Toward Transnational Feminist Methodologies in Global Health: Critical Ethnographies of HIV and Abortion

Abstract

Unlike prevailing research methodologies in the interdisciplinary field of global health, feminist methodologies allow researchers to unsettle the premises and assumptions of the field. This paper describes how we mobilize transnational feminist ethnography in our research on HIV in India and postabortion care in Senegal. Transnational feminist perspectives enable us to re-embed HIV prevention and post-abortion care in the politics of gender and sexuality and in postcolonial histories of health governance. They consider the role of gender and sexuality not just in terms of gendered health inequalities, but also in terms of how global health problems are defined, managed, measured, and contested. We outline how our projects put this lens into practice by pushing the methodological boundaries of time, scale, and scope and through a historicized, multisited, and multiscalar approach that triangulates multiple sources of data. Feminist ethnography requires that we turn the critical gaze upon ourselves, reflecting on multiple and shifting personal and professional positionalities during and after fieldwork and our ethical commitments to our interlocutors. While acknowledging the significant personal, institutional, and professional challenges of using feminist methodologies, especially given the dominant modes of research in global health, we urge greater consideration, among both advanced and early scholars, of the possibilities they offer for studying global health problems.