EDUC 5225 – Triple Entry Journal 7
Nick Taylor
March 8, 2006
Summary:
An explicitly feminist approach to interviewing recognizes the exploitative and contradictory nature of the traditional “textbook”, masculine models, in which the interviewer’s primary role is as a tool for the extraction of data from the (passive) subject. A feminist model is based instead on equality between participants in terms of emotional commitment and risk at work in the interview process, and seeks to redress the exploitation of minorities by the academy. The author’s experience interviewing new mothers, in which the majority of participants attest to the interview process as therapeutic, illustrates the reciprocity and respect this model enables.
The tension in the masculine, “textbook” model of research between the supposed need for neutrality and the desire to establish rapport is insoluble: as numerous examples attest, finding out about participants’ lives demands a level of “bias” – personal attachment. In cases where there is little social distance between interview and interviewee, the importance of such attachment, and the need to establish equality between them, is all the more urgent. A feminist approach – in which the female researcher is already an “insider” – can be taken as a model for all social research.
Reflections:
“feminine and masculine psychology in patriarchal societies is the psychology of subordinate and dominant groups” (250)
“…not only in feminist research but in social science in general” (260)
Is this an instance, as described by Moschkovich (2002), Loomba (2005), and Smith (1999), of a feminist approach to social science laying claim to an ability to speak for all oppressed minorities – and thereby ignoring that colonization carries different meanings and material conditions for different communities? Is there a danger here in assuming that the relation of men to women in a Western context can illuminate the relation of colonizer/colonized or oppressor/oppressed in a post-colonial context?
“…else he will find himself merely “maintaining rapport,” while failing to penetrate his clichés
Oakley’s article is filled with excerpts like the one above, from textbook descriptions of the interview process. She is quick to pick up on the masculine language in these excerpts, and following her lead I found the above line really funny/interesting – the conception of the interviewer as “penetrating” clichés. This may be reading too much into one line of text, but I really think metaphors like this are never innocent, but are evocative of a sexually aggressive – adding another layer to Oakley’s description of the conventional masculine understanding of the interview process as antagonistic and exploitative.
Question:
I read in this article a tension between a kind of Freirean understanding of dialogic research processes (where the researcher and participants act as co-investigators)
versus a kind of Foucaultian understanding of the insolubility of certain power dynamics (researcher/researched, for example, or interviewer/interviewee in this case). I’m not sure Oakley’s model of “researching for the women” instead of “researching for researchers” isn’t unproblematic – ie, are you still enacting a power imbalance by claiming (and doing) research “for” a group?
In other words, just as Oakley stresses that the “perfect” interview in masculinist tradition is impossible, is the perfectly egalitarian feminist model put forward by Oakely equally impossible? Will there always be some traces of an uneven power relationship in an understanding of research as “for” – rather than with – an oppressed or colonized group, given that the researcher still holds the final say over what meanings and experiences get articulated and reported (presumably in an academically-recognized context)?
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