Feminist analytics of government?

Questions of reading, writing and knowing have been central issues in feminist epistemologies and methodologies. Awareness of the partiality and situatedness of knowledge as well as its performativity has lead feminist scholars to practice critical self-reflection about the ways in which they themselves as researchers participate in certain hierarchical social relations. In this paper, I discuss a number of recent feminist approaches to epistemology and methodology, and explore the ways in which these approaches could be applied in sociological research.

I will tackle these questions in the context of my own research, which focuses on contemporary gendered practices in Finnish and European social policy and working life. Drawing from the work of some feminist scholars (e.g. Grosz, Haraway, Sedgwick), I discuss the challenges in describing and analysing my own position and its complex relations to the subject of my study. Ethical and political questions arise already in the selection of the research topic: Should the emphasis be on analysing power and normative structures, or rather on exploring something more “positive”, such as possibilities of resistance? How to combine a “mainstream” social scientific approach, analytics of government – sometimes criticised for being too abstract to grasp gendered subjectivities – with feminist poststructuralist theories and epistemologies? Is it possible to formulate a critique of gendered or heteronormative practices in a constructive way and without a self-righteous tone – in a way that takes into account that “I” too in many ways engage in such practices? How to think and act on the empirical, textual data materials, which have been produced by “living people”, perhaps working in my field? How and to which extent can the researcher consider the possible consequences, effects and outcomes of her or his research, especially in the fields of gender studies and politics?