Feminist Research and the Cultural Power of Failure:
A Book Review Essay
“Wiping Out: A Celebration of Research-Failures and the Lessons They Teach” Panel.
Joanna Wolfe, Chair. Joanna Wolfe, Laura Wilder, and Rebecca Rickly, Speakers.
CCCC Annual Conference, March 13, 2008.
Ethical Dilemmas in Feminist Research: The Politics of Location, Interpretation, and Publication. Gesa E.
Kirsch. Albany: SUNY Press, 1999.
Getting smart: Feminist research and pedagogy with/in the postmodern. Patti Lather. New York:
Routledge, 1991.
Reviewed by Daisy Levy
AL 870
MSU Rhetoric & Writing Program
March 18, 2009
I attended a panel on research failures at the 2008 CCCC conference last weekend. I was
intrigued by the explicit use of the word “failure” in the title of the panel, and equally
interested to hear how working researchers and scholars in our field would deal with an open
admission and (I hoped) generative conversation on the use of failure, as both a heuristic for
further development of a person’s methodology and the potential for revision of what I
imagine as the conventional goal of research (maybe in practice more than in theory) – to
prove, validate, justify; to garner academic currency and ethos in the “rightness” and
“success” of the researcher. In so many conversations I hear about scholarship and the
production of knowledge, I feel disheartened by what sounds to me like work that is
motivated by an ego asserting her or himself into the existing structure that is Academia. I
understand this is motivated by particular material needs – job security (or a job at all),
recognition for labor done (both as cultural and material capital), and a more abstract (and
yet, very important) sense of accomplishment.
The panel did this, fairly well, I thought. Fraught with voices that spoke too fast, too loud,
and faces that flushed easily (were they nervous about speaking in public, I wondered, or
nervous to speak in public about mistakes they’d made, mistakes that they hadn’t yet figured
how to reconcile?), this group of three researchers “came clean” about inappropriate
method/-ological issues like loosely (or poorly) bounded studies, use of inappropriate
methods, rushing to collect data and confusing triangulation. The panel ended with a general
sense of relief (collective – audience as well as speaker, I think) and also a hopeful mood
about the potential of acknowledging “failure” as an integral part of the labor of research;
not only this, but messiness (and public messiness) creates a place where increased rigor and
deeper thinking animates the project.
This leads me to consider how a different concept of “failure” is implicit in Gesa E. Kirsch’s
Ethical Dilemmas in Feminist Research: The Politics of Location, Interpretation, and Publication (State U
of NY Press, 1999). Generally her argument is centered in, exactly as the title suggests, what
obstacles might look like to someone claiming to conduct research according to feminist
principles of scholarship; these principles she cites from Mary Fonow (from Beyond
Methodology) as reflexivity, action-orientation, consideration of the “affective components of
research” (Fonow qtd. in Kirsch 3), and using the “situation-at-hand” (Kirsch 4) as an object
of inquiry. She adds to this an assemblage of principles she’s culled from a multi-disciplinary
reading of feminist scholars in oral history, anthropology, education, women’s studies,
sociology, and philosophy. These principles of feminist research attend to acknowledgment
and validation of women’s experiences, to collaborative work with participants as much as
possible (my emphasis), to analysis of rhetorical, social, historical contexts that form the
research site as well as those contexts that inform the participants’ values and experiences.
Also, these principles include analyzing the shaping contexts of researchers’ lives, values, and
goals, attempting to change androcentric norms, taking responsibility for representations of
others, and acknowledging limitations and contradictions. To this last point, I would like to
add, “failures.”
Once Kirsch lays out these explicit intentions and practices for feminist research, she spends
the rest of her book discussing three general stages of a research process in which these
principles can create difficulty for researchers and participants both. She does her reader a
great service by breaking these discussions up into accessible conversations of examples of
already conducted research projects, pointing out the obstacles that are inherent or those
that become intricate elements of the research project as the study progresses. Logically, she
follows a “normal” trajectory of a study, discussing first the dilemmas that are present or
arise from (mostly) qualitative research in the site of data collection – interviews namely. Her
choice to focus on interviews makes sense, as she asserts much feminist research relies on
qualitative study for it’s receptivity to intimacy and collaborative efforts, more so than
quantitative work (at first glance, anyway). I have to take her on her word on this point, and
while she does mention that there are quantitative researchers working in a feminist
orientation, the “numbers” don’t balance out. Since I’ve not conducted any formal
quantitative research, I can only say that intuitively, it makes sense that conversation,
interviews, and field site observation would lend itself to a different “view of the ground”
than would surveys, or other such “countings.”
This section deals primarily with issues of vulnerability; Kirsch details that of the participants
primarily, but interestingly, she also admits to a kind of vulnerability for the researcher. She
is clear about the relative imbalance between these two points on the continuum, noting that
the researcher is almost always situated in a position of power (given this is her study, her
research interest, her guiding questions). Still, I was surprised and intrigued in Kirsch’s
discussion of the ways that researchers can feel manipulated, betrayed, and misunderstood.
As examples of existing studies that bump against some of these questions of vulnerability,
Kirsch uses her own work, Women Writing the Academy, as well as Carol Smart’s study of
white, middle-class professional men and Sondra Hale’s research about the Sudanese
women’s movement. The issues that arise in these (and other) works she includes range from
reversals in the power dynamic between the researcher and participants (in Smart’s case),
participants’ agendas and drive to manipulate responses for political gain, researchers
discovering controversial or “secret” painful information (as in Middleton’s study of feminist
teachers, or Cheri Williams’ study of hearing impaired children). There are more examples
than can be reasonably listed here; suffice it to say that Kirsch doesn’t hold back on a
“literature review” of ethical dilemmas in data collection, neither does she hold herself at a
safe distance from these errors or sticky spots.
This is a pattern she maintains into the next two sections of her book, addressing first issues
of how feminist researchers should consider the representation of others, and second, how
to conceptualize and execute publication and distribution of work. The dilemmas in these
respective chapters circle around a shared question, one Kirsch borrows from Joan Acker,
Kate Barry, and Johanna Esseveld: “How do we explain the lives of others without violating
their reality?” (Qtd. in Kirsch, 45) Frankly, I think this question is at the core of “feminist
research” and works through various stages in different ways. But these two chapters both
work to illustrate possible sites of “violation” or at least “invasion.”
In the moment of representation, Kirsch sees some of the following potential “dilemmas”:
interpretive conflict, confidential information, and institutional constraints conflicting with
participants’ goals or values. As she does in the previous chapter, Kirsch provides multiple
examples of these dilemmas, borrowing from composition scholars Jennie Dautermann, Lisa
Ede, and Andrea Lunsford as well as feminist researchers in sociology (Katherine Borland),
psychology (Michelle Fine), women’s studies (Sherry Gorelick), and others. Kirsch suggests
that “interpretive conflict is inevitable in qualitative research since we can never fully enter
someone else’s consciousness, nor can we see reality through others’ eyes” (49), a view
consistent with postmodern scholars, more of which I’ll address in my notes about Patti
Lather’s Getting Smart, later in this essay. This uncertainty is central to Kirsch’s book, and also
to the notion of Feminist Research in the preoccupation with the position of the researcher,
the participants, and now, in Kirsch’s chapters on representation and publication, the
resulting knowledge from the whole process. Questions and concerns about
misrepresentation, misappropriation, multiple interpretations, and (de)selection of reportable
data culminate in a level of anxiety that can lead a researcher to, in Kirsch’s words but also in
the words of several of the CCCC panel members, “paralysis.”
One way around this, or better, one way to resist this, is to do what Kirsch suggests at the
end of Chapter 3, to “be prepared for dialogue with those we study, particularly dialogue
which sets the agenda for research” (Kirsch 63). This suggestion comes up over and over
again, and so it’s clear to me that Kirsch’s goal is to blur the line between
researcher/researched. Again, a primary intention or function of feminist research is the
project of collaboration – in research design, interpretation and analysis, and even
representation. Feminist research locates itself in a radical re-vision of knowledge creation,
and there is always a “yet” to Kirsch’s assertions. This reveals the ambivalence we have in
truly blurring the lines. (As academics, as teachers, as scholars, as citizens? Perhaps all.) Try
as she might to separate the categories of potential pitfalls or struggles in creating ethically
sound scholarship, each of these dilemmas is marked with this anxiety, and each of these
dilemmas resists an easy solution.
Ultimately, Kirsch tries to console her reader by stating that researchers need to prepare
themselves to make political and ethical choices. It’s not much of a consolation to this
reader, but echoes with my mother’s voice: “No one said it was easy.” This strikes me as the
ultimate dilemma of Kirsch’s work – there is no easy way to go about conducting feminist
research. The products can be powerful, re-generative, re-visionary, radical, or worse, can reinscribe existing power structures, un-do or negate work that has been done before. Here, I
start to think about the CCCC panel again. Kirsch published this book 10 years ago, and I’m
wondering now, if a renewed discussion on her claims about feminist research might
invigorate this notion of failure, or the other way around. Perhaps thinking of failure in the
traditional binary sense is indicative of a research model that contains participants at a sterile
distance from the researcher, one that insists on “objective” “reality” that reveals “truth.”
Could feminist research principles lead us to a more comfortable understanding of failure as
“integral to the labor of research,” a moment leading us to “renewed rigor and deeper
understanding”?
I think Patti Lather says so. Nearly a decade before Kirsch’s book arrived on the scene,
Lather published her book Getting Smart: Feminist Research and Pedagogy With/In the Postmodern
(Routledge 1991). While Kirsch and Lather are not colleagues in the disciplinary sense
(Kirsch is a composition scholar, Lather works in Educational Policy and Leadership), they
certainly share goals in the world of scholarship. If Kirsch is foregrounding the “feminist” in
her perspective, Lather is “postmodern,” yet neither is washed clean of the other. In fact, I
think both might agree that the attempt to mark one lens as “better” than another is a moot
point. Kirsch might claim that feminism carries her farther intellectually, as her primary goals
(at least as revealed in Ethical Dilemmas) are focused on a re-organization of gendered
hegemony. Earlier than Kirsch (though I don’t claim the time period is a cause or effect of
this), Lather is distinctively postmodern in her approach, and uses feminism to redeem some
of the postmodern “failures” (that word again).
Lather is grounded particularly in the deconstructionists like Derrida, and responds explicitly
to the assumptions of a field and culture: that positivism has failed; that inquiry is built on
“participatory values;” that critical theory fosters potential for social change; that research is
a mode for empowerment; and that postmodernism carries with it it’s own challenges
toward understanding (Lather 2-7). She is searching for a “libratory theory and practice in
research and pedagogy,” and this book outlines what she sees as possible pathway to such a
thing.
After outlining her own goals and some reflection on her position within a contemporary
intellectual site (postmodernism), Lather offers her take on the “historical overview” of
postmodernism, where it’s been, and who it’s gathered along the way. In this chapter, Lather
details the operating questions of Postmodernism – how to engage in the production of
knowledge in ways that are made of the material conditions (“the blood and the spirit”)
rather than out of the “consumerism of ideas that can pass for a life of the mind in academic
theory” (Lather 20). Whether or not Lather herself set this stage for Kirsch eight years later
is irrelevant; certainly Kirsch has felt the postmodernist impulse undergirding her own
project – “the antifoundational critique of knowledge” (Kirsch 7).
In fact, the criticism that Kirsch launches of postmodernism – that of reducing and
essentializing experience to relativist malaise – is an echo of Lather’s admission that
deconstruction needs feminism’s attention to praxis, and self-reflexivity to note what is
problematic but also to urge towards action in the world (Lather 29). For Lather,
postmodernism can subvert agency, but also necessarily asks about and reveals the dominant
discourses in the world. This revelation is important to feminism similar to the ways that
feminism’s politicization invigorates postmodernism. For Lather, the two critical theories
work together, cultivating a scenario in which the lines between teaching, research, and art
are collapsed; “deconstruction is a method, not a disclosure” (Lather 13).
After Lather articulates the intersections of postmodern theory with feminist theory, and
what she calls “post Marxist challenges” (22-26) , she builds her project similarly to the way
Kirsch will do it, later. She works her model on the development of research as a site of
praxis, a notion that may not be revolutionary to us now, but surely has informed what’s
become a more acceptable given in research, as Kirsch describes, action-oriented,
collaborative, engaged in disrupting existing hegemonic structures, etc. Different than
Kirsch, however, Lather is advocating research that is transparent in a postmodernist
understanding, that knowledge is socially and historically (we might say, rhetorically)
constructed. She is more settled than Kirsch on whether or not there is a “true story” and is
more willing to represent the constructed knowledge as multi-vocal, and multi-textual,
evidenced in the sequence of chapters in which she describes her own process towards
enacting a research methodology and epistemology wrapped (and unwrapped) in feminism,
deconstruction, and post structuralism.
Kirsch argues with the “deconstructed” vocality of representations of research, such as those
that Lather suggests. While Kirsch agrees with the flexibility and texture that multi-vocal
texts approximate, she is troubled by the possibility that texts of these sort are ultimately
elitist and inaccessible, thereby contradicting the initial intentions of feminist methodology. I
recognize Kirsch’s arguments, and think I understand the critiques. Still, the back and forth
of the worth or not of “experimental text production” has the feel of a debate designed to
distract the masses from the task at hand. Lather is more interested in “writing under
erasure” (Derrida qtd. in Lather 10), and Kirsch is not. I want to ask them both; does a
reader really have to be versed in deconstruction theory in order to understand a text? Does
a reader really have to be fluent in critical feminist theory to understand that she has been
marginalized or constrained in particular, political ways?
More to the point, both Lather and Kirsch are attempting to shape a research methodology
that reflects and participates in doing, more that one which asserts an existing paradigm and
authority. The possibility for this kind of research pushes at limits we may not know already
exist, whether it’s a dominant discourse about reality, or anxiety about who speaks for
whom, who studies whom. Pushing at limits necessitates occasional failures; sometimes the
limits push back. As ethical, smart researchers, I think Lather and Kirsch would say we owe
it to ourselves and others to notice these failures, to see them publically, and then act again.