ON FEMINIST METHODOLOGY: A RESPONSE.

This article presents the author's response to comments by Caroline Ramazanoglu, Lorain Gelsthorpe and Anne Williams on his discussion of feminist methodology. Ramazanoglu attributes to me a fundamental opposition to the central tenets of feminism, claiming that I regard the whole of feminism as largely unconvincing, and complains that this only emerges piecemeal in my article rather than being stated explicitly at the beginning. What the central tenets of feminism are is a matter of dispute, I imagine, but I certainly do not reject the whole of feminism, nor does this follow from what I wrote. What I do find convincing is the case for a distinctively feminist methodology, and this is indicated at the start of my article, in the abstract. As I also make clear there, I do not deny the validity of all of the arguments that form part of the case for a feminist methodology, although I question some interpretations of them. In my view the idea of a feminist methodology suffers from the same weaknesses as all attempts to establish new research paradigms based on distinctive epistemological and/or political assumptions. One of the elements of feminist methodology that I questioned is the idea that the transformation of gender relations, which is the point of feminism, properly be the point of feminist research.