Experience is sometimes horribly ill-used. Who of us hasn't groaned when another student raises their hand and begins to speak about how "one time" or "this friend of mine" or "in my mother's case," and goes on to extol a glittering individual example that is meant to undermine an entire body of research to the contrary? Individual examples do not render empirical patterns irrelevant. As individuals, we all have a multitude of experiences that may or may not fit general patterns - but that doesn't mean those patterns don't exist.
It also doesn't mean that there aren't many, many, many examples of individual experiences that do fit this empirical patterns. Given conversations about inequality, privilege, and oppression, it is those examples of 'experience' that are usually not afforded space or legitimacy. These are experiences that I feel are dangerous to invalidate as merely discursive constructions. Scott (1991) argues that 'experience' is discursive and often wrongly used to 'naturalize' difference. Although Scott says that "subjects...are constituted through experience," we must be careful not to take this to mean that this construction doesn't have very real, harmful social consequences. Subjects are not necessarily the ones doing the constructing, which is a tenuous point that can easily be missed.
Experience, particulary that of people of color, indicates that race and the race hierarchy is very real. The experiences of lesbians, gays, and bisexuals indicate that hegemonic gender and sexual norms are very real. The experience of trans folks and women indicates that gender is very real. Even McDowell (1992) suggests that it is women's 'experience' as women that has lead to feminist researchers' inclination to study subjects with substantive social concerns.
But this experience is complicated, as McDowell is wary of essentializing a feminist identity and ascribing masculinity and femininity to particular methodologies (i.e. quantiative methods are masculine methods; qualitative methods are feminine methods). This is perhaps a mistinterpretation of what feminism is suggesting. McDowell notes that small-scale qualitative studies are "assumed... [to] draw on women's (purported) abilities to listen, to empathize, and to validate personal experiences as part of the research process," but it seems to me that feminists are arguing that qualitative studies allow for all of us to draw on our shared abilities to listen, empathize, and validate personal experiences. These are not essentialist notions of women researchers, but offer what convential methodologies deny or dismiss as unimportant. McDowell cautions against an over-valorizing of feminist methods, but I question whether this is a justified critique. (When men praise conventional methods, does anyone suggest they are over-valorizing them?) The point is that conventional methods do not have to be valorized - they are already normalized. We must valorize feminist methods because otherwise, who would champion them? More importantly, if we didn't say they were worth doing, who would ever do them? Sometimes you have to yell to be heard above a downpour, and feminist researchers who tout feminist methods may risk over-valorizing them rather than be silently drenched.
McDowell goes on to cite Hill Collins, who suggests we must strive to "decolonize our minds" although none of us can escape from "hegemonic notions of knowledge." In that sense, claiming any particular method is preferable or better is unhelpful. It seems best to just acknowledge the subjectivity of experience, a feminist tenet that has dramatically challenged conventional methodologies as well as those that are termed 'feminist' (McDowell 1992). Feminist scholarship faces intense pressure to conform, at least somewhat, to conventional methodologies in order to be seen as 'legitimate' or publishable. This may largely explain why McDowell could not locate feminist geography research that had been overly reflexive about the researcher's subjectivity or analytic of "the particular position of women as researchers." I would argue that the disciplinary pressure feminist researchers face cannot be taken so lightly. Critiquing women for "remain[ing] relatively absent from her text" doesn't seem fair given why women may strive to legitimize their research by removing themselves from it. Citing the 'experience of difference' as women is not necessarily encouraged in academic work, which pretends to be masculinist, objective, neutral, and value-free.
McDowell does return to this complication with more nuance and forgiveness, acknowledging that women in the academy have a tendency to become "a surrogate man" in order to compensate for marginality. (Consider nearly two decades later, C. J. Pascoe's selected attire of plain t-shirts and cargo pants in an attempt to become "degendered" in her research for Dude, You're a Fag is an example of how "de-gendered" really just means "less like a 'woman' and more like a 'man.'") She concludes that "we must recognize and take account of our own position, as well as that of our research participants, and write this into our research practice rather than continue to hanker after some idealized equality between us."
Can't we write our subjectivity into our research practice while still hankering away with our idealized notions? I'd hate to think this is an either/or crossroads. It is a hard line to tow, this post modern critique of 'experience' as discursive and of feminism as too structural and essentializing. Even though Scott argues that noting the construction of experience "does not mean that one dismisses the effects of such concepts and identities," it is all too easy to imply that the 'experience of difference' reifies difference itself. And although McDowell cautions against the relativism of post modernism, but even she admits how easily post modernism dismisses any structured feminism, even if it led to post modern feminism. I am concerned that, in striving to complicate essentialism, we miss a very essential recognition of structures.
Allow me to conclude with a quote that I feel sums up the complications. In a debate about 'race' in The Black Scholar, Jon Michael Spencer attacked "the postmodern conspiracy to explode racial identity" and argued that "to relinquish the notion of race - even though it's a cruel hoax - at this particular time is to relinquish our fortress against the powers and principalities that still try to undermine us." Acknowledging the very real experiences of marginalized groups is acknowleging that marginalization is happening. A movement away from that is, perhaps, a most unfortunate path to take. It may also be an exercise in self-harm, because we lose sight of the structures themselves and, most importantly, those oppressed by them.
In the end, I guess we can always chalk it up to experience.
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