Feminist theory

Empirical studies conducted from a range of theoretical perspectives have all in some way affirmed the existence of women's experience as a source of privileged understandings, if not the basis of an alternative social science. With the turn to post-modernism many of the certainties of a feminist research practice have been dislodged. This has liberated a plethora of exciting philosophical, political and cultural endeavours that tackle the essentialism around women embedded in both feminist and non-feminist texts.

Artist Ailie Rutherford has been working with Glasgow Women’s Library (GWL) to visualise the complex nature of work and care for many women. The Pouring Out, Pouring In exhibition shares prints and other outcomes from the Mapping Women’s Work workshop series at GWL. Building on a University of Glasgow study, the women involved have mapped out their multiple paid and unpaid roles, thinking together about how a more equitable economic system might look. 

In this paper, I reflect on multiple “failures” I encountered during my fieldwork on agricultural cooperatives in Kyrgyzstan: from my own “failure” to comply with a linear research design to the alleged “failure” of farmers to cooperate within the formal boundaries of cooperatives. I then suggest how a feminist research practices based on a performative ontology enables a reframing of these experiences that opens space for more hopeful affects.