Post-qualitative research: critical contributions from poststructural feminism

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to take a journey through the development of feminist epistemology, whose contributions to the social sciences have traveled from the exposure of the androcentric bias of its research, the rejection of the notions of objectivity and neutrality of traditional empirical methods, to the display of the power-based systems that create and recreate the concepts used by science within a particular social and political system. Even though women were the main object of study of feminist epistemologies at first, its interest has shifted toward other subjects that have been left out, inquiring about the conditions of possibility that have maintained deeply unequal societies. Three feminist epistemological perspectives are reviewed here, with emphasis on feminist poststructuralism due to its contributions to post-Cartesian post-qualitative research