Drucilla Barker
- Barker questions methods in feminist economic theory and proposes a new approach, interpretive, based on concept developed by Spike Peterson (Schonpflug 152).
- “Interpretive approaches call on the insights of poststructuralism, postmodernism, and postcolonialism. These insights facilitate critical evaluations of the dialectic between power and knowledge, examine the ways in which the underlying processes of the economy are discursively constituted, and theorize the conceptual as well as the empirical aspects of gender, race, class, sexuality, and nationality” (Barker, 2005, “Beyond Women and Economics: Rereading Women’s Work, Signs, 30 (4): 2191).
- Barker says there’s no way to step outside of power, of the network of power relations, and to find a neutral vantage point for taking an oppositional stand.
- “Interpretive approaches add to feminist economic analyses of work because they are able to bridge the discursive and the material. Moreover, deconstructing the category of ‘women’ enables us to speak on behalf of women because doing so forces us to consider explicitly the multiple and conflicting intersections of gender, race, class, sexuality, and nation” (Barker 2005: 2204).
- “I am advocating a methodological pluralism that will bridge the chasm between materialist and discursive perspectives. Recognizing the constitutive links between representations and the real and between power and knowledge and using gender as a conceptual rather than an empirical category are both strategies that will further the feminist economics project” (Barker 2005: 2204).