Page 109 - CULTURE IN THE COMMUNICATION AGE

MIRJA LIIKKANEN

knowledge is said to be inherently contaminated, or said not to be legitimate
knowledge in the first place. Unfortunately, such abstract philosophical claims
have too often unproductively clouded empirical possibilities that could lead to
policy discussions and social change that would benefit women (and men too).
The first empirical symbols to be attacked were numbers and statistics,
which were said to distort women’s ‘real’ reality. At that point some years ago
it was argued that the only way to obtain true knowledge about women’s
experiences was to engage ethnography and various related qualitative empir-
ical research methods. But quite soon, and located within broad discussions
that questioned whether any common womanhood exists in the first place,
ethnographic empiricism was also argued to be hopelessly contaminated.
The implications of this brief history are monumental, and by no means all
positive. As Angela McRobbie correctly points out, the anti-empirical turn
‘leaves us feminists who are concerned with the politics of culture high and dry
when it comes to contributing to political debates outside the academy’
(McRobbie 1997: 171). The ‘dead end’ in empirical research therefore comes
at the end of a long road, and the ‘politically correct’ consequences of the anti-
empirical movement will not be easy to overcome. This strict exclusion/
inclusion mentality effectively inhibits free-flowing debate. Moreover, many
empirically minded scholars now steer clear of women’s research because they
feel uncomfortable with the self-absorbed, overly poetic discussions that now
dominate the debate. Such abstract discussions seem to many to be simply
too far removed from the realities, and the possibilities, of the complex,
undetermined, empirical world.

Feminists and ordinary women: research as
powerful practise

Charlotte Brunsdon (1997) has productively explored the category of ‘ordinary
women’ produced by feminist research. She distinguishes between categories
of ‘feminist’ and ‘ordinary woman’ created by shifts in research on women
and has constructed a three-part typology reflecting stages of this research:
(1) transparent – no others; (2) hegemonic – non-feminist women others, and (3)
fragmented – everyone an other.
Brunsdon describes the first stage (transparent) as utopian. There was a belief
in a shared sisterhood of all women, in a common consciousness of women as a
group subordinated by a global patriarchy and thus sharing gender-speci fic
experiences.
The next relationship (hegemonic) is described by Brunsdon as the most
common within her own sphere of interest – media criticism. She says that this
stage can also be described as ‘the impulse to transform the feminine identifica-
tions of women to feminist ones’. She continues, ‘the construction of feminist
identity through this relation involves the di fferentiation of the feminist from
her other, the ordinary woman, the housewife, the woman she might have

98