Disruptive Voices

Disruptive Voices: The Possibilities of Feminist Research charts the beginnings of a creative solution to emerging and hotly contested issues in feminist scholarship and feminist philosophy of science. In a range of powerful essays including “Sexuality, Schooling, and Adolescent Females: The Missing Discourse of Desire,” “Coping with Rape,” and “Beyond Pedestals: Revisiting the Lives of Women with Disabilities,” Michelle Fine probes the politics of research methods such as interviews and ethnography and examines issues such as the relationship between researchers and their subjects, the intimacies and betrayals of data collection, the politics of interpretation, and the serious dilemmas of public representation of research results.

Moving beyond the feminist critique of traditional scientific method and epistemology, Fine identifies new research methods that, while still empirical, have the potential to disrupt and transform conventional practices. In drawing these alternative methodologies from the actual experiences of women’s lives, Fine imagines “what could be” for girls and women across lines of race, class, sexualities, and disabilities. As an introduction to the kinds of methodological, theoretical, and political possibilities that can be opened up by feminist scholarship, Disruptive Voices will appeal to a wide range of scholars and students across the disciplines.