The gift of objectivity is granted to its grantees

Last week, I received the course evaluations back for my course on the sociology of gender (and I could add here, from a feminist methodological standpoint, that the university's standardized mix of quantitative and qualitative measurements is a pitiful attempt where neither quantitative nor qualitative data are at all helpful in improving the way a course is taught) .  Like any class, there is always that one student, or, in larger classes, that handful of students, who seem to have either a personal vendetta against you or those who seem never to consider the fact that you will actually read what they write and it will crush your young, budding pedagogical soul.  (Eventually, I'm told, you get cynical about such comments, one day shout, "f this s!" and start delivering crusty lectures and multiple choice exams in bitter resignation).  In my case, one student wrote on my evaluations that the readings in my class were "biased" and that it would have been "interesting to see how a man would have taught this course" differently.

Because I am read as 'woman,' my teaching gender - since "gender," as we know, is coded "woman," where "woman" is "other" and "man" is neutral - is always already perceived as biased.  I felt as though I had not reached that student with the very core, fundamental point of my course: gender is as real as we make it, and indeed, we make it very, very real.  But I no more represent a static 'woman's perspective' than any male-identified person represents a static 'man's perspective.'  And even if a man were to teach the class, he could teach it with a far more progressive bent than I ever could, simply because his privileged status meant he could afford to.  While my push for a feminist analysis will be taken as bias, his push for a feminist analysis will be taken as objective truth.  That is, of course, if he is white, suitably masculine, dressed well, and speaks unaccented English (although a British accent would suffice).  And while I assume I can generally pass as straight, this hypothetical male instructor would be doomed if he was read in the slightest bit as gay, because of course the only reason that a man would be invested in women's general welfare would be because he wants to date...men?

The point I am trying to make is that gender as a social institution has such a hold on us that we can hardly fathom the myriad of ways in which we are sorted or sort each other.  Gender remains a formidable institutional force and principle of social organization, and yet its more insidious means of perpetuating inequality in the post-second wave feminist era are so taken for granted that most of us don't recognize it.  And when we teach it, we are greeting over two decades of brilliantly invasive socialization, from before birth ("Is it a boy or a girl?") to young adulthood.  After a six week course attempting to pull back the curtain to reveal the socially-generated and structurally-reinforced hold gender has on our lives, a student can still conclude, "Nah.  Pretty sure gender is a static binary, LOL."

Our struggles amongst ourselves speak to the problems we confront in transforming our students - we ourselves are not yet transformed, or even all that sure of what we want to transform into.  Even after forty years of women's studies as an academic discipline (and several hundred years of feminist scholarship), we are still striving to legitimize a feminist lens in the academy.  We are still making the same arguments about how the methods we are critiquing are not objective or unbiased, but rather very much political, very much a value judgment. 

Beetham and Demetriades (2007) gesture to this when they chronicle how a gendered scholarship is always changing - in their case, from a 'women in development' framework to a 'gender and development' framework following a post-colonial and racial critique - and yet we are still challenging the same old "mainstream" perspective on measurement.  We have reached a point where qualitative and quantitative parties are not the same embittered, divided camps they once were, and those with a gendered lens often see the benefits of mixed methods and lend valuable critiques of how quantitative methods can better measure gendered experiences.  We may have our own "healthy internal debate" and work across disciplines and methodologies (Fonow and Cook 2005), which is all well and good, but still struggle to defend a gendered perspective to those who believe that objective, value-free research 1) exists, 2) is empirically, epistemologically, and methodologically doable, and 3) done by them.  We still struggle to convince these researchers - and the realm of the non-academy, where polls and numbers are presented to the public as flat, objective assertions, and our students, who assure us that they are each individuals of their own making and already experts on the social world - of their own subjectivity and political positions.

In White Logic, White Methods (2008), Zuberi and Bonilla-Silva write, "Ah, whiteness grants the gift of external objectivity to its grantees!"  And indeed we could say the same about middle-classness, maleness, about heterosexuality, about able-bodiedness, about any privileged position. Those who make the rules or who occupy the same categories as those who made the rules, those whose identities are so normalized as the golden standard as to be rendered invisible to the souls that occupy them, lay claim to such 'objectivity' in the face of any challenges to the contrary.  And those who do not occupy those positions can still be so profoundly colonized by these privileged, normative views that they come to believe them to be the objective, unbiased real. 

Feminist scholarship was never a monolithic or single-perspective to begin with, but as feminist scholarship has integrated into the academy, we must be careful to see the ways in which our defense of our frameworks as legitimate and necessary weakens.  I worry that, as feminist scholars have increasingly become the "gatekeepers' to an academy where they were once "on the outside looking in" (Fonrow and Cook 2005: 2230), we are in danger of our own bias being eroded.  If we make the dangerous claim that "the product of any research process is a construction of, not a reflection of, what the reality is about" (Fonrow and Cook 2005:2221), we must be careful not to lose sight of the very real power imbalances that permeate the constructions and not back ourselves into a corner where a feminist lens can be minimized or de-legitimated as merely a construction of reality.  We are especially susceptible to such critiques by virtue of our position on the axes of oppression - if we are poor, if we are female, if we are transgendered, if we are people of color, if we are queer.  To those that inevitably tell us, "That is your construction," we must say, "Yes, but my construction and representation illuminates the construction and representation of yours." 

We must also rethink our strategy, because perhaps there is a construction or version of reality that is more accurate than others.  There is a construction that is less oppressive, less silencing, and more holistic.  There are methodologies that get us there more effectively than others.  We should be at peace with, and not apologize for, how our "bias" is one that can transform, if we dare it to.  Feminist methodology allows for us to name where it is we stand and not deceive ourselves that we are otherwise; it also allows for us to envision a more compassionate, humane way to be.  I will continue to teach with "bias," yes, but with the bias that offers liberation, transformation, and an alternate view of what is true and possible.  A bias that, hopefully, shows just how biased we already were.