Silverio, SA; (2018) A man in women’s studies research: Privileged in more than one sense. In: Clift, BC and Hatchard, J and Gore, J, (eds.) How do we belong? Researcher positionality within qualitative inquiry. An edited volume of the proceedings of the 4th annual qualitative research symposium. (pp. 39-48). University of Bath: Bath, United Kingdom.

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Abstract

Qualitative investigations allow researchers to document the experience of certain aspects of peoples’ lives. In doing so, Psychologists and other qualitative researchers can build a rapport with their participants of such intensity it allows for unconstrained access to socio-emotional narratives which accompany a participants’ identity and psyche. In the first qualitative study I designed, I interviewed twelve never married older women about femininity, examining what effect, if any, marital status and ageing social networks had on gender identity; on the private-personal and public-political concepts of womanhood; and on later-life femininity. During two Grounded Theory analyses, I became increasingly aware that despite embracing a critical realist ontology and wanting findings to be revealed from within the data (objectivist epistemology), I had been influenced by my readings on gender and sex: de Beauvoir’s notion of “One is not born, but becomes woman”, and Bem’s “Psychological Androgyny”. Wrestling with my position as a (male) researcher bringing my interpretation of existing theory to women’s studies research, I questioned whether I had become a subjective spectator instead of the objective outsider I set-out to be.

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