2) To explore the ways in which gender is experienced and made sense of by those who are asexual and abstinent
3) From this, develop a more nuanced, and empirically informed,
understanding of the interconnections between gender and sexuality. These aims developed out of my interest in the substantive topic, but they were also influenced by my particular epistemological and ontological assumptions about the world as well as my political and theoretical convictions. My desire to explore gendered experiences (and how gender is made sense of) indicates, first of all, my feminist conviction of the necessity of ‘attending to the significance of gender and gender asymmetry as a basic feature of all social life’ (Cook and Fonow, 1988: 5). My desire to explore gendered experiences, and how gender is
made sense of, indicates the importance I place on subjective accounts. This is
borne from an assumption that ‘knowledge’ is always situated (Haraway, 1988), and so subjective accounts are in effect the only kind of ‘knowledge’ available to us. However, I am also rooted in a constructionist perspective.30 This means
that I do not see these subjective accounts as accounts of a pre-existing and objective thing called ‘reality’, but that reality is precisely these accounts and understandings (Blaikie, 2000: 116). Therefore, in my research, I am not
assuming gender to be a ‘fact’ that people simply understand in different ways, but rather that ‘gender’ is constructed through these understandings
themselves. However, it is important to note that if something is constructed, it does not mean it is not real. This can be interpreted in two ways. First, ‘gender’ has significant material consequences: constructions of gender (and even the idea that gender exists at all) structure how we organise our social world in a very real way. Second, constructionism does not [have to] deny the phenomenal world, or the ‘stuffness of life’ as Turner (2008: 507) puts it. However it is not that we are simply confronted with the reality of ‘stuff’, but rather it is how we see (or don’t see), interact with, and give meaning to that ‘stuff’ that
constitutes our reality. As Crotty (1998: 43-44) puts it: ‘We do not create
meaning. We construct meaning. We have something to work with. What we have to work with is the world and objects in the world’.
30 I use the term ‘constructionism’ as distinguished from ‘constructivism’. Although they are often
used synonymously, Gubrium and Holstein (2008: 8) suggests that constructionism implies the social element of meaning-making in a way that constructivism does not.
So for example, we can think about the role of the body in the construction of ‘sex’ and ‘gender’. We can say that in some sense the ‘fleshiness’ of our bodies exist with particular phenotypical features, but our bodies do not exist as bodies - they do not ‘materialise’ as such (Butler, 1990: 153) – until we construct them as bodies, and we have an understanding of what bodies mean. As an example of how we construct bodies, Laqueur (1990) argues that there is no fact of sexually dimorphic bodies (even though we may ‘see’ it as irrefutable today) by tracing how for much of Western history, it was obvious the body only had one sex. This also gives a sense of how constructions do not occur individually, on a whim, but are always socially embedded. As Crotty argues:
‘It is clearly not the case that individuals encounter phenomena in the world and make sense of them one by one. Instead, we are all born into a world of meaning. We enter a social milieu in which a ‘system of intelligibility’ prevails… Our culture brings things into view for us and endows them with meaning and, by the same token, leads us to ignore other things.’ (1998: 54).
It is through our interactions in the social world that we construct, reproduce, sustain (and sometimes challenge) meanings, but these meanings are always temporally and spatially specific – at different types and in different places, different things are brought into view.
It is in how I respond to these meanings as a researcher that the theoretical and political element of my research paradigm emerges. Namely, I am attentive to and critical of how social constructions and webs of meaning are always imbued with power relations, and exist to serve particular interests. Much of the
methodological literature describes this perspective as ‘critical theory’ or ‘critical theories’ (e.g. Lincoln et al., 2011: 102) 31, and generally encompasses
feminist, anti-racist, Marxist, queer etc. political positions. My own worldview is particularly influenced by intersectional queer feminism. However, while Lincoln et al. (2011) suggest that ‘constructionism’ and ‘critical theory’ constitute two separate paradigms, I prefer Crotty’s (1998: 60) characterisation of
constructionism as an epistemological and ontological perspective out of which several different theoretical paths can emerge, of which critical theory is one.
31 This use of ‘critical theory’ is much broader than the ‘Critical Theory’ associated with the
Indeed, as Marshall (2008: 688) argues, critical theories such as feminism must be constructionist at base, since the alternative would mean accepting the status quo as natural and unchangeable. As such, critical approaches are also normative and interested (Marshall, 2008: 688) – rather than acquiescing to the relativism that some forms of constructionism might promote, at heart there is a contention that social constructions that oppress and exploit are ethically
wrong. Constructionism allows us not only to trace the construction of meaning, but through making visible the ‘malleability of social forms’, we can also ‘reveal a potential for change’ (Holstein and Gubrium, 2011: 353).