had not appeared in earlier formulations of feminist research within the literature.
AsI
refined my topic,
theoption of interviewing men appeared increasingly central, raising new
challenges to the representation of diversity in feminist research. In this sense my earlier
position, which conceptualised feminist research as 'by' , 'for' and 'on' women, was
superseded by my awareness that to understand women's experience was critically to also
understand the impact of the men around them, and to compare and contrast their
experience with that of men as home-based workers. In contrast to the literature of the
1980s
andmy own previous experiences of research, doing feminist research in this context
meant adding in research with men because of the importance of understanding the
differences in
theimplications of paid work entering their homes for them as opposed to for
women. It also
leadme to interview partners of each of the teleworkers because it appeared
to be crucial to hear "both sides of the story" (Reinharz, 1992: 4 1 ), and to reflect on how
men as partners responded to the entry of paid work into their homes and relationships.
In addition,
thebenefits of including men in this feminist research project, which previously
might have been defined as "women only", were significant theoretically and
methodologically. Theoretically it enabled me to ask a series of questions concerning, for
example, the experience for men of entering homes to perform paid work when this is a
traditional site of women's unpaid work, and to explore whether men's integration into
closer contact with their children provided them with opportunities to combine
'work' and'home' in innovative ways. More generally the inclusion of men in the study encouraged me
to think about power relations more broadly, that is, to take up Foucault's
(1990: 98)
idea that power is 'everywhere' , coextensive with the social, and that both genders "circulate between its threads" rather than conceptualising power as something which men do to women.Methodologically, researching men's experience provided an insight into the difference gender makes in an interview context. For example, their lives tended to be more rigidly scheduled, confining our interviews into tighter time frames and leading to less lengthy and reflective answers. These interviews also tended to be held in more formal contexts such as home or on-site offices rather than in kitchens or living rooms as were the women's, and while I was given food and/or coffee during my interviews with all of the fourteen women, none of the twelve men offered me this 'hospitality' .
TIle character of the men's interviews were also different to those of the women. The men tended not to answer questions I perceived they found irrelevant or boring, especially those concerning domesticity, while the women endeavoured to provide reasonably lengthy answers to every question. In tenns of questions regarding the family and the household, this study parallelled Stacey's
( 199 1 : 267)
observation that men's gender and kinship narratives were "relatively inarticulate and underdeveloped" because men had less "experience, investment, or interest in the work of sustaining kin ties". The many questions on child care, housework and relationships in this study (see Teleworker Interview Schedule, Appendix Two) provoked much shorter and more perfunctory responses from the men than from the women.In
one case the teleworking man spent the majority of his interview showing me the latest software he had designed while his wife, his (female) personal secretary and I watched silently. This experience alerted me to the potential for computers themselves to figure as significant artifacts in the lives of men, where any discussion of software with the men lead to very lengthy and highly technical narratives, while the women barely mentioned these issues. I learned to steer away from these topics in order to elicit more personal and reflective material from the men, while their narratives helped me to formulate questions about computing for the women.The second element of researching with men that Stacey
( 199 1 : 267)
identified as problematic was the politics of gender as they are experienced in the interview context itself and the inevitable shortcomings of one individual "studying gender in a gendered world". Like Stacey, being a woman did detrimentally affect my access to and empathy with the male teleworkers, unlike the rapport that I enjoyed with the women. This 'space' between us was reflected in the character of the men's narratives which tended to become a monologue and included much less self-disclosure on my part, a dynamic which Reinharzalso commentates upon as the outcome of feminists 'studying up' , where they make less demands and "self-disclose less because self-disclosure diminishes one's power"
( 1 992: 42).
Additionally, a subtle sexual sub-text was visible in a number of the interviews with the men which was not present with the women. In some cases this sexual subtext was more overt
and
one man I interviewed in a remote rural location told me in the course of the interview that his sexual fantasy involved an unfamiliar woman showing up at the door as I had just done, who wanted to have sex with him. He also insisted on hugging me at the end of the interview.This
experience was rather discomforting, not to mention sobering, given that colleagues were unaware of my whereabouts for reasons of participant confidentiality.This
experience also suggests a further layer of complexity in the power relations between interviewer and interviewee, troubling the assumption that feminist research "attempts to develop special relationships with the people studied" (ibid:240).
Another interesting element of interviewing the men concerned the two men who were explicitly chosen to participate in the study because they were combining telework with parenting :their baby children. In the interview process their different orientations to this caring responsibility compared to the women was visible in the boundaries they set around this task vis-a.-vis the 'job' of talking to me.
All
of the women I interviewed with small children carefully organised or juggled their child care to facilitate the interview, tidying away this aspect of their lives in a living example of how they manage their families in order to focus on their work. However, both of the men in this prime parenting role expected me to make my schedule more flexible in response to their responsibilities for their children. In one case the male teleworker interrupted the interview frequently to check on a sleeping child, in another the teleworker decided not to proceed with an interview because his baby was sick even though he was aware that I had travelled by air for three hours explicitly for the interview. Both of these experiences reflected for me the different boundaries between researcherand
researched when women interview men, and also the different orientation to the 'business' of child care which these men experienced.In the eighties Keohane