Misbehaving as Feminist Ethics: Social Justice and Resistance

• In Event: Being Irresponsible: A Feminist Undoing of Academic Research

Abstract

In this paper, we raise the question “How do we enact feminist research as ethical social justice?

Shelton (2019) quotes participants to claim, “When I do bad stuff, I make the most difference.”. Through our FRC work, we aim to explicitly counter neoliberal ethical questions grounded in economic efficiency by turning towards feminist communitarianism that refuses the separation of the economic from the ethical, the political from the personal, the community from the individual. Institutional ethics focus researchers’ attention on necessary but insufficient guidelines for protecting human subjects which are wholly inadequate to the conceptualization of collective, community-engaged research focused on social justice outcomes (for example, Fine 2018). As a Feminist Research Collective, our dialogues and practices embody multiple layers of ethically plural “We”s that are organically intra-connected. We refuse to accept the “we” as unproblematic, just as we resist the dichotomies of economic/ethical, political/personal, individual/collective. Our storyworlding methodology co-creates a space that opens up the ethical community and resists its confinement to neoliberal forms of assessment and accountability through a revision of communitarian ethics as a polity-in-the-making.

Communitarianism has been justly criticized by contemporary feminists who deconstruct the idea of community as “the same” whose impetus for “we” is necessarily parochial and rides on the backs of othering its strangers and its disenfranchised (Karavanta, 2019; Dennis, 2018; Butler, 2015; Wynter, 2007; Ahmed, 2000). “We” struggle toward an inclusive, diverse “we” as a polity-in-the-making (Butler, 2015) dedicated to “becoming common” together (Gandhi, 2014). Polity-in-the-making, as the phrase itself suggests, is an ongoing endeavor as “we” retain possibilities for agency and collectively engage in multiple spheres of communities, including those of our participants.

Our paper begins with a performed dialogue indicative of our ongoing conversations of ethics. We offer several examples from our work which are juxtaposed with the dialogue amongst members on the topic of feminist ethics. Ethics, as always-already practical (Dennis, 2018) emerges in the space between our conversation about ethics and our ethical own doing. The following key points are highlighted:(1)Our “we” is both more than and inclusive of the collection of diverse individuals who belong with one another through our FRC and our storyworlding methodology. (2)This “we” forms a resistance to neoliberal academic institutions as the FRC is a “stranger” within its walls. (3)“We” seek open and fallible opportunities for agency, which point toward refusing the policing of our collective bodies alongside resisting the policing aspects of neoliberal ethics.

The dialogue serves as a springboard for deliberating the ways in which feminist communitarian ethics and storyworlding methodololgies work within our collectivities while fostering an openness for others to locate their own just research practices. We invite audience participants to alter, add-to, reconfigure, and challenge the dialogue, and offer diverse examples so that we might push toward a neoliberally irresponsible feminist ethics.

Authors

• Barbara Dennis, Indiana University

• Alycia M. Elfreich, Indiana University - Bloomington