El ritual de integración al jardín

As I mentioned above, one of the driving forces of feminist research was to challenge the passivity, subordination and silencing of women in traditional research approaches. From a feminist point of view, in order to understand women’s lives there is a need to develop feminist theories that “explain the world from the position of women, and that enable us to conceptualise reality in a way that reflects women’s interests and values, drawing on women’s own interpretations of their own experiences.” (Abbott et al. 2005, 364) This is why women’s everyday experiences, and more importantly, the subjective meanings that they assign to their experiences constitute the empirical and theoretical resources for feminist analysis.

Analysis of personal experiences provides us with people’s interpretations of their own lives and how they see themselves as gendered beings. Furthermore, it provides insight into how

individuals’ gendered experiences are related to the ways in which society is structured. In this manner, we can investigate in what ways social life is organised through patriarchal structures as well as in what ways women’s oppression is created by men’s agency. Contrary to the traditional approaches that have ignored the link between the personal and the structural, or that have investigated this link from only the point of view of (western, white, middle-class) men, feminist understanding places women’s personal experiences in a broader social, historical and political context of these experiences (Harding 1987; Thompson 1992, 4).

An emphasis on experience, however, is not without its problems. Whilst the challenge of male-dominance in both the public and private spheres is an essential starting point for feminist research, it is not solely male-dominance that is the source of oppression for women. Asking the questions “which women?” and “whose experiences?”, black feminists (as well as postcolonial, poststructural, postmodern and critical feminists, who are generally classified under the umbrella term ‘postmodern feminists’) have emphasised that there is no uniform or universal category of ‘woman’ and not all women have the same concerns, choices and views on their lives. They criticised the early feminist contributions on the grounds that they focused on issues related to white, middle- and upper-class women and overlooked the issues which are important for the lives of working-class women and women of colour (Brooks and Hesse-Biber 2007).

These critiques shared by a large group of feminists brought about the consideration of the significance of diversity and plurality in women’s experiences, and of taking into account how other factors such as age, class, ethnicity, sexual orientation and geographical locations shape these experiences and create different forms of inequality. As Harding (1987, 7) states,

Masculine and feminine are always categories within every class, race, and culture in the sense that women’s and men’s experiences, desires and interests differ within every class, race and culture. But so, too, are class, race, and culture always categories within gender, since women’s and men’s experiences, desires and interests differ according to class, race and culture. Although the commonality of women’s experiences is essential for the political role of feminist research, as feminism stems from the critique of the gender-based asymmetries between men and women, it is important also to address the complexity that other socially constructed

aspects of difference adds to gender as it is experienced by women.

Harding (1987) furthers the issue of diversity, suggesting that a woman may have diverse experiences of ‘being a woman’ depending on various roles she adopts throughout her life. Referring to herself and her colleagues, for example, she indicates that one’s experiences as a mother and as a scientist can be contradictory, and this very contradiction between different identities of women is a rich resource for feminist research (see also Chapter 2 for the complexity, diversity and multiplicity of gender).

Although the early feminist research focused on women’s experiences due to their invisibility both as the researcher and the researched, later studies have recognised the relevance of men’s experiences to understanding the gendered life (Campbell 2003; Gelsthorpe 1992; Maynard 2004). For example, in their study on domestic violence, Anderson and Umberson (2004) examine men’s accounts in order to understand how these men construct masculine identities through the practice of violence towards their female partners. This is feminist research, asking feminist questions, but to men about masculinity. As Hesse-Biber and Leckenby (2004, 214) argue, “just as adding women into research does not make it feminist, feminist research may not have women as its subject.”

Men’s experiences, in addition to women’s, are being recently utilised in both feminist technology and feminist organisation studies in order to understand the gendered aspects of work life (see the review of these fields in Section 2.1.2 in Chapter2, also see Murgia and Poggio 2009). For example, a number of studies done on non-traditional occupations show that whereas being minority causes women to experience isolation and negative stereotyping (Kanter 1977), it can bring positive career outcomes to men in such occupations, i.e. they are encouraged to apply for promotion and dominate the top management despite their small representation in the profession (Cross and Bagilhole 2002; Evans 1997; Simpson 2004). These studies demonstrate how studying men in non-traditional occupations in addition to women enables us to see such contrasting situations, which would have been overlooked otherwise. In another study, Lie (1995, 379) argues that since technical developments and implementations at work are dominated by men, “women’s experiences with technology are in many ways ‘created in the image of man’.” She suggests that in order to understand these experiences feminist researchers also need to study men and masculinities.

Sharing this position, my research utilises both male and female industrial designers’ personal experiences in order to understand in what ways and to what extent they consider gender relevant, and what other complicating factors it intersects, in their work lives. In doing this, I operationalise my interpretation of the gender triad, which I discussed in Chapter 2 and at the beginning of this chapter, examining how these experiences are gendered by first, the construction of symbolic associations and ideal images regarding the industrial designer’s work; second, structural divisions and hierarchies in the workplace; and third, the social relations between industrial designers and other workers, such as engineers (as discussed in Chapter 3), production workers (as discussed in Chapter 4) and others that may appear in the analysis of these experiences.