Description
A plethora of feminist scholars acknowledge and reflect that there is no ‘one feminist method’ of doing research. However, this paper argues that in advocating for a multi-method feminist approach to research, the relationship between the process and product of research have not been sufficiently problematised. Thus, this paper presents an internal critique of feminist knowledge creation within International Relations (IR) research by arguing that in privileging certain post-positivist ways of doing research, new knowledge hierarchies are created and sustained within feminist research. In order to make this case, this paper first attempts to analyse and problematise what ‘feminist research’ involves. Building on this conceptual clarity, subsequent sections of the paper look at the compatibility of ‘feminist research’ with various research methods. The second part of the paper delves deeper into feminist contentions with quantitative research methods, analyses the utility and contribution of quantitative methods to feminist IR scholarship, arguing that the two are not a-priori antithetical. In the final section, it introduces the concept of ‘gender statistics’ and further fleshes out the conditions under which quantitative methods could be compatible with feminist research. Empirically, the paper briefly uses the example of the Global Gender and Environment Outlook Report (UNEP, 2016) to explicate how a gender-centric analysis of macro and micro level sex-disaggregated data can open up beneficial avenues for feminist IR research.
