such “manly” activities as sports, hunting, and power-seeking in the family and other spheres of life. Rather, the ministry defended more “feminine” traits and activities as legitimate expressions of masculinity, especially in the family. The ministry’s affirmation of femininity did not include its male members having sex with men. Gerber’s dilemma: if the ex-gay ministry’s inclusion of nonhegemonic forms of masculinity is evidence of the successful influence of feminism’s view of flexible gender roles, should the ministry or the movement still be condemned uniformly by feminists?
The 2002 federal Healthy Marriage Initiative, part of the George W. Bush administration’s marriage promotion program, was the focus of Randles’ research. In her eighteen-month ethnography of a federally funded relationship skills program for unmarried, low-income couples with or expecting a baby, she anticipated finding plenty of ammunition for a feminist critique. In particular, she looked for evidence that the organization was trying to convince or push its participants to marry. While marriage was a topic of conversation by both program staff and participants, Randles did not find that marriage was presented as the best solution to the financial and life problems confronting participants. She found that the program focused mainly on relationship skills that stressed communication and partner equality in decision making and household management. While the staff believed that marriage might encourage low-income men to be more stable providers, Randles did not observe this to be the central goal of the program. Her dilemma: are feminist critiques and suspicions of all marriage promotion programs justified, and can these programs offer life-skills counseling and even partnership equality while also advocating for marriage?
In all three of these cases, the authors’ “feminist ethnographer’s dilemma” arose, in part, out of the tension between feminism as an analytic perspective and feminism as a political project. Their sociological analysis of each of these empirical cases offers some good news for their subjects of study—feminists’ worst fears were not substantiated. These findings, however, contain potentially bad news for the political goals of feminism, to expose and, through exposure and documentation, to challenge the misogyny and patriarchy of the cases in point. Does the untidiness of these findings undermine the legitimacy of feminism as a methodology, theoretical perspective, or political agenda? I don’t think so.
I like the messiness of Avishai, Gerber, and Randles’ findings. I especially like the moments in which the data challenged expectations and pushed the authors to new insights. The discovery of negative (contrary to one’s expectations) evidence is no less a discovery. Unexpected findings can provide insights into the conditions under which our expectations are valid (or not), point the way toward alternative interpretations, or force us to rethink our arguments. In the 1980s when I began to research Native American activism of the previous decade, I expected to find that activism was based on emergent national Native identities and agendas (Nagel 1995, 1996). There were groups like “Indians of All Tribes” and the “American Indian Movement” that seemed to confirm my expectations. I also found, however, that there were many organizations and incidents of protest at tribal levels. I had assumed these more historical tribal entities had lost their relevance in the wake of the large-scale U.S. national ethnic and racial politics of the Civil Rights era. The unanticipated durability of tribal identity along with a resurgence of tribal cultures and languages in the 1980s forced me to rethink my simplistic assumptions about the mutability of race and ethnicity. Ethnic boundaries are neither eternal nor completely fluid. New identities and groups (“Native American”) do not necessarily replace existing identities and groups (“Winnebago” or “Ojibwe”), and older identities and group boundaries can be rejuvenated and transformed (“HoChunk” or “Anishnaabe”). Shifts in the organization and identification of Native Americans offered an expanded understanding of how ethnicity might be socially organized among both Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities in the United States and in other national settings.
Negative evidence and the urge to challenge the validity of others’ research findings is part of the self-correcting skepticism of science, even “social science.” The overthrow of previous assumptions and paradigms is the basis for Kuhn’s (1962) celebration of scientific revolutions and an important element in the advancement of knowledge. Because of the utility of negative evidence and the productivity of debate, Kuhn cautions intellectuals against complacency. Paradigmatic upheaval can usher in new ways of thinking, but there can be danger when an epistemological revolutionary process begins to feed on itself, getting in the way of explanation, devouring its own. A healthy balance between the enchantment of new ideas and the demonization of established models is hard to achieve.
Tension between older and newer ways of thinking is not the only source of discomfort experienced by sociological researchers. There are strains within a single theoretical perspective, especially at the intersection where theory meets praxis. This nexus is the basis for the dilemma very eloquently articulated by Avishai, Gerber, and Randles. We all worry about what our theoretical and empirical reference groups will think of our research. Is feminism any harsher a master than the disciplinary pressures faced by race and ethnicity researchers or demographers or political sociologists? The management of negative evidence represents an existential challenge for all researchers and for the perspectives guiding their work. Is the political project of feminism threatened by negative evidence? Maybe. As the authors point out, however, unexpected findings can be used to develop further feminist theory, rather than discredit it entirely. Is the success of feminism or its cooptation by antifeminist movements and organizations a threat to the movement? Probably. An important unfolding feminist dilemma is the subversion of feminist principles by their incorporation into antifeminist organizations like patriarchal religions, homophobic organizations, and conservative pro-family programs. Can the facade of feminism conceal a deeper-rooted misogyny and patriarchy? Yes. My experience working in historically masculinist organizations is that they manage to maintain many features of the old boys’ club. Changes in the rules and the presence of women, some in leadership roles, ironically, can dull the critical edge and diminish the power of feminist critiques of business as usual. Should Feminism be the enemy of feminist successes? No. Maintaining a critical lens is important, but as the authors do, we should recognize the inroads political and analytical feminism have made into many social worlds. The dilemmas remain, but the successes should be celebrated.