feminism literature review

This essay offers a very basic introduction to feminist literary theory, and a compendium of Great Writers Inspire resources that can be approached from a feminist perspective. It provides suggestions for how material on the Great Writers Inspire site can be used as a starting point for exploration of or classroom discussion about feminist approaches to literature. Questions for reflection or discussion are highlighted in the text. Links in the text point to resources in the Great Writers Inspire site. The resources can also be found via the ' Feminist Approaches to Literature' start page . Further material can be found via our library and via the various authors and theme pages.

The Traditions of Feminist Criticism

According to Yale Professor Paul Fry in his lecture The Classical Feminist Tradition from 25:07, there have been several prominent schools of thought in modern feminist literary criticism:

First Wave Feminism: Men's Treatment of Women In this early stage of feminist criticism, critics consider male novelists' demeaning treatment or marginalisation of female characters. First wave feminist criticism includes books like Marry Ellman's Thinking About Women (1968) Kate Millet's Sexual Politics (1969), and Germaine Greer's The Female Eunuch (1970). An example of first wave feminist literary analysis would be a critique of William Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew for Petruchio's abuse of Katherina.
The 'Feminine' Phase - in the feminine phase, female writers tried to adhere to male values, writing as men, and usually did not enter into debate regarding women's place in society. Female writers often employed male pseudonyms during this period.
The 'Feminist' Phase - in the feminist phase, the central theme of works by female writers was the criticism of the role of women in society and the oppression of women.
The 'Female' Phase - during the 'female' phase, women writers were no longer trying to prove the legitimacy of a woman's perspective. Rather, it was assumed that the works of a women writer were authentic and valid. The female phase lacked the anger and combative consciousness of the feminist phase.

Do you agree with Showalter's 'phases'? How does your favourite female writer fit into these phases?

Read Jane Eyre with the madwoman thesis in mind. Are there connections between Jane's subversive thoughts and Bertha's appearances in the text? How does it change your view of the novel to consider Bertha as an alter ego for Jane, unencumbered by societal norms? Look closely at Rochester's explanation of the early symptoms of Bertha's madness. How do they differ from his licentious behaviour?

How does Jane Austen fit into French Feminism? She uses very concise language, yet speaks from a woman's perspective with confidence. Can she be placed in Showalter's phases of women's writing?

Dr. Simon Swift of the University of Leeds gives a podcast titled 'How Words, Form, and Structure Create Meaning: Women and Writing' that uses the works of Virginia Woolf and Silvia Plath to analyse the form and structural aspects of texts to ask whether or not women writers have a voice inherently different from that of men (podcast part 1 and part 2 ).

In Professor Deborah Cameron's podcast English and Gender , Cameron discusses the differences and similarities in use of the English language between men and women.

In another of Professor Paul Fry's podcasts, Queer Theory and Gender Performativity , Fry discusses sexuality, the nature of performing gender (14:53), and gendered reading (46:20).

How do more modern A-level set texts, like those of Margaret Atwood, Zora Neale Hurston, or Maya Angelou, fit into any of these traditions of criticism?

Depictions of Women by Men

Students could begin approaching Great Writers Inspire by considering the range of women depicted in early English literature: from Chaucer's bawdy 'Wife of Bath' in The Canterbury Tales to Spenser's interminably pure Una in The Faerie Queene .

How might the reign of Queen Elizabeth I have dictated the way Elizabethan writers were permitted to present women? How did each male poet handle the challenge of depicting women?

By 1610 Thomas Middleton and Thomas Dekker's The Roaring Girl presented at The Fortune a play based on the life of Mary Firth. The heroine was a man playing a woman dressed as a man. In Dr. Emma Smith's podcast on The Roaring Girl , Smith breaks down both the gender issues of the play and of the real life accusations against Mary Frith.

In Dr. Emma Smith's podcast on John Webster's The Duchess of Malfi , a frequent A-level set text, Smith discusses Webster's treatment of female autonomy. Placing Middleton or Webster's female characters against those of Shakespeare could be brought to bear on A-level Paper 4 on Drama or Paper 5 on Shakespeare and other pre-20th Century Texts.

Smith's podcast on The Comedy of Errors from 11:21 alludes to the valuation of Elizabethan comedy as a commentary on gender and sexuality, and how The Comedy of Errors at first seems to defy this tradition.

What are the differences between depictions of women written by male and female novelists?

Students can compare the works of Charlotte and Emily Brontë or Jane Austen with, for example, Hardy's Tess of the d'Ubervilles or D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover or Women in Love .

How do Lawrence's sexually charged novels compare with what Emma Smith said about Webster's treatment of women's sexuality in The Duchess of Malfi ?

Dr. Abigail Williams' podcast on Jonathan Swift's The Lady's Dressing-Room discusses the ways in which Swift uses and complicates contemporary stereotypes about the vanity of women.

Rise of the Woman Writer

With the movement from Renaissance to Restoration theatre, the depiction of women on stage changed dramatically, in no small part because women could portray women for the first time. Dr. Abigail Williams' adapted lecture, Behn and the Restoration Theatre , discusses Behn's use and abuse of the woman on stage.

What were the feminist advantages and disadvantages to women's introduction to the stage?

The essay Who is Aphra Behn? addresses the transformation of Behn into a feminist icon by later writers, especially Bloomsbury Group member Virginia Woolf in her novella/essay A Room of One's Own .

How might Woolf's description and analysis of Behn indicate her own feminist agenda?

Behn created an obstacle for later women writers in that her scandalous life did little to undermine the perception that women writing for money were little better than whores.

In what position did that place chaste female novelists like Frances Burney or Jane Austen ?

To what extent was the perception of women and the literary vogue for female heroines impacted by Samuel Richardson's Pamela ? Students could examine a passage from Pamela and evaluate Richardson's success and failures, and look for his influence in novels with which they are more familiar, like those of Austen or the Brontë sisters.

In Dr. Catherine's Brown's podcast on Eliot's Reception History , Dr. Brown discusses feminist criticism of Eliot's novels. In the podcast Genre and Justice , she discusses Eliot's use of women as scapegoats to illustrate the injustice of the distribution of happiness in Victorian England.

Professor Sir Richard Evans' Gresham College lecture The Victorians: Gender and Sexuality can provide crucial background for any study of women in Victorian literature.

Women Writers and Class

Can women's financial and social plights be separated? How do Jane Austen and Charlotte Brontë bring to bear financial concerns regarding literature depicting women in the 18th and 19th century?

How did class barriers affect the work of 18th century kitchen maid and poet Mary Leapor ?

Listen to the podcast by Yale's Professor Paul Fry titled "The Classical Feminist Tradition" . At 9:20, Fry questions whether or not any novel can be evaluated without consideration of financial and class concerns, and to what extent Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own suggests a female novelist can only create successful work if she is of independent means.

What are the different problems faced by a wealthy character like Austen's Emma , as opposed to a poor character like Brontë's Jane Eyre ?

Also see sections on the following writers:

Jane Austen
Charlotte Brontë
George Eliot
Thomas Hardy
D.H. Lawrence
Mary Leapor
Thomas Middleton
Katherine Mansfield
Olive Schreiner
William Shakespeare
John Webster
Virginina Woolf

If reusing this resource please attribute as follows: Feminist Approaches to Literature at http://writersinspire.org/content/feminist-approaches-literature by Kate O'Connor, licensed as Creative Commons BY-NC-SA (2.0 UK).

Literary Theory and Criticism

Home › British Literature › Feminist Literary Criticism

Feminist Literary Criticism

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on October 7, 2022

Feminist literary criticism has its origins in the intellectual and political feminist movement. It advocates a critique of maledominated language and performs “resistant” readings of literary texts or histories. Based on the premise that social systems are patriarchal—organized to privilege men—it seeks to trace how such power relations in society are reflected, supported, or questioned by literary texts and expression.

One of the founders of this kind of approach was Virginia Woolf , who showed in her 1929 essay A Room of One’s Own how women’s material and intellectual deprivation were obstacles to authorship. Woolf illustrated her case with the abortive artistic aspirations of Shakespeare’s fictitious sister Judith. In another essay, “Professions for Women,” Woolf also announced the necessity for women writers to kill the “angel in the house,” taking her cue from Coventry Patmore’s mid-Victorian poem of the same name that glorified a domestic (or domesticated) femininity devoid of any critical spirit.

Another important source of inspiration has been Simone de Beauvoir ’s 1949 The Second Sex . Here de Beauvoir wrote that “one is not born a woman, one becomes one.” De Beauvoir’s point behind her muchquoted comment was that “ ‘woman’ is a cultural construction, rather than a biological one.” As Ruth Robbins notes, this remark is important because it highlights the fact that “the ideas about male and female roles which any given society may have come to regard as natural are not really so and that given that they are not natural they may even be changed” (118). All three texts provided ammunition for the women’s liberation movement of the 1960s and 1970s and are useful starting points for discussions of short stories that take women and the feminine as central concerns.

The ensuing critical response may best be described as bifurcating into an Anglo-American and a French strand. The former was defined by the greater importance British feminists such as Sheila Rowbotham, Germaine Greer, and Michèle Barrett attached to class. Literary critics working in this school were interested in representations of women in literary texts, an approach most famously encapsulated in Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics (1970)—probably the world’s best-selling doctoral thesis. Groundbreaking as the book turned out to be in reading canonized authors (e.g., Charles Dickens, D. H. Lawrence) against the grain and in drawing attention to their suffocating (and often misogynist) representations of women, it was also criticized for its insistence on a male conspiracy. There were objections that its readings were too often based on the assumption that literature simply mirrors reality.

Left, Susan Gubar. Right, Sandra M. Gilbert. | Left, Eli Setiya. Right, Peter Basmajian. Via Vox

Subsequent critics sought to redress the gaps in Millet’s book by setting out to discover and reevaluate neglected female writing. Among those mapping this dark continent (in Sigmund Freud’s trope) was Ellen Moers, whose Literary Women (1976) is often seen as pioneering in its attempts to focus on noncanonical women writers such as Mary Shelley. The book has since been criticized on account of its unqualified appraisal of “heroinism,” an appraisal that leaves the concept of the “great writer”—a central category of male literary historiography—intact. One of the terms used by Elaine Showalter in A Literature of Their Own (1977) is “ gynocriticism ,” a term intended to indicate her concern with the history of women as authors. In A Literature of Their Own Showalter posited the idea of a “feminine” period of literary history (1840–80) in which the experiences of women such as the Brontës, Elizabeth Gaskell, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, and George Eliot—notably their use of male pseudonyms and imitation of male standards—demonstrate the obstacles women writers have tended to face. Showalter then described a second phase (1880–1920) that comprised so-called New Woman writers (e.g., Vernon Lee, George Egeron, Ella D’Arcy) dedicated to protest and minority rights. After 1920, this feminist stage was transcended by a female phase whose major representatives, Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf are said to move beyond mimicry or opposition by asserting feminine identities, no matter how fragile or provisional these might be. Their narratives explore allegedly minor yet personally significant, even epiphanic moments and experiment with gender roles including androgyny and homosexuality. Literary texts of this period can also be said to anticipate postmodernist views of gender in their emphasis on the cultural interpretation of the body as distinguished from the physical characteristics that make people male or female.

Further landmarks in the field of feminist research were provided by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar ’s The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Imagination (1979) and The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women (1985). The Madwoman, runner-up for a Pulitzer Prize in 1980, attributed an “anxiety of authorship” to writers such as Jane Austen, the Brontës, and George Eliot. It also posited the widespread imagery of guilt or rage in texts by 19th-century women writers as part of a specifically female aesthetic—an aesthetic whose distinctness from male writers was emphasized in the canon of women’s literature as established by the 1985 Norton Anthology. Gilbert and Gubar have remained extremely influential, although some critics have questioned the clearcut separatism of their canon (male versus female) on the grounds that it unconsciously validates the implicit patriarchal ideology.

French feminism shifted the focus onto language. Its proponents drew on Freudian models of infant development that the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan had connected with processes of language acquisition and the construction of sexual difference. Lacan’s disciples Julia Kristeva, Hélène Cixous, and Luce Irigaray started from the premise that a child’s entry into language coincides with the disruption of its dyadic relationship with the mother. Language then reflects a binary logic that works through oppositions such as male/female, nature/culture. This pattern connecting oppression and language tends to group positive qualities with the masculine side. Woman, it is argued, is therefore alienated from linguistic structures and is liable to turn to a different discourse, derived from a preoedipal, “semiotic” period of fusion of mother and child. As so-called écriture feminine , this form of writing disturbs the organizing principles of “symbolic” masculinized language. It dissolves generic boundaries, causal plot, stable perspectives, and meaning in favor of rhythmic and highly allusive writing. Such transgression, though, is not gender-specific but can be performed by anyone—indeed, James Joyce is cited as the major representative of “writing one’s body” on the margins of dominant culture.

Both the French celebration of disruptive textual pleasure and the Anglo-American analysis of textual content have come under attack for their underlying assumption that all women—African slave and European housewife—share the same oppression. Postcolonial feminism, as advanced by Alice Walker, bell hooks, Gayatri Spivak, and Chandra Talpade Mohanty, took issue with the reductive ways of representing nonwhite women as sexually constrained, uneducated, and in need of being spoken for. They also objected to feminism’s insistence that women needed to reinforce their homogeneity as a sex, because they felt that this thinking demonstrated an ignorance of plurality and in fact perpetuated the very hierarchies on which patriarchy and Western imperialism had thrived.

From today’s perspective, so much has been done to improve female presence that some commentators have suggested that we live in an age of postfeminism . However, there are many who would argue that even in a postfeminist age much needs to be done to highlight the importance of interrogating seemingly natural signs of male/female difference. Critics following Judith Butler have begun to entertain the idea that the very assumption of an innate biological sex might itself be a cultural strategy to justify gender attributes. Whether one accepts this position or not, seeing identities as the embodiments of cultural practices may prompt change. This, in turn, might pave the way for a correspondingly flexible critical approach to identities as things that are entwined with other categories: ethnicity, sexual orientation, social status, health, age, or belief. In this sense, the prefix post- should not be read as meaning after feminism or as suggesting a rejection of feminism; rather, it should suggest a more self-reflexive working on the blind spots of former readings.

Key Ideas of Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar

Post-Feminism: An Essay

Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics

Simone de Beauvoir and The Second Sex

Feminism: An Essay

Analysis of Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own

BIBLIOGRAPHY Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble. Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. 2nd ed. London: Routledge, 1999. Eagleton, Mary. Working with Feminist Criticism. Oxford: Blackwell, 1996. Gamble, Sarah, ed. The Routledge Companion to Feminism and Postfeminism. London: Routledge, 2001. Hanson, Clare, ed. Re-reading the Short Story. New York: St. Martin’s, 1989. Moi, Toril. Sexual/Textual Politics. Feminist Literary Theory. London: Methuen, 1985. Ruth Robbins, “Feminist Approaches.” in Literary Theories, edited by Julian Wolfreys and William Baker, 103–126. London: Macmillan, 1998. Showalter, Elaine. A Literature of Their Own. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977.

Article contents

Feminist theory and its use in qualitative research in education.

Emily Freeman Emily Freeman University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190264093.013.1193
Published online: 28 August 2019

Feminist theory rose in prominence in educational research during the 1980s and experienced a resurgence in popularity during the late 1990s−2010s. Standpoint epistemologies, intersectionality, and feminist poststructuralism are the most prevalent theories, but feminist researchers often work across feminist theoretical thought. Feminist qualitative research in education encompasses a myriad of methods and methodologies, but projects share a commitment to feminist ethics and theories. Among the commitments are the understanding that knowledge is situated in the subjectivities and lived experiences of both researcher and participants and research is deeply reflexive. Feminist theory informs both research questions and the methodology of a project in addition to serving as a foundation for analysis. The goals of feminist educational research include dismantling systems of oppression, highlighting gender-based disparities, and seeking new ways of constructing knowledge.

feminist theories
qualitative research
educational research
positionality
methodology

Introduction

Feminist qualitative research begins with the understanding that all knowledge is situated in the bodies and subjectivities of people, particularly women and historically marginalized groups. Donna Haraway ( 1988 ) wrote,

I am arguing for politics and epistemologies of location, position, and situating, where partiality and not universality is the condition of being heard to make rational knowledge claims. These are claims on people’s lives I’m arguing for the view from a body, always a complex, contradictory, structuring, and structured body, versus the view from above, from nowhere, from simplicity. Only the god trick is forbidden. . . . Feminism is about a critical vision consequent upon a critical positioning in unhomogeneous gendered social space. (p. 589)

By arguing that “politics and epistemologies” are always interpretive and partial, Haraway offered feminist qualitative researchers in education a way to understand all research as potentially political and always interpretive and partial. Because all humans bring their own histories, biases, and subjectivities with them to a research space or project, it is naïve to think that the written product of research could ever be considered neutral, but what does research with a strong commitment to feminism look like in the context of education?

Writing specifically about the ways researchers of both genders can use feminist ethnographic methods while conducting research on schools and schooling, Levinson ( 1998 ) stated, “I define feminist ethnography as intensive qualitative research, aimed toward the description and analysis of the gendered construction and representation of experience, which is informed by a political and intellectual commitment to the empowerment of women and the creation of more equitable arrangements between and among specific, culturally defined genders” (p. 339). The core of Levinson’s definition is helpful for understanding the ways that feminist educational anthropologists engage with schools as gendered and political constructs and the larger questions of feminist qualitative research in education. His message also extends to other forms of feminist qualitative research. By focusing on description, analysis, and representation of gendered constructs, educational researchers can move beyond simple binary analyses to more nuanced understandings of the myriad ways gender operates within educational contexts.

Feminist qualitative research spans the range of qualitative methodologies, but much early research emerged out of the feminist postmodern turn in anthropology (Behar & Gordon, 1995 ), which was a response to male anthropologists who ignored the gendered implications of ethnographic research (e.g., Clifford & Marcus, 1986 ). Historically, most of the work on feminist education was conducted in the 1980s and 1990s, with a resurgence in the late 2010s (Culley & Portuges, 1985 ; DuBois, Kelly, Kennedy, Korsmeyer, & Robinson, 1985 ; Gottesman, 2016 ; Maher & Tetreault, 1994 ; Thayer-Bacon, Stone, & Sprecher, 2013 ). Within this body of research, the majority focuses on higher education (Coffey & Delamont, 2000 ; Digiovanni & Liston, 2005 ; Diller, Houston, Morgan, & Ayim, 1996 ; Gabriel & Smithson, 1990 ; Mayberry & Rose, 1999 ). Even leading journals, such as Feminist Teacher ( 1984 −present), focus mostly on the challenges of teaching about and to women in higher education, although more scholarship on P–12 education has emerged in recent issues.

There is also a large collection of work on the links between gender, achievement, and self-esteem (American Association of University Women, 1992 , 1999 ; Digiovanni & Liston, 2005 ; Gilligan, 1982 ; Hancock, 1989 ; Jackson, Paechter, & Renold, 2010 ; National Coalition for Women and Girls in Education, 2002 ; Orenstein, 1994 ; Pipher, 1994 ; Sadker & Sadker, 1994 ). However, just because research examines gender does not mean that it is feminist. Simply using gender as a category of analysis does not mean the research project is informed by feminist theory, ethics, or methods, but it is often a starting point for researchers who are interested in the complex ways gender is constructed and the ways it operates in education.

This article examines the histories and theories of U.S.–based feminism, the tenets of feminist qualitative research and methodologies, examples of feminist qualitative studies, and the possibilities for feminist qualitative research in education to provide feminist educational researchers context and methods for engaging in transformative and subversive research. Each section provides a brief overview of the major concepts and conversations, along with examples from educational research to highlight the ways feminist theory has informed educational scholarship. Some examples are given limited attention and serve as entry points into a more detailed analysis of a few key examples. While there is a large body of non-Western feminist theory (e.g., the works of Lila Abu-Lughod, Sara Ahmed, Raewyn Connell, Saba Mahmood, Chandra Mohanty, and Gayatri Spivak), much of the educational research using feminist theory draws on Western feminist theory. This article focuses on U.S.–based research to show the ways that the utilization of feminist theory has changed since the 1980s.

Histories, Origins, and Theories of U.S.–Based Feminism

The normative historiography of feminist theory and activism in the United States is broken into three waves. First-wave feminism (1830s−1920s) primarily focused on women’s suffrage and women’s rights to legally exist in public spaces. During this time period, there were major schisms between feminist groups concerning abolition, rights for African American women, and the erasure of marginalized voices from larger feminist debates. The second wave (1960s and 1980s) worked to extend some of the rights won during the first wave. Activists of this time period focused on women’s rights to enter the workforce, sexual harassment, educational equality, and abortion rights. During this wave, colleges and universities started creating women’s studies departments and those scholars provided much of the theoretical work that informs feminist research and activism today. While there were major feminist victories during second-wave feminism, notably Title IX and Roe v. Wade , issues concerning the marginalization of race, sexual orientation, and gender identity led many feminists of color to separate from mainstream white feminist groups. The third wave (1990s to the present) is often characterized as the intersectional wave, as some feminist groups began utilizing Kimberlé Crenshaw’s concept of intersectionality ( 1991 ) to understand that oppression operates via multiple categories (e.g., gender, race, class, age, ability) and that intersecting oppressions lead to different lived experiences.

Historians and scholars of feminism argue that dividing feminist activism into three waves flattens and erases the major contributions of women of color and gender-nonconforming people. Thompson ( 2002 ) called this history a history of hegemonic feminism and proposed that we look at the contributions of multiracial feminism when discussing history. Her work, along with that of Allen ( 1984 ) about the indigenous roots of U.S. feminism, raised many questions about the ways that feminism operates within the public and academic spheres. For those who wish to engage in feminist research, it is vital to spend time understanding the historical, theoretical, and political ways that feminism(s) can both liberate and oppress, depending on the scholar’s understandings of, and orientations to, feminist projects.

Standpoint Epistemology

Much of the theoretical work that informs feminist qualitative research today emerged out of second-wave feminist scholarship. Standpoint epistemology, according to Harding ( 1991 , 2004 ), posits that knowledge comes from one’s particular social location, that it is subjective, and the further one is from the hegemonic norm, the clearer one can see oppression. This was a major challenge to androcentric and Enlightenment theories of knowledge because standpoint theory acknowledges that there is no universal understanding of the world. This theory aligns with the second-wave feminist slogan, “The personal is political,” and advocates for a view of knowledge that is produced from the body.

Greene ( 1994 ) wrote from a feminist postmodernist epistemology and attacked Enlightenment thinking by using standpoint theory as her starting point. Her work serves as an example of one way that educational scholars can use standpoint theory in their work. She theorized encounters with “imaginative literature” to help educators conceptualize new ways of using reading and writing in the classroom and called for teachers to think of literature as “a harbinger of the possible.” (Greene, 1994 , p. 218). Greene wrote from an explicitly feminist perspective and moved beyond simple analyses of gender to a larger critique of the ways that knowledge is constructed in classrooms.

Intersectionality

Crenshaw ( 1991 ) and Collins ( 2000 ) challenged and expanded standpoint theory to move it beyond an individual understanding of knowledge to a group-based theory of oppression. Their work, and that of other black and womanist feminists, opened up multiple spaces of possibility for feminist scholars and researchers because it challenged hegemonic feminist thought. For those interested in conducting feminist research in educational settings, their work is especially pertinent because they advocate for feminists to attend to all aspects of oppression rather than flattening them to one of simple gender-based oppression.

Haddix, McArthur, Muhammad, Price-Dennis, and Sealey-Ruiz ( 2016 ), all women-of-color feminist educators, wrote a provocateur piece in a special issue of English Education on black girls’ literacy. The four authors drew on black feminist thought and conducted a virtual kitchen-table conversation. By symbolically representing their conversations as one from the kitchen, this article pays homage to women-of-color feminism and pushes educators who read English Education to reconsider elements of their own subjectivities. Third-wave feminism and black feminism emphasize intersectionality, in that different demographic details like race, class, and gender are inextricably linked in power structures. Intersectionality is an important frame for educational research because identifying the unique experiences, realities, and narratives of those involved in educational systems can highlight the ways that power and oppression operate in society.

Feminist Poststructural Theory

Feminist poststructural theory has greatly informed many feminist projects in educational research. Deconstruction is

a critical practice that aims to ‘dismantle [ déconstruire ] the metaphysical and rhetorical structures that are at work, not in order to reject or discard them, but to reinscribe them in another way,’ (Derrida, quoted in Spivak, 1974 , p. lxxv). Thus, deconstruction is not about tearing down, but about looking at how a structure has been constructed, what holds it together, and what it produces. (St. Pierre, 2000 , p. 482)

Reality, subjectivity, knowledge, and truth are constructed through language and discourse (cultural practices, power relations, etc.), so truth is local and diverse, rather than a universal experience (St. Pierre, 2000 ). Feminist poststructuralist theory may be used to question structural inequality that is maintained in education through dominant discourses.

In Go Be a Writer! Expanding the Curricular Boundaries of Literacy Learning with Children , Kuby and Rucker ( 2016 ) explored early elementary literacy practices using poststructural and posthumanist theories. Their book drew on hours of classroom observations, student interviews and work, and their own musings on ways to de-standardize literacy instruction and curriculum. Through the process of pedagogical documentation, Kuby and Rucker drew on the works of Barad, Deleuze and Guattari, and Derrida to explore the ways they saw children engaging in what they call “literacy desiring(s).” One aim of the book is to find practical and applicable ways to “Disrupt literacy in ways that rewrite the curriculum, the interactions, and the power dynamics of the classroom even begetting a new kind of energy that spirals and bounces and explodes” (Kuby & Rucker, 2016 , p. 5). The second goal of their book is not only to understand what happened in Rucker’s classroom using the theories, but also to unbound the links between “teaching↔learning” (p. 202) and to write with the theories, rather than separating theory from the methodology and classroom enactments (p. 45) because “knowing/being/doing were not separate” (p. 28). This work engages with key tenets of feminist poststructuralist theory and adds to both the theoretical and pedagogical conversations about what counts as a literacy practice.

While the discussion in this section provides an overview of the histories and major feminist theories, it is by no means exhaustive. Scholars who wish to engage in feminist educational research need to spend time doing the work of understanding the various theories and trajectories that constitute feminist work so they are able to ground their projects and theories in a particular tradition that will inform the ethics and methods of research.

Tenets of Feminist Qualitative Research

Why engage in feminist qualitative research.

Evans and Spivak ( 2016 ) stated, “The only real and effective way you can sabotage something this way is when you are working intimately within it.” Feminist researchers are in the classroom and the academy, working intimately within curricular, pedagogical, and methodological constraints that serve neoliberal ideologies, so it is vital to better understand the ways that we can engage in affirmative sabotage to build a more just and equitable world. Spivak’s ( 2014 ) notion of affirmative sabotage has become a cornerstone for understanding feminist qualitative research and teaching. She borrowed and built on Gramsci’s role of the organic intellectual and stated that they/we need to engage in affirmative sabotage to transform the humanities.

I used the term “affirmative sabotage” to gloss on the usual meaning of sabotage: the deliberate ruining of the master’s machine from the inside. Affirmative sabotage doesn’t just ruin; the idea is of entering the discourse that you are criticizing fully, so that you can turn it around from inside. The only real and effective way you can sabotage something this way is when you are working intimately within it. (Evans & Spivak, 2016 )

While Spivak has been mostly concerned with literary education, her writings provide teachers and researchers numerous lines of inquiry into projects that can explode androcentric universal notions of knowledge and resist reproductive heteronormativity.

Spivak’s pedagogical musings center on deconstruction, primarily Derridean notions of deconstruction (Derrida, 2016 ; Jackson & Mazzei, 2012 ; Spivak, 2006 , 2009 , 2012 ) that seek to destabilize existing categories and to call into question previously unquestioned beliefs about the goals of education. Her works provide an excellent starting point for examining the links between feminism and educational research. The desire to create new worlds within classrooms, worlds that are fluid, interpretive, and inclusive in order to interrogate power structures, lies at the core of what it means to be a feminist education researcher. As researchers, we must seriously engage with feminist theory and include it in our research so that feminism is not seen as a dirty word, but as a movement/pedagogy/methodology that seeks the liberation of all (Davis, 2016 ).

Feminist research and feminist teaching are intrinsically linked. As Kerkhoff ( 2015 ) wrote, “Feminist pedagogy requires students to challenge the norms and to question whether existing practices privilege certain groups and marginalize others” (p. 444), and this is exactly what feminist educational research should do. Bailey ( 2001 ) called on teachers, particularly those who identify as feminists, to be activists, “The values of one’s teaching should not be separated sharply from the values one expresses outside the classroom, because teaching is not inherently pure or laboratory practice” (p. 126); however, we have to be careful not to glorify teachers as activists because that leads to the risk of misinterpreting actions. Bailey argued that teaching critical thinking is not enough if it is not coupled with curriculums and pedagogies that are antiheteronormative, antisexist, and antiracist. As Bailey warned, just using feminist theory or identifying as a feminist is not enough. It is very easy to use the language and theories of feminism without being actively feminist in one’s research. There are ethical and methodological issues that feminist scholars must consider when conducting research.

Feminist research requires one to discuss ethics, not as a bureaucratic move, but as a reflexive move that shows the researchers understand that, no matter how much they wish it didn’t, power always plays a role in the process. According to Davies ( 2014 ), “Ethics, as Barad defines it, is a matter of questioning what is being made to matter and how that mattering affects what it is possible to do and to think” (p. 11). In other words, ethics is what is made to matter in a particular time and place.

Davies ( 2016 ) extended her definition of ethics to the interactions one has with others.

This is not ethics as a matter of separate individuals following a set of rules. Ethical practice, as both Barad and Deleuze define it, requires thinking beyond the already known, being open in the moment of the encounter, pausing at the threshold and crossing over. Ethical practice is emergent in encounters with others, in emergent listening with others. It is a matter of questioning what is being made to matter and how that mattering affects what it is possible to do and to think. Ethics is emergent in the intra-active encounters in which knowing, being, and doing (epistemology, ontology, and ethics) are inextricably linked. (Barad, 2007 , p. 83)

The ethics of any project must be negotiated and contested before, during, and after the process of conducting research in conjunction with the participants. Feminist research is highly reflexive and should be conducted in ways that challenge power dynamics between individuals and social institutions. Educational researchers must heed the warning to avoid the “god-trick” (Haraway, 1988 ) and to continually question and re-question the ways we seek to define and present subjugated knowledge (Hesse-Biber, 2012 ).

Positionalities and Reflexivity

According to feminist ethnographer Noelle Stout, “Positionality isn’t meant to be a few sentences at the beginning of a work” (personal communication, April 5, 2016 ). In order to move to new ways of experiencing and studying the world, it is vital that scholars examine the ways that reflexivity and positionality are constructed. In a glorious footnote, Margery Wolf ( 1992 ) related reflexivity in anthropological writing to a bureaucratic procedure (p. 136), and that resonates with how positionality often operates in the field of education.

The current trend in educational research is to include a positionality statement that fixes the identity of the author in a particular place and time and is derived from feminist standpoint theory. Researchers should make their biases and the identities of the authors clear in a text, but there are serious issues with the way that positionality functions as a boundary around the authors. Examining how the researchers exert authority within a text allows the reader the opportunity to determine the intent and philosophy behind the text. If positionality were used in an embedded and reflexive manner, then educational research would be much richer and allow more nuanced views of schools, in addition to being more feminist in nature. The rest of this section briefly discussrs articles that engage with feminist ethics regarding researcher subjectivities and positionality, and two articles are examined in greater depth.

When looking for examples of research that includes deeply reflexive and embedded positionality, one finds that they mostly deal with issues of race, equity, and diversity. The highlighted articles provide examples of positionality statements that are deeply reflexive and represent the ways that feminist researchers can attend to the ethics of being part of a research project. These examples all come from feminist ethnographic projects, but they are applicable to a wide variety of feminist qualitative projects.

Martinez ( 2016 ) examined how research methods are or are not appropriate for specific contexts. Calderon ( 2016 ) examined autoethnography and the reproduction of “settler colonial understandings of marginalized communities” (p. 5). Similarly, Wissman, Staples, Vasudevan, and Nichols ( 2015 ) discussed how to research with adolescents through engaged participation and collaborative inquiry, and Ceglowski and Makovsky ( 2012 ) discussed the ways researchers can engage in duoethnography with young children.

Abajian ( 2016 ) uncovered the ways military recruiters operate in high schools and paid particular attention to the politics of remaining neutral while also working to subvert school militarization. She wrote,

Because of the sensitive and also controversial nature of my research, it was not possible to have a collaborative process with students, teachers, and parents. Purposefully intervening would have made documentation impossible because that would have (rightfully) aligned me with anti-war and counter-recruitment activists who were usually not welcomed on school campuses (Abajian & Guzman, 2013 ). It was difficult enough to find an administrator who gave me consent to conduct my research within her school, as I had explicitly stated in my participant recruitment letters and consent forms that I was going to research the promotion of post-secondary paths including the military. Hence, any purposeful intervention on my part would have resulted in the termination of my research project. At the same time, my documentation was, in essence, an intervention. I hoped that my presence as an observer positively shaped the context of my observation and also contributed to the larger struggle against the militarization of schools. (p. 26)

Her positionality played a vital role in the creation, implementation, and analysis of military recruitment, but it also forced her into unexpected silences in order to carry out her research. Abajian’s positionality statement brings up many questions about the ways researchers have to use or silence their positionality to further their research, especially if they are working in ostensibly “neutral” and “politically free” zones, such as schools. Her work drew on engaged anthropology (Low & Merry, 2010 ) and critical reflexivity (Duncan-Andrade & Morrell, 2008 ) to highlight how researchers’ subjectivities shape ethnographic projects. Questions of subjectivity and positionality in her work reflect the larger discourses around these topics in feminist theory and qualitative research.

Brown ( 2011 ) provided another example of embedded and reflexive positionality of the articles surveyed. Her entire study engaged with questions about how her positionality influenced the study during the field-work portion of her ethnography on how race and racism operate in ethnographic field-work. This excerpt from her study highlights how she conceived of positionality and how it informed her work and her process.

Next, I provide a brief overview of the research study from which this paper emerged and I follow this with a presentation of four, first-person narratives from key encounters I experienced while doing ethnographic field research. Each of these stories centres the role race played as I negotiated my multiple, complex positionality vis-á-vis different informants and participants in my study. These stories highlight the emotional pressures that race work has on the researcher and the research process, thus reaffirming why one needs to recognise the role race plays, and may play, in research prior to, during, and after conducting one’s study (Milner, 2007 ). I conclude by discussing the implications these insights have on preparing researchers of color to conduct cross-racial qualitative research. (Brown, 2011 , p. 98)

Brown centered the roles of race and subjectivity, both hers and her participants, by focusing her analysis on the four narratives. The researchers highlighted in this section thought deeply about the ethics of their projects and the ways that their positionality informed their choice of methods.

Methods and Challenges

Feminist qualitative research can take many forms, but the most common data collection methods include interviews, observations, and narrative or discourse analysis. For the purposes of this article, methods refer to the tools and techniques researchers use, while methodology refers to the larger philosophical and epistemological approaches to conducting research. It is also important to note that these are not fixed terms, and that there continues to be much debate about what constitutes feminist theory and feminist research methods among feminist qualitative researchers. This section discusses some of the tensions and constraints of using feminist theory in educational research.

Jackson and Mazzei ( 2012 ) called on researchers to think through their data with theory at all stages of the collection and analysis process. They also reminded us that all data collection is partial and informed by the researcher’s own beliefs (Koro-Ljungberg, Löytönen, & Tesar, 2017 ). Interviews are sites of power and critiques because they show the power of stories and serve as a method of worlding, the process of “making a world, turning insight into instrument, through and into a possible act of freedom” (Spivak, 2014 , p. xiii). Interviews allow researchers and participants ways to engage in new ways of understanding past experiences and connecting them to feminist theories. The narratives serve as data, but it is worth noting that the data collected from interviews are “partial, incomplete, and always being re-told and re-membered” (Jackson & Mazzei, 2012 , p. 3), much like the lived experiences of both researcher and participant.

Research, data collection, and interpretation are not neutral endeavors, particularly with interviews (Jackson & Mazzei, 2009 ; Mazzei, 2007 , 2013 ). Since education research emerged out of educational psychology (Lather, 1991 ; St. Pierre, 2016 ), historically there has been an emphasis on generalizability and positivist data collection methods. Most feminist research makes no claims of generalizability or truth; indeed, to do so would negate the hyperpersonal and particular nature of this type of research (Love, 2017 ). St. Pierre ( 2016 ) viewed the lack of generalizability as an asset of feminist and poststructural research, rather than a limitation, because it creates a space of resistance against positivist research methodologies.

Denzin and Giardina ( 2016 ) urged researchers to “consider an alternative mode of thinking about the critical turn in qualitative inquiry and posit the following suggestion: perhaps it is time we turned away from ‘methodology’ altogether ” (p. 5, italics original). Despite the contention over the term critical among some feminist scholars (e.g. Ellsworth, 1989 ), their suggestion is valid and has been picked up by feminist and poststructural scholars who examine the tensions between following a strict research method/ology and the theoretical systems out of which they operate because precision in method obscures the messy and human nature of research (Koro-Ljungberg, 2016 ; Koro-Ljungberg et al., 2017 ; Love, 2017 ; St. Pierre & Pillow, 2000 ). Feminist qualitative researchers should seek to complicate the question of what method and methodology mean when conducting feminist research (Lather, 1991 ), due to the feminist emphasis on reflexive and situated research methods (Hesse-Biber, 2012 ).

Examples of Feminist Qualitative Research in Education

A complete overview of the literature is not possible here, due to considerations of length, but the articles and books selected represent the various debates within feminist educational research. They also show how research preoccupations have changed over the course of feminist work in education. The literature review is divided into three broad categories: Power, canons, and gender; feminist pedagogies, curriculums, and classrooms; and teacher education, identities, and knowledge. Each section provides a broad overview of the literature to demonstrate the breadth of work using feminist theory, with some examples more deeply explicated to describe how feminist theories inform the scholarship.

Power, Canons, and Gender

The literature in this category contests disciplinary practices that are androcentric in both content and form, while asserting the value of using feminist knowledge to construct knowledge. The majority of the work was written in the 1980s and supported the creation of feminist ways of knowing, particularly via the creation of women’s studies programs or courses in existing departments that centered female voices and experiences.

Questioning the canon has long been a focus of feminist scholarship, as has the attempt to subvert its power in the disciplines. Bezucha ( 1985 ) focused on the ways that departments of history resist the inclusion of both women and feminism in the historical canon. Similarly, Miller ( 1985 ) discussed feminism as subversion when seeking to expand the canon of French literature in higher education.

Lauter and Dieterich ( 1972 ) examined a report by ERIC, “Women’s Place in Academe,” a collection of articles about the discrepancies by gender in jobs and tenure-track positions and the lack of inclusion of women authors in literature classes. They also found that women were relegated to “softer” disciplines and that feminist knowledge was not acknowledged as valid work. Culley and Portuges ( 1985 ) expanded the focus beyond disciplines to the larger structures of higher education and noted the varies ways that professors subvert from within their disciplines. DuBois et al. ( 1985 ) chronicled the development of feminist scholarship in the disciplines of anthropology, education, history, literature, and philosophy. They explained that the institutions of higher education often prevent feminist scholars from working across disciplines in an attempt to keep them separate. Raymond ( 1985 ) also critiqued the academy for not encouraging relationships across disciplines and offered the development of women’s, gender, and feminist studies as one solution to greater interdisciplinary work.

Parson ( 2016 ) examined the ways that STEM syllabi reinforce gendered norms in higher education. She specifically looked at eight syllabi from math, chemistry, biology, physics, and geology classes to determine how modal verbs showing stance, pronouns, intertextuality, interdiscursivity, and gender showed power relations in higher education. She framed the study through poststructuralist feminist critical discourse analysis to uncover “the ways that gendered practices that favor men are represented and replicated in the syllabus” (p. 103). She found that all the syllabi positioned knowledge as something that is, rather than something that can be co-constructed. Additionally, the syllabi also favored individual and masculine notions of what it means to learn by stressing the competitive and difficult nature of the classroom and content.

When reading newer work on feminism in higher education and the construction of knowledge, it is easy to feel that, while the conversations might have shifted somewhat, the challenge of conducting interdisciplinary feminist work in institutions of higher education remains as present as it was during the creation of women’s and gender studies departments. The articles all point to the fact that simply including women’s and marginalized voices in the academy does not erase or mitigate the larger issues of gender discrimination and androcentricity within the silos of the academy.

Feminist Pedagogies, Curricula, and Classrooms

This category of literature has many similarities to the previous one, but all the works focus more specifically on questions of curriculum and pedagogy. A review of the literature shows that the earliest conversations were about the role of women in academia and knowledge construction, and this selection builds on that work to emphasize the ways that feminism can influence the events within classes and expands the focus to more levels of education.

Rich ( 1985 ) explained that curriculum in higher education courses needs to validate gender identities while resisting patriarchal canons. Maher ( 1985 ) narrowed the focus to a critique of the lecture as a pedagogical technique that reinforces androcentric ways of learning and knowing. She called for classes in higher education to be “collaborative, cooperative, and interactive” (p. 30), a cry that still echoes across many college campuses today, especially from students in large lecture-based courses. Maher and Tetreault ( 1994 ) provided a collection of essays that are rooted in feminist classroom practice and moved from the classroom into theoretical possibilities for feminist education. Warren ( 1998 ) recommended using Peggy McIntosh’s five phases of curriculum development ( 1990 ) and extending it to include feminist pedagogies that challenge patriarchal ways of teaching. Exploring the relational encounters that exist in feminist classrooms, Sánchez-Pardo ( 2017 ) discussed the ethics of pedagogy as a politics of visibility and investigated the ways that democratic classrooms relate to feminist classrooms.

While all of the previously cited literature is U.S.–based, the next two works focus on the ways that feminist pedagogies and curriculum operate in a European context. Weiner ( 1994 ) used autobiography and narrative methodologies to provide an introduction to how feminism has influenced educational research and pedagogy in Britain. Revelles-Benavente and Ramos ( 2017 ) collected a series of studies about how situated feminist knowledge challenges the problems of neoliberal education across Europe. These two, among many European feminist works, demonstrate the range of scholarship and show the trans-Atlantic links between how feminism has been received in educational settings. However, much more work needs to be done in looking at the broader global context, and particularly by feminist scholars who come from non-Western contexts.

The following literature moves us into P–12 classrooms. DiGiovanni and Liston ( 2005 ) called for a new research agenda in K–5 education that explores the hidden curriculums surrounding gender and gender identity. One source of the hidden curriculum is classroom literature, which both Davies ( 2003 ) and Vandergrift ( 1995 ) discussed in their works. Davies ( 2003 ) used feminist ethnography to understand how children who were exposed to feminist picture books talked about gender and gender roles. Vandergrift ( 1995 ) presented a theoretical piece that explored the ways picture books reinforce or resist canons. She laid out a future research agenda using reader response theory to better comprehend how young children question gender in literature. Willinsky ( 1987 ) explored the ways that dictionary definitions reinforced constructions of gender. He looked at the definitions of the words clitoris, penis , and vagina in six school dictionaries and then compared them with A Feminist Dictionary to see how the definitions varied across texts. He found a stark difference in the treatment of the words vagina and penis ; definitions of the word vagina were treated as medical or anatomical and devoid of sexuality, while definitions of the term penis were linked to sex (p. 151).

Weisner ( 2004 ) addressed middle school classrooms and highlighted the various ways her school discouraged unconventional and feminist ways of teaching. She also brought up issues of silence, on the part of both teachers and students, regarding sexuality. By including students in the curriculum planning process, Weisner provided more possibilities for challenging power in classrooms. Wallace ( 1999 ) returned to the realm of higher education and pushed literature professors to expand pedagogy to be about more than just the texts that are read. She challenged the metaphoric dichotomy of classrooms as places of love or battlefields; in doing so, she “advocate[d] active ignorance and attention to resistances” (p. 194) as a method of subverting transference from students to teachers.

The works discussed in this section cover topics ranging from the place of women in curriculum to the gendered encounters teachers and students have with curriculums and pedagogies. They offer current feminist scholars many directions for future research, particularly in the arena of P–12 education.

Teacher Education, Identities, and Knowledge

The third subset of literature examines the ways that teachers exist in classrooms and some possibilities for feminist teacher education. The majority of the literature in this section starts from the premise that the teachers are engaged in feminist projects. The selections concerning teacher education offer critiques of existing heteropatriarchal normative teacher education and include possibilities for weaving feminism and feminist pedagogies into the education of preservice teachers.

Holzman ( 1986 ) explored the role of multicultural teaching and how it can challenge systematic oppression; however, she complicated the process with her personal narrative of being a lesbian and working to find a place within the school for her sexual identity. She questioned how teachers can protect their identities while also engaging in the fight for justice and equity. Hoffman ( 1985 ) discussed the ways teacher power operates in the classroom and how to balance the personal and political while still engaging in disciplinary curriculums. She contended that teachers can work from personal knowledge and connect it to the larger curricular concerns of their discipline. Golden ( 1998 ) used teacher narratives to unpack how teachers can become radicalized in the higher education classroom when faced with unrelenting patriarchal and heteronormative messages.

Extending this work, Bailey ( 2001 ) discussed teachers as activists within the classroom. She focused on three aspects of teaching: integrity with regard to relationships, course content, and teaching strategies. She concluded that teachers cannot separate their values from their profession. Simon ( 2007 ) conducted a case study of a secondary teacher and communities of inquiry to see how they impacted her work in the classroom. The teacher, Laura, explicitly tied her inquiry activities to activist teacher education and critical pedagogy, “For this study, inquiry is fundamental to critical pedagogy, shaped by power and ideology, relationships within and outside of the classroom, as well as teachers’ and students’ autochthonous histories and epistemologies” (Simon, 2007 , p. 47). Laura’s experiences during her teacher education program continued during her years in the classroom, leading her to create a larger activism-oriented teacher organization.

Collecting educational autobiographies from 17 college-level feminist professors, Maher and Tetreault ( 1994 ) worried that educators often conflated “the experience and values of white middle-class women like ourselves for gendered universals” (p. 15). They complicated the idea of a democratic feminist teacher, raised issues regarding the problematic ways hegemonic feminism flattens experience to that of just white women, and pushed feminist professors to pay particular attention to the intersections of race, class, gender, and sexuality when teaching.

Cheira ( 2017 ) called for gender-conscious teaching and literature-based teaching to confront the gender stereotypes she encountered in Portuguese secondary schools. Papoulis and Smith ( 1992 ) conducted summer sessions where teachers experienced writing activities they could teach their students. Conceptualized as an experiential professional development course, the article revolved around an incident where the seminar was reading Emily Dickinson and the men in the course asked the two female instructors why they had to read feminist literature and the conversations that arose. The stories the women told tie into Papoulis and Smith’s call for teacher educators to interrogate their underlying beliefs and ideologies about gender, race, and class, so they are able to foster communities of study that can purposefully and consciously address feminist inquiry.

McWilliam ( 1994 ) collected stories of preservice teachers in Australia to understand how feminism can influence teacher education. She explored how textual practices affect how preservice teachers understand teaching and their role. Robertson ( 1994 ) tackled the issue of teacher education and challenged teachers to move beyond the two metaphors of banking and midwifery when discussing feminist ways of teaching. She called for teacher educators to use feminist pedagogies within schools of education so that preservice teachers experience a feminist education. Maher and Rathbone ( 1986 ) explored the scholarship on women’s and girls’ educational experiences and used their findings to call for changes in teacher education. They argued that schools reinforce the notion that female qualities are inferior due to androcentric curriculums and ways of showing knowledge. Justice-oriented teacher education is a more recent iteration of this debate, and Jones and Hughes ( 2016 ) called for community-based practices to expand the traditional definitions of schooling and education. They called for preservice teachers to be conversant with, and open to, feminist storylines that defy existing gendered, raced, and classed stereotypes.

Bieler ( 2010 ) drew on feminist and critical definitions of dialogue (e.g., those by Bakhtin, Freire, Ellsworth, hooks, and Burbules) to reframe mentoring discourse in university supervision and dialogic praxis. She concluded by calling on university supervisors to change their methods of working with preservice teachers to “Explicitly and transparently cultivat[e] dialogic praxis-oriented mentoring relationships so that the newest members of our field can ‘feel their own strength at last,’ as Homer’s Telemachus aspired to do” (Bieler, 2010 , p. 422).

Johnson ( 2004 ) also examined the role of teacher educators, but she focused on the bodies and sexualities of preservice teachers. She explored the dynamics of sexual tension in secondary classrooms, the role of the body in teaching, and concerns about clothing when teaching. She explicitly worked to resist and undermine Cartesian dualities and, instead, explored the erotic power of teaching and seducing students into a love of subject matter. “But empowered women threaten the patriarchal structure of this society. Therefore, women have been acculturated to distrust erotic power” (Johnson, 2004 , p. 7). Like Bieler ( 2010 ), Johnson ( 2004 ) concluded that, “Teacher educators could play a role in creating a space within the larger framework of teacher education discourse such that bodily knowledge is considered along with pedagogical and content knowledge as a necessary component of teacher training and professional development” (p. 24). The articles about teacher education all sought to provoke questions about how we engage in the preparation and continuing development of educators.

Teacher identity and teacher education constitute how teachers construct knowledge, as both students and teachers. The works in this section raise issues of what identities are “acceptable” in the classroom, ways teachers and teacher educators can disrupt oppressive storylines and practices, and the challenges of utilizing feminist pedagogies without falling into hegemonic feminist practices.

Possibilities for Feminist Qualitative Research

Spivak ( 2012 ) believed that “gender is our first instrument of abstraction” (p. 30) and is often overlooked in a desire to understand political, curricular, or cultural moments. More work needs to be done to center gender and intersecting identities in educational research. One way is by using feminist qualitative methods. Classrooms and educational systems need to be examined through their gendered components, and the ways students operate within and negotiate systems of power and oppression need to be explored. We need to see if and how teachers are actively challenging patriarchal and heteronormative curriculums and to learn new methods for engaging in affirmative sabotage (Spivak, 2014 ). Given the historical emphasis on higher education, more work is needed regarding P–12 education, because it is in P–12 classrooms that affirmative sabotage may be the most necessary to subvert systems of oppression.

In order to engage in affirmative sabotage, it is vital that qualitative researchers who wish to use feminist theory spend time grappling with the complexity and multiplicity of feminist theory. It is only by doing this thought work that researchers will be able to understand the ongoing debates within feminist theory and to use it in a way that leads to a more equitable and just world. Simply using feminist theory because it may be trendy ignores the very real political nature of feminist activism. Researchers need to consider which theories they draw on and why they use those theories in their projects. One way of doing this is to explicitly think with theory (Jackson & Mazzei, 2012 ) at all stages of the research project and to consider which voices are being heard and which are being silenced (Gilligan, 2011 ; Spivak, 1988 ) in educational research. More consideration also needs to be given to non-U.S. and non-Western feminist theories and research to expand our understanding of education and schooling.

Paying close attention to feminist debates about method and methodology provides another possibility for qualitative research. The very process of challenging positivist research methods opens up new spaces and places for feminist qualitative research in education. It also allows researchers room to explore subjectivities that are often marginalized. When researchers engage in the deeply reflexive work that feminist research requires, it leads to acts of affirmative sabotage within the academy. These discussions create the spaces that lead to new visions and new worlds. Spivak ( 2006 ) once declared, “I am helpless before the fact that all my essays these days seem to end with projects for future work” (p. 35), but this is precisely the beauty of feminist qualitative research. We are setting ourselves and other feminist researchers up for future work, future questions, and actively changing the nature of qualitative research.

Acknowledgements

Dr. George Noblit provided the author with the opportunity to think deeply about qualitative methods and to write this article, for which the author is extremely grateful. Dr. Lynda Stone and Dr. Tanya Shields are thanked for encouraging the author’s passion for feminist theory and for providing many hours of fruitful conversation and book lists. A final thank you is owed to the author’s partner, Ben Skelton, for hours of listening to her talk about feminist methods, for always being a first reader, and for taking care of their infant while the author finished writing this article.

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Feminisms and entrepreneurship: a systematic literature review investigating a troubled connection

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Published: 26 April 2024

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Francesco Paolo Lagrasta ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-9237-4875 1 ,
Barbara Scozzi ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-7359-4469 1 &
Pierpaolo Pontrandolfo ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-8021-5073 1

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The paper aims to systematically review the literature that empirically investigates the relationship between feminisms and entrepreneurship. Feminisms, meant as movements, cultures, collective identities embedded with values and beliefs, could indeed contribute to challenge patriarchal gender norms that dominate the entrepreneurial world, so allowing new forms and narratives of business to emerge. To achieve the paper goal, a systematic literature review protocol is developed and the most prominent scientific research databases are queried. After a bibliometric framing of the retrieved papers, content analysis is adopted to identify the theoretical and methodological approaches, relevant topics and research gaps. Despite a considerable inhomogeneity in definitions, topics, and theoretical framings, the study shows that most papers agree on recognizing the crucial role of feminisms in: (i) women's entrepreneurial empowerment, especially in traditionally male-dominated cultural and geographical contexts and (ii) challenging the neoliberal paradigm. The study also inductively derives a definition of feminist entrepreneur, proposing an ontology that illustrates its relationship to the concepts of entrepreneurship, feminism and entrepreneurial feminist. From a managerial perspective, the study highlights similarities and differences among heterogeneous entrepreneurial experiences, thus unveiling feminist entrepreneurship features potentially useful for policy makers, educators, and practitioners. On the societal level, the research contributes to spreading knowledge about a phenomenon arguably disruptive in enhancing the inclusiveness of traditional entrepreneurial ecosystems.

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Introduction

Entrepreneurship has proven to be central to the economic development of market economies, in both developed and developing countries. In addition, entrepreneurship can contribute to social and environmental value generation (Schaltegger & Wagner, 2011 ) and play a central role in addressing global societal grand challenges (Brammer et al., 2019 ) such as the end of hunger and poverty, global warming, and gender equality. Entrepreneurship has, for example, proven to enhance livelihood of its actors, the entrepreneurs, often serving as a means of individual, family, and community social redemption (Renko & Freeman, 2018 ). As mentioned in (Certo & Miller, 2008 ; Renko & Freeman, 2018 ), entrepreneurship can contribute to the achievement of social sustainability either by improving the living conditions of those who decide to start their own business (entrepreneurship by disadvantaged groups) or by creating social value for such groups (entrepreneurship for disadvantaged groups). Starting also from these assumptions, international organizations, governments, researchers, and experts agree in recognizing fostering entrepreneurship as a lever to face the impacts of economic, social, and environmental crises at the international, national, and local level (Arafat et al., 2020a , b ; European Commission et al., 2021 ; OECD, 2008 ; Ribeiro-Soriano, 2017 ).

These are some of the rationales behind a plethora of international, national, and regional political agendas, initiatives, and projects aimed at encouraging access to entrepreneurship for groups excluded from the business world. Despite the dominant neo-liberal individualistic paradigm, which elevates entrepreneurial action to the highest expression of human potential and presents entrepreneurship as an inclusive (Harrison et al., 2024 ) and “meritocratic accessible field of economic opportunity seeking behavior” (Ahl & Marlow, 2012 ), there is indeed considerable evidence of access limitation faced by certain groups based on ethnic, cultural, demographic, and gender variables (Ahl & Marlow, 2012 ; Fairlie, 2007 ). With reference to the gender variable, the world of entrepreneurship has historically been analyzed from a purely male point of view (Ahl, 2006 ), resulting in narratives that depict the entrepreneur as a Darwinian hero, endowed with values traditionally considered as masculine (Gupta et al., 2009 ). Such a narrative has been fueled by a Schumpeterian vision of (western) entrepreneurship (Nguyen & Nguyen, 2008 ) and the traditional male dominance over the entrepreneurial system (Minniti, 2009 ; Orser et al., 2011 ), with negative repercussions in terms of access to the entrepreneurial world for those who do not fit into the masculine entrepreneurial discourse (Gupta et al., 2009 ). As demonstrated in the seminal paper by Langowitz and Minniti ( 2007 ) with reference to the gender variable, a lower propensity for entrepreneurship by women is due only to contextual variables that largely depend on culture and environment.

Feminist cultures and movements have historically challenged male dominance in various spheres of society, including the business world (Harquail, 2019 ). Multiple studies adopting feminist theoretical lenses explored the male domination over the entrepreneurial world, when investigating, for example, gender stereotypes, exclusionary narratives, and stereotypical role models (e.g., Balachandra et al., 2019 ; Gupta et al., 2009 ; Mc Donnell & Morley, 2015 ). In the contemporary entrepreneurial landscape new entrepreneurial narratives and identities, such as that of feminist entrepreneurship (Elliott & Orser, 2015 ; Harquail, 2019 ) are emerging. However, feminist entrepreneurship is still an underexplored entrepreneurial subgroup and, as Orser et al. ( 2011 ) argues, “the prescriptive academic attribution of feminist discourse to women’s lived experiences” risks distorting the academical representation of the phenomenon.

The aim of the paper is to explore the literature that empirically investigates the experience of feminist entrepreneurs. In particular, the study aims to inspect the literature shedding light on the relationship between feminisms and entrepreneurship by giving voice to the entrepreneurial experiences of feminist entrepreneurs. To this end, the study uses a systematic literature review protocol to identify the relevant literature on the topic, and content analysis to highlight the main theoretical and methodological features and themes as well as potential future research streams.

The review allows a heterogeneous and updated knowledge base to be collected and analyzed. Despite a considerable inhomogeneity in definitions, topics, and theoretical framings, the study shows that most papers agree on recognizing the crucial role of feminisms in: (i) women's entrepreneurial empowerment, especially in traditionally male-dominated cultural and geographical contexts and (ii) challenging the neoliberal paradigm. Additionally, the study led to a definition of feminist entrepreneur. Such definition posits the feminist entrepreneur in ontological relation with the concepts of feminist and entrepreneur, while pointing out the differences between feminist entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial feminism.

From a research point of view, the implications of the study are multiple. First, by conducting a systematic review of theories and methodologies adopted to frame the phenomenon, the study provides researchers with methodological and theoretical indications that could inform and drive future research developments. Second, the study points out concepts that may have been inconsistently managed within the research domain and provides a synoptic and comparative analysis of the main definitions and operationalizations. Finally, the study draws up a collection of open questions and issues capable of inspiring future researchers, so contributing to enable the development of a consistent research area. From a managerial point of view, the study provides a summary of feminist entrepreneurship studies that includes information and recommendations, potentially preparatory to activities such as the development of feminist entrepreneurial training courses, incubation projects, and mentorship programs. From a societal point of view, the study contributes to investigating new entrepreneurial identities that are potentially disruptive in terms of social value creation: indeed, the cultural and value structure of entrepreneurs has been shown to play a decisive role in decisions concerning the generation of social and environmental value (e.g., Gunawan et al., 2020 ; Thelken & de Jong, 2020 ; Yasir et al., 2022 ). Investigating and understanding the phenomenon of feminist entrepreneurship could encourage individuals whose set of values could potentially enrich the business world to enter such a world.

The paper is organized as follows: in the “ Background and research rationale ” section, the theoretical framework of the research and the rationale that led to the generation of the research questions are presented. The “ Research methodology ” section illustrates the methodological approach and its implementation. In the “ Findings ” and “ Discussion ” sections, the results are outlined and discussed. Finally, in the Conclusions, closing considerations are drawn and future research avenues identified.

Background and research rationale

The section outlines the theoretical assumptions and the research background based on which the research questions are developed. First, the main feminist historical waves and the characteristics common to all feminist strands are illustrated. Then, the relationship between feminisms and entrepreneurship is introduced.

Feminisms and entrepreneurship

Defining feminism is a complex and delicate task. Harnessing the concept in a rigid and static definition would entail freezing it in a certain era, relegating it to a certain culture or chaining it to a certain ideology. The concept has undergone a definitional stratification over time that has gradually expanded its ontological boundaries. Indeed, most of the latest conceptualization renounce providing a unique and precise definition (e.g., Grunig et al., 2000 ; Hoffman, 2001 ). That can be ascribed to the need of including within the boundaries of feminism a vast plurality of cultures, theories, movements, concepts, and perspectives. Feminism has undergone considerable changes over time, hybridizing itself with different cultures, gradually addressing different issues and contributing to give voice to extraordinarily heterogeneous identities. The multiplicity of voices raised under the tag feminism is so characteristic of feminism that some scholars prefer to use it as plural noun, i.e. feminisms rather than feminism (Cornwall et al., 2007 ; Olesen, 1994 ).

Historically, four feminist waves are usually identified (Munro, 2013 ; Offen, 1988 ). The first feminist wave (19th and early 20th century) focused on universal fundamental rights like voting and property. Collective mobilizations characterized this period as a way to address socio-cultural problems. The demands of the first wave were followed by those of the second wave (~1960–1990), which broadened the pool of rights and social conditions to which women aspired, including, for example, reproductive rights, gender equality in the workplace and in the family group. During the second wave, especially in America and Canada, the first feminist businesses started to emerge. These economic activities were essentially shops, community centers and cultural businesses that presented themselves as more ethically responsible and women-friendly alternatives (Delap, 2020 , p. 123). The third feminist wave (1990–2010) distinguishes from the first two by the blossoming of numerous and diverse currents of thought within feminism itself (e.g., trans-feminism, eco-feminism, post-feminism). The quantity and heterogeneity of cultures, subcultures, movements, concepts and positions that arose within the third wave constituted its cultural-historical signature, to the point that according to Evans ( 2015a ) “[…] the confusion surrounding what constitutes third wave feminism is in some respects its defining feature”. With the third wave the term feminism began to become inclusive of even more different demands which, however, shared some common features such as the recognition of the male privilege, the strive for sexual freedom, and the acknowledgement of power structures (Heywood & Drake, 1997 , p. 3). Moreover, several strands of third-wave feminism aligned with neo-liberal individualism, connecting feminist discourse to the realm of individual self-determination (Evans, 2015a , b ). The third wave witnessed the progressive flourishing of feminist enterprises: businesses oriented towards the dissemination of feminist ideals capable of creating synergy between activism, political dissent and marketplace participation (Davis, 2017 ). Building on the heterogeneous assumptions of the third wave and leveraging the potential offered by the new digital media, the fourth feminist wave is periodized from 2012 onwards (Munro, 2013 ). Common to the various strands of the fourth wave is the focus on intersectionality, an analytic framework that dominates feminist discussion. Intersectionality enriched academic and public discourse highlighting how personal and political factors (e.g., gender, ethnicity, social class, disability) interact and overlap in generating oppression or privilege (Wernimont & Losh, 2016 ).

Apart from the historical differentiation, which according to some scholars represents a simplification of the complex historical development of western feminism (Evans, 2015a ), feminisms have also differentiated vertically, connecting, for example, ideologies, cultures, and religions. Indeed, the various facets of feminism constitute a heterogeneous plethora of strands and theories now competing, now overlapping, now complementing each other (Lorber, 2011 ; Wendling, 2018 ). Such fragmentation reflects the feminist aim to give voice to different women and minorities (e.g. LGBTIQA+ people) acknowledging diversity without universalizing perspectives (Grunig, 1988 ).

According to Hoffman ( 2001 ) feminism “is both multiple and singular, since ‘liberal’, ‘socialist’ and ‘radical’ feminisms are distinctive feminisms that can and should be assessed according to the extent to which they contribute positively to the development of a post-patriarchal society. […] Each represents differing feminisms within a single body of argument unified by its commitment to the emancipation of women”. While renouncing the ambition to univocally define feminism, and indeed reiterating the need for the term ‘feminisms’, Grunig et al. ( 2000 ) identifies four characteristics common to all feminist strands and theories: “i) the centrality of gender as an analytical category, (ii) a belief in equity for everyone and the concern for oppression wherever it is found, (iii) an openness to all voices, and (iv) a call to action”. These four pillars partially replicate one of the simplest, most inclusive and popular definitions of feminism (Harquail, 2019 , p. 45), the one provided by Hooks in ( 2000 , p. 1): “Feminism is a movement to end sexism, sexist exploitation, and oppression”. Although it is therefore possible to delineate certain elements common to all feminisms, the various theories represent a variegated whole in terms of philosophies and theoretical frameworks. Based on the above discussion, the following research question arises:

RQ-1 : What are the theoretical lenses and methodological protocols adopted to frame and investigate feminist entrepreneurship within empirical studies?

Addressing such a question means detecting the most popular theories and methodologies adopted to frame feminist entrepreneurial experiences. As stated in (Ahl & Marlow, 2012 ) the theoretical lenses commonly adopted to frame the phenomenon of entrepreneurship contribute to the social construction of the entrepreneur archetype: in addition, the theoretical lenses generally used to investigate the entrepreneurial phenomenon contribute to epistemological gender bias (Calás et al., 2009 ). RQ-1 contributes to understanding whether such a bias is reproduced in the literature that investigates feminist entrepreneurship so as to inform research on entrepreneurship as a whole with these findings. Furthermore, given the intrinsic symbiosis between theory and methodology (Duane et al., 2005 ), it becomes important to investigate not only the theoretical frameworks but also the applied methodological protocols. The investigation of the methodological aspects has a dual purpose. Firstly, it allows to illustrate the most commonly used methodologies in order to inform future research with methodological empirical designs that past literature has indicated as effective. Secondly, the investigation is useful to shed light on possible systematic limitations affecting the existing body of knowledge. In particular, certain recurring choices in the methodologies of sampling, data retrieval and data analysis could systematically bias the literature. Indeed, the scope of RQ-1 includes assessing the methodological pluralism within the domain and highlighting possible pitfalls.

Feminist entrepreneurs and organizations

The examples of feminist strands and theories given in the previous section are only a hint of the multitude of feminisms that can be traced (Wendling, 2018 ). Despite that, even if a comprehensive categorization of feminisms could be proposed, the experiences of feminists would exceed the structures and definitions generated by academic criticism: according to (Grunig et al., 2000 ) women's experiences can hardly be framed within a single conceptualization of “feminist”. Furthermore, Orser et al. ( 2011 ) illustrate how the identities of self-declared feminist entrepreneurs eschew stereotypes relating to women entrepreneurs, show unprecedented ways of enacting feminist values, and allow for a critical review of the attribution of certain prescriptive academic discourses to the life stories of feminist entrepreneurs. Based on these considerations, the following research question is formulated:

RQ-2 : How is the feminist entrepreneur defined and to which feminist strand such definitions refer to?

Although to a lesser extent than feminism, also the concept of entrepreneurship has changed over time. Prince et al. ( 2021 ) collects the most prominent definitions of entrepreneurship, grouping them by definitional theme: over the course of time, the concept of entrepreneurship has been defined, for example, by associating it with the management of uncertainty, the recognition of opportunities, the creation of value. Building on the assumption that the entrepreneurial field must be placed “at the nexus of opportunities, enterprising individuals and teams, and mode of organizing” (Busenitz et al., 2003 ), Calás et al. ( 2009 ) argue that the conceptualizations of entrepreneurship capture the economic dimension, while neglecting the dimension of social change that is central to feminist discourses. Most theorizations on entrepreneurship indeed do not enough emphasize its potential value of gendered social change. Such theorizations are reflected in the definitions of entrepreneurs that may be exclusionary of minor entrepreneurial instances. RQ-2 aims to shed light on such aspects by providing novel insights from the literature investigating feminist entrepreneurs. The research question delves both whether the literature has conceptually associated certain feminist strands with entrepreneurship, and whether existing empirical investigations have inductively revealed feminism strands associated with entrepreneurial behavior. Additionally, the question could potentially highlight the feminisms that have received more attention by academic empirical research and trace the strands that encouraged entrepreneurial behavior. According to Petersson McIntyre ( 2021 ), third- and fourth-wave feminisms seem to point to entrepreneurship as the preferred route to individual self-fulfillment and socio-economic independence. Some feminist strands have also proven to act as levers and cultural incentives for the development of women’s enterprises in highly patriarchal contexts (Althalathini et al., 2022 ).

In order to provide a complete picture of the characteristics of feminist entrepreneurship investigated in the existing literature, it was deemed necessary to collect information about the industry and the size of companies started by feminist entrepreneurs. Based on that, the following research question is formulated:

RQ-3 : What are the industry and the size of the companies run by the feminist entrepreneurs?

RQ-3 finds justification in that some definitions of feminist entrepreneurs conceptualize them as “[…] change agents who exemplify entrepreneurial acumen in the creation of equity-based outcomes that improve women's quality of life and well-being through innovative products, services and processes” (Orser et al., 2013 ). Such definitions could limit the ontological boundaries of the category, thus excluding entire entrepreneurial industries. Additionally, the conceptualization proposed by Orser et al. ( 2013 ) is related both to the term ‘entrepreneurial feminist’ and to ‘feminist entrepreneur’ (Orser et al., 2011 ). The inversion of the terms, although they share the same etymological roots, might suggest different meanings: possible new definitions will be evaluated in the discussion phase (see RQ-2). The size of a company has been shown to impact the extent to which the culture and values of its founders are reflected in the business itself (Kotey, 1997 ): RQ-3 seeks to understand whether the phenomenon also finds a counterpart in the case of feminist values. Within the study, and in line with most of the managerial and entrepreneurial literature, the size of a company is operationalized using the number of employees.

Research methodology

The systematic literature review is a research methodology aimed at investigating a specific topic by leveraging on existing contributions. Originally developed in the medical field to achieve consistency and standardization in the review of medical treatments (Boell & Cecez-Kecmanovic, 2015 ), the methodology is currently adopted in several scientific fields, including management (Paul & Criado, 2020 ; Tranfield et al., 2003 ), entrepreneurship (Kraus et al., 2020 ), and gender studies (Santos & Neumeyer, 2021 ). A systematic literature review allows for the identification, evaluation, and correlation of evidence gathered from previous publications. In particular, systematic reviews have become a preferred tool for consolidating knowledge related to a domain, theory and/or methodology (Paul & Criado, 2020 ). In comparison to other approaches to review, the systematic literature review allows for the avoidance of analyses tainted by sporadic and potentially biased coverage of existing evidence, presenting itself as a methodology endowed with replicability, transparency, objectivity, and rigor (Boell & Cecez-Kecmanovic, 2015 ; Hiebl, 2023 ). In order to ensure these features, numerous frameworks have been developed to guide and standardize the systematic review process. The research pipeline adopted in this study was informed by several methodological recommendations contained in (Kraus et al., 2020 ; Tranfield et al., 2003 ; Xiao & Watson, 2019 ). As pointed out in Hiebl ( 2023 ), the definition of the sample under review constitutes a critical step in the systematic review process, crucial in ensuring its rigor and reproducibility. For this reason, the following part of this section explains all the steps and rationales that led to the definition of the sampled articles.

The steps that guided the study are illustrated in Fig. 1 and explained in the next paragraphs.

Systematic literature research pipeline adopted in this study

Step 1 and Step 2 deal with research planning. In particular, in Step 1 (Problem Formulation) the research questions introduced in the “ Background and research rationale ” section are formulated. As shown, the questions are drawn on the basis of an initial analysis of the literature which defined the research background. It is deemed necessary to precisely state the scope of the review, which, in alignment with the defined research questions, focuses on the investigation of empirical studies having feminist entrepreneurship as their subject. Subsequent choices that characterize this research design are therefore made coherently with that scope. In Step 2 (Research Protocol Development) the research protocol is designed: as explained by Kraus et al. ( 2020 ), that required the identification of the search database to be queried, the selection of the keywords and formulation of the query, the choice of filters to be applied, the definition of the quality criteria to be met, the definition of the data extraction mode, and the development of the data analysis mode.

In Step 3 (Literature Search) we select 15 primary search terms grouped into two semantic areas (feminism and entrepreneurship). Adopting a precautionary and inclusive approach, the identified search terms are lemmatized: all the search terms led back to the roots “feminis*” and “entrepren*” which identify two different etymological families. The final query is formulated as follows: “entrepren*” AND “feminis*”. The lemmatization process results in a query whose results include, but are not limited to, those of the query achievable by using the 15 primary identified search terms.

The primary identified search terms, lemmatizations and the final query are shown in Fig. 2 .

Search terms grouped by semantic area, lemmatizations, and final query

The selected query was launched on two search engines, Scopus and Web Of Science (WOS): such a choice is justified by the scientific relevance and reliability of the two databases (Burnham, 2006 ; Li et al., 2018 ). The search fields of the query were title, abstract and keywords. The initial raw output consisted of 446 (Scopus) and 530 (WOS) documents.

Scopus and WOS allow the raw query output to be filtered by exploiting structured bibliographic data such as year of publication, language or scientific area. In Step 4 (Inclusion Screening) we filtered the results to obtain a homogeneous knowledge base by scientific area, language, and publication type. The applied filters are shown in Table 1 : the Subject Area filter was set homologously rather than identically, because the two databases index documents by using different classifications. We chose to limit the review to journal articles as they are considered validated knowledge in the business and management literature (Podsakoff et al., 2005 ): book, chapter, and conference papers were excluded due to the high variability of the peer review process (Jones et al., 2011 ). After applying the filters, the cardinalities of the outputs fell to 155 for Scopus and 212 for Web of Science.

After a duplicate elimination phase, titles and abstracts of the papers were read. The reading allowed the results to be skimmed down to a sample of 15 articles. The 15 articles selected were read in their entirety: after reading the full text two articles that were not relevant to the research questions were eliminated. The articles excluded after abstract and full text reading were mainly off topic articles not containing empirical studies, articles adopting feminist theory in areas other from entrepreneurship or aimed at investigating gender stereotypes by adopting feminist approaches. Only empirical articles which could have contributed to even one of the research questions were included. The high false positive rate (more than 95% of the articles selected with the query were discarded) is indicative of a certain caution and laxity in the query design phase. At that stage, the 13 selected articles were read and analyzed to identify additional keywords useful to broaden the search or cited articles potentially useful for answering the research questions. In both cases, the activities did not produce any results: no keywords were identified that were not covered by the formulated query and no reference articles were identified aimed at empirically investigating feminist entrepreneurship. We therefore proceeded with the Data Extraction phase.

In Step 5 (Data Extraction) the selected articles were read and subjected to bibliometric analysis and content analysis. Bibliometric analysis deals with the mapping of literary production related to a topic in a quantitative manner leveraging on structured bibliometric data (Schmitz et al., 2017 ). In particular, the years of publication, journals and nationality of the authors were analyzed, with the aim of addressing the research questions and define the bibliographical boundaries of the obtained knowledge base. Further bibliometric analysis (e.g., co-citation, co-authorship, keywords co-occurence) was not deemed appropriate due to the small number of retrieved articles. Therefore, the research presents a only a bibliometric framing of the selected articles.

Content analysis is a methodological tool for textual data analysis, aimed at identifying manifest and/or latent content widely used for the analysis of business and management literature (Gaur & Kumar, 2018 ). The adoption of content analysis as a data analysis tool allowed the us to code documents by using themes deductively obtained from the research questions formulated and inductively emerging from the knowledge base (Gaur & Kumar, 2018 ; Jones et al., 2011 ; Liñán & Fayolle, 2015 ; Thorpe et al., 2005 ). The following themes, grouped in two categories, namely ‘Theories and Methodologies’ and ‘Definitions and Features’ were defined a priori to address the research questions:

Theories and methodologies: ‘Theoretical framing’, ‘Methodological protocol’;

Definitions and features: ‘Feminist entrepreneur definition’, ‘Feminist strands’, ‘Industry’, ‘Size’, ‘Country’.

As to the theme ‘Methodological protocol’, data were collected on the unit of analysis of the identified works, sampling techniques, sample cardinality and characterization, and methodologies of data retrieval and analysis used. These a priori defined elements were derived from those indicated as fundamental for the development of a research protocol in (Wahyuni, 2012 ).

In Step 6 (Data Analysis and Synthesis), the textual unit coded in Step 5 were summarized, compared with each other and discussed. In Step 7 (Findings Reporting), the output of the previous step was discussed together with the bibliometric framing.

In this section, the retrieved knowledge base is described and the results of the analysis, classified as bibliometric framing and content analysis, are reported.

Bibliometric framing

The knowledge base obtained by applying the protocol consists of 13 articles, covering a time span of approximately 10 years. No empirical research capable of satisfying the search criteria was identified before 2011. Table 2 provides the list of the articles, accompanied by the authors’ name, year, journal and country .

The first article (Orser et al., 2011 ) that empirically investigates the phenomenon of feminist entrepreneurship dates back to 2011. However, a significant increase in the scientific interest towards the topic is not registered until 2021, as shown in Fig. 3 . Despite that, the overall low number of identified articles confirms that the empirical analysis of feminist entrepreneurship is an underdeveloped research niche (Harquail, 2019 ).

Bar chart visualizing the cumulative of published articles within the knowledge base, per year

The literature landscape is dominated by ‘ Gender, Work and Organization’ , a journal historically focused on gender issues and feminist knowledge and practice (John Wiley & Sons, 2022 ), followed by ‘ Journal of Business Ethics’ , and by ‘ Gender in Management’, ‘Equality, diversity, and Inclusion’ , ‘ International Journal of Gender and Entrepreneurship ’, ‘ Journal for International Business and Entrepreneurship Development ’, ‘ International Journal of Entrepreneurial Behaviour and Research ’, and ‘ Business History ’.

Geographically, most of the studies are conducted in Canadian, US and European institutions. Scholars are engaged in research that is often conducted on samples selected from their home countries or, as in the case of Ketchum ( 2022 ), in archival research focused on the history of feminist local businesses.

The keywords that appear more than once are, in order of frequency of occurring: women entrepreneurship (6), feminism (4), Islam (3), Islamic feminism (2), neoliberalism (2), entrepreneurship (2).

Content analysis

This section illustrates the themes detected within the knowledge base. In the first part the main themes that emerged are illustrated and related to each other. The following subsections (“ Theories and methodologies ”, “ Definitions and features ”) contain the results of the coding adopting the preconceived themes defined based on the research questions.

The selected articles are characterized by a considerable heterogeneity of topics and aims. The earlier studies, dated back to 2011 (Orser et al., 2011 ) and 2013 (Orser et al., 2013 ), investigate the phenomenon of feminist entrepreneurs and entrepreneurial feminists. Orser et al. ( 2011 ) disproves the archetype of the female entrepreneur described in the literature as “caring and nurturing” (Machold et al., 2008 ), by empirically demonstrating that feminist entrepreneurs adopt a set of attributes to describe their entrepreneurial identity that refutes the feminine portray mentioned in some feminist literature. Orser et al. ( 2013 ) shifts the focus from feminist entrepreneurs to entrepreneurial feminists, and from the dimension of attributes to that of values. In particular, the authors investigate the way in which entrepreneurial feminists enact feminist values in the opportunity recognition phase and how they are reflected in their governance and leadership. The results of the study show how the experiences of entrepreneurial feminists contradict that feminist critique that sees business enterprise working “… to the detriment of all women” (Walker et al., 2004 ), and likewise refute the neo-classical paradigm of the entrepreneur exclusively interested in the economic return. Entrepreneurial feminists indeed seem to be able to witness for organizational and entrepreneurial models in which feminist ethics is firmly intertwined with value creation processes. The relationship between feminism and entrepreneurial identity is also explored in (Petersson McIntyre, 2021 ): the research investigates the meaning that some female entrepreneurs (influencers and gender consultants) attribute to feminism and feminist values. The paper critically illustrates how the attribute “feminist” is placed in relation to certain entrepreneurial activities and interpreted according to sensibilities that refer to the choice of feminism and post-feminism. According to the results of the study, feminist values are interpreted by entrepreneurs as something to be used in their individual professional and entrepreneurial careers, and not as a constituent trait of their identity.

The studies cited so far empirically investigate the relationship between feminisms and entrepreneurial identities while maintaining the individual as the unit of analysis. On the other hand, in Petrucci ( 2020 ) and Kemp and Berkovitch ( 2020 ), the units of analysis are feminist communities and organizations, respectively. In (Petrucci, 2020 ) the training and mentorship strategies adopted in the tech sector by postfeminist communities are investigated. Postfeminist communities prove useful in generating supportive, inclusive, and safe environments that support individuals in their professional careers and trigger (or accelerate) organizational change. Kemp and Berkovitch ( 2020 ) investigates the practices, narratives, discourses, and struggles of some feminist NGOs that advocate for economic empowerment of women through micro-financed entrepreneurship. The study reveals how feminism and the neoliberal paradigm “both collude and collide”. In (Ketchum, 2022 ) the analysis of how feminist organizations have co-existed with the neo-liberal economic paradigm assumes the contours of an historiographic investigation. In particular, by analyzing the history of Canadian feminist cafés and bars that sprang up between the 1970s and 1980s, Ketchum ( 2022 ) contributes to documenting the entrepreneurial experiences of feminist women, largely neglected by academic research. The collected testimonies and documents allow for the historical investigation of entrepreneurial activities whose inception and management openly challenged the establishment.

While the literature focusing on Western cases mostly, but not exclusively, investigates the phenomenon of feminist entrepreneurship as a paradigm that challenges the neoclassical entrepreneurial paradigm, in the rest of the world the feminist entrepreneurship literature focuses on the role feminisms can play in deeply challenging patriarchal social and cultural structures. In (Tlaiss & McAdam, 2021a ) and (Tlaiss & McAdam, 2021b ) the role that Islamic feminism plays in the female entrepreneurial experience in Lebanon is investigated. Specifically, in (Tlaiss & McAdam, 2021a ) the scholars highlight how the feminist interpretation of Islam provides Lebanese women entrepreneurs with “… entrepreneurial resilience within the context of adverse socio-cultural barriers and masculine stereotypes”. Along with entrepreneurial resilience, it emerges how the Islamic feminism allows Islamic teachings to be internalized both as a vehicle to personal growth and as ethical guidebook to business growth. In (Tlaiss & McAdam, 2021b ) the authors investigate the Lebanese female entrepreneurial system and highlights how Islamic feminism allows the women entrepreneurs “… to deflect the negative influence of socio-cultural values and norms to understand the nature and causes of widespread, traditional, conservative interpretations of Islam and to identify and draw clear distinctions between the teachings and principles of Islam and the traditional, masculine gender norms which are often confused in patriarchal contexts”. Such studies demonstrate the critical role played by Islamic religiousness, swayed by a feminist interpretation of the Koran, in shaping the entrepreneurial behavior of Muslim women. Althalathini et al. ( 2022 ) further confirms these findings in the contexts of Afghan, Iraqi and Palestinian conflict. The authors investigate the influence of Islamic feminism on women's empowerment in traditionally patriarchal and conflict-ridden contexts. The cases analyzed in the research highlight how a feminist interpretation of Islam is able to legitimize female entrepreneurial behavior and challenge gendered social norms and inequalities. The subject of Islamic feminism was also previously addressed in (Özkazanç-Pan, 2015 ): the scholar demonstrates how both Islamic and secular feminism contribute to challenging patriarchal norms by elevating entrepreneurship as women's empowerment tool. The research also emphasizes the neo-liberal development paradigm contribution in perpetuating gender inequality within the Turkish context: in this sense, Islamic and secular feminisms present themselves as path-breaking alternatives to both the neo-liberal political/economic paradigm and the patriarchal cultural tradition. Alkhaled ( 2021 ) longitudinally explores the process of commitment and encroachment that leads, in the Saudi Arabian environment (where declaring oneself as a feminist is forbidden), female entrepreneurs to create organizational networks supportive for women, to develop feminist awareness and solidarity, and finally to become political activists. The subject of Islamic feminism and its role in the empowerment of Muslim women is thus a topic that has been particularly explored in the business literature.

Other studies have investigated other non-Western business realities in which feminist secular cultures seems to have contributed to the emergence of new entrepreneurial identities. In (Aramand, 2013 ) the synergetic relationship between Mongolian nomadic culture, secular feminist culture and Asian collectivist culture in the development of entrepreneurial motivation is explored. Siddique ( 2018 ) investigates the relationship between feminism and entrepreneurial skills in the Bangladeshi context: the research empirically and quantitatively demonstrates a positive correlation between the construct 'own sense of feminism' and entrepreneurial skills. This relationship appears to validate the scholar's hypothesis that feminisms encourage women to obtain adequate entrepreneurial training.

As illustrated so far, the content analysis led to the identification, within the knowledge base, of a number of recurring themes relating to three categories: feminisms, entrepreneurship, and challenges. Specifically, all the identified works relate feminism-related themes to one or more entrepreneurship-related aspect. The selected articles place such relations in a dialectical perspective now with the neo-liberal entrepreneurial paradigm, now with patriarchal cultural contexts, now with feminist discourse. A comprehensive representation of the identified themes and the papers that explored them is presented in Fig. 4 . The numbers on the arrows refer to the ID code associated to papers reported in Table 2 . For example, Aramand ( 2013 ) – ID3 in Table 2 - investigates the role of feminist secular cultures in supporting entrepreneurial motivation to challenge gender inequality .

Themes identified in the literature and the relationships between them

Theories and methodologies

All the identified studies rely on qualitative research protocols (Aspers & Corte, 2019 ) except for (Siddique, 2018 ). As shown in Table 3 , most of the qualitative research protocols adopt semi-structured interviews and/or document analysis. The selection of these methodological tools is in line with the nature of the samples, which largely consist of individuals and, to a lesser extent, of organizations and communities. The sampling technique, when explicitly declared within the papers, is generally purposive, possibly followed by a snowballing phase. It is particularly striking that during the sampling phase several studies have resorted to an interviewee recruitment that exploit the researchers' network of personal and professional acquaintances.

Homogeneity at the methodological level is not reflected at the theoretical level: the identified studies adopt heterogeneous theoretical frameworks because engaged on epistemologically different fields. Such heterogeneity derives from the diversity of aims that connotes the selected articles. Orser et al. ( 2011 ) adopt the identity theory to frame entrepreneurship. According to those scholars, becoming an entrepreneur means embarking on a path of identity construction and negotiation in which categories such as ethnicity and gender are also included. Such a theoretical framing is functional to the analysis of entrepreneurship also at the individual level: in particular (Orser et al., 2011 ) identify and analyze the sets of attributes used by feminist entrepreneurs to describe their identity. The same scholars attempt to frame the feminist entrepreneurship within one of the three major entrepreneurial theories (neoclassical theory, contingency theory, relational theory). On the other hand, Aramand ( 2013 ) and Siddique ( 2018 ) embrace two motivational theories, respectively motivational theories and the theory of planned behavior. Motivational theories shift the focus of analysis from identity to behavior. Among the motivational theories, the theory of planned behavior is certainly one of the best known and applied in the entrepreneurial field, both for qualitative research and, more often (Siddique, 2018 ), to conduct quantitative surveys.

Studies investigating the contribution of Islamic feminism on entrepreneurial behavior embrace structuration theory (Tlaiss & McAdam, 2021a ) and theory of quiet encroachment (Alkhaled, 2021 ), shifting the level of analysis from the behavioral/individual to the sociological/cultural level. Structuration theory is useful to framing complex and multidimensional social phenomena, insisting “on the potential for human agency and reflexivity to solve conflicts between the dimensions of structure through choosing actions deliberately and executing them effectively, even, in defiance of the rules and structure” (Giddens, 1984 ; Tlaiss & McAdam, 2021a ). The theory of quiet encroachment makes it possible to frame silent and chronic social phenomena. In the case of (Alkhaled, 2021 ), such theory is used to demonstrate how entrepreneurship in Saudi Arabia serves as a platform to experience feminist solidarity and catalyze social change.

Many of the identified studies attempt to explore the phenomenon of feminist entrepreneurship with the (more or less) explicit aim of laying the epistemological foundations of new theories. Kemp and Berkovitch ( 2020 ), for example, adopt a grounded approach to explain the conflicts between neo-liberalism and feminism. The considerable amount of research aimed at exploratory theory-building points out the novelty and uniqueness of the feminist entrepreneurial phenomenon. The theoretical and methodological designs adopted within the retrieved articles also suggests a certain difficulty in framing feminist entrepreneurship within the major entrepreneurial theories (e.g. Orser et al., 2013 ).

Definitions and features

The analyzed papers lead to different definitions of feminist entrepreneur, when explicit: not all works manifestly contain specific definitions of feminism and entrepreneur, and that does not contribute to univocally identify the feminist entrepreneurial subgroup. First of all, the definitions of entrepreneurship are not completely homogeneous. Orser et al. ( 2011 ) for example conceptualizes entrepreneur, business owner, and self-employed as a whole category. In addition, feminist entrepreneurs are identified as “… female entrepreneurs who own and operate firms targeting female clients, with a double bottom line, one that includes helping women overcome subordination” in the sample recruiting phase and defined as “…change agents who exemplify entrepreneurial acumen in the creation of equity-based outcomes that improve women’s quality of life and well-being through innovative products, services and processes”. A few years later, Orser et al. ( 2013 ) coined the expression “entrepreneurial feminist” and provided a formal definition identical with the one previously provided for feminist entrepreneur. Such definition refers to the feminist literature that sees the entrepreneur as a change agent (Calás et al., 2009 ) and is adopted in (Alkhaled, 2021 ) as well. Within the identified literature, however, definitional frames of 'entrepreneur' and 'entrepreneurship' refer to topics other than social change: in (Siddique, 2018 ) entrepreneurship is defined as “… the art of creation of business with profitability and future growth intention along with the skills to run an organization and overcome risk barriers”. In (Tlaiss & McAdam, 2021b ) the entrepreneur is operationalized as “as an individual who owned and managed a business and was self-employed”, in line with what stated in (Orser et al., 2011 ).

The analyzed documents rarely contain a reference to one or more feminist strands. On the other hand, many studies consider feminisms as deeply intertwined with national cultures. Figure 5 shows the geography of the studies constituting the knowledge base. Nine over 13 of the selected studies focus on Muslim and North American (US and Canada) settings.

Geography of the selected empirical cases

Studies aimed at investigating the relationship between feminism and entrepreneurship in Islamic contexts situate and explain entrepreneurial experiences by adopting Islamic Feminism as part of their theoretical background. As illustrated in (Alkhaled, 2021 ), this is due to the considerable difficulties of sampling entrepreneurs that define themselves as feminists in contexts wherein feminism and activism are institutionally outlawed or culturally unaccepted.

Also, with reference to data on the industry and the size of the surveyed companies, the picture is extremely heterogeneous (see Table 4 ). The industries investigated range from tourism to consulting: however, most studies analyze entrepreneurial experiences coming from different sectors.

The data presented in the “ Findings ” section proved to be useful in addressing the research questions.

As to RQ-1 (Theoretical lenses and methodologies), the identified theoretical lenses are consistent with the entrepreneurial research domain, even though a hesitancy in uncritically applying the major entrepreneurial theories can be highlighted, to the point that, Orser et al. ( 2013 ) discuss in which of the entrepreneurial macro-theories feminist entrepreneurship could be framed. Indeed, none of the identified studies propose an organic and comprehensive framing capable of shaping feminist entrepreneurship as a theoretically grounded concept. Feminist entrepreneurship thus remains an empirical phenomenon that seems to escape an orthodox and simplistic framing, standing in dialectical contrast to both the neoliberal paradigm and certain feminist critiques. The adopted theoretical lenses are often informed by feminist theory, with both theoretical and methodological implications. In line with the suggestions formulated by Ahl ( 2006 ) in their seminal paper, gender is not used to conduct static comparative investigations within the identified studies. From this point of view, most of the samples contain, where stated, subjects who identify with the female gender. However, in the absence of theoretically grounded framing, the broad female representativeness is not based on theoretical implications nor precise operationalizations, except in the case of (Orser et al., 2011 ), but rather derives from specific research needs combined, as discussed below, with the choice of purposive and snowballing sampling methods. In order to develop a theory capable of explaining feminist entrepreneurship, we argue that, from a philosophical-theoretical point of view, pragmatic approaches (Kaushik & Walsh, 2019 ) oriented towards theory building could be exploited. The use of such approaches for the framing of the feminist entrepreneurial phenomenon could allow not only the development of theories capable of framing it, but also the integration and expansion of existing entrepreneurial theories adopting mixed methodologies. From a methodological point of view, there is a certain homogeneity in adopting qualitative research protocols. The dominance of qualitative approaches is historically connected within feminist research (e.g., Letherby, 2004 ; Oakley, 1998 ). Extant research proves to be engaged in the description and qualification phases of the phenomenon (Hlady Rispal et al., 2015 ), adopting purposeful methodologies. From a methodological point of view, the lack of a theoretical framework also entails the lack of a coherent conceptualization of feminism and entrepreneurship within the research domain. Entrepreneurship is considered a complex phenomenon that cannot be entirely represented within a single theoretical framework: feminisms add complexity by also presenting themselves as extremely heterogeneous movements and cultures. Studies on feminist entrepreneurship do not shy away from considering the complexities related to the two concepts and resort to qualitative case studies that seem, at present, generally preparatory to the development of future theories. It is no coincidence that the identification of feminist entrepreneurs often takes place in an unstructured manner or by resorting to the self-attribution of the attribute 'feminist' by the sample members. However, feminist entrepreneurial research could already rely on methodological tools for measuring feminist identity, which have already been developed within the socio-psychological literature (Henley et al., 1998 ; Lee & Wessel, 2022 ). Such tools could enable and accelerate the adoption of quantitative research protocols, thus contributing to the theoretical and methodological enrichment of the research domain.

As to RQ-2 (Definitions and feminist strands), the analysis points out that the terms feminist entrepreneur and entrepreneurial feminist identify different categories. When referring to feminist entrepreneurs, Orser et al. ( 2011 ) adopts the already mentioned definition: "female entrepreneurs who own and operate firms targeting female clients, with a double bottom line, one that includes helping women overcome subordination" so binding the category 'feminist entrepreneurs' to a gender (female). Such definition excludes those entrepreneurs who enact their values in ways that are strategically independent from the choice of targeting women. Feminist values can indeed affect leadership, managerial approach, governance and self-legitimization process. In addition, as acknowledged in the Islamic feminism literature, entrepreneurs do not always explicitly manifest feminist values within their business, although these are traceable in their experiences.

In the attempt to make a critical synthesis of what arises from the literature, we define:

Feminists: individuals who recognize men’s and women’s unequal conditions and desire to change that (Ahl, 2004 , p. 16; Orser et al., 2013 );

Entrepreneurs: individuals who own and manage a business and are self-employed (Orser et al., 2011 ; Tlaiss & McAdam, 2021b );

Feminist entrepreneur: entrepreneurs who recognize men’s and women’s unequal conditions and act, manifestly or latently, to pursue gender equality (derived from Ahl, 2004 ; Orser et al., 2013 );

Entrepreneurial feminist: change agents who exemplify entrepreneurial acumen in the creation of equity-based outcomes that improve women’s quality of life and well-being through innovative products, services and processes (Alkhaled, 2021 ; Orser et al., 2013 ).

The proposed definitions, formulated based on the papers identified within the study, are related among each other as represented in Fig. 6 .

Ontology derived from the collected definitions

The ontological boundaries of the categories defined do not appear to be linked to either biological sex or gender. Based on the retrieved studies, the definition of feminist entrepreneur provided is in line with the experiences gathered and deliberately broad and inclusive, free of any prescriptive indications acting on the strategic dimensions of the enterprise (e.g. customer segment). Entrepreneurial feminists are represented as a subset of the category feminist entrepreneurs: they are configured as change-oriented entrepreneurs who pursue gender equality through the development of innovative processes, products and services, in line with the definition provided in (Orser et al., 2013 ). However, the proposed ontology does not contain information on the ontological relationships between the represented categories and other entrepreneurial subcategories, such as social entrepreneurs or ecopreneurs. Such ontological relationships could be explored by future research both at the conceptual and empirical levels. In addition, the selected studies do not delve into how the feminist identity of entrepreneurs is reflected in their business strategy. From the point of view of entrepreneurial studies, the research allows to provide a retrospective framing capable of justifying subsequent theory driven or theory building approaches.

In the reviewed literature no evidence of concepts, movements or cultures specifically involved in the feminist entrepreneurial experience is reported. Islamic feminism emerges in the account of the experiences of some entrepreneurs. However, Islamic feminism is not always expression of a manifestly declared identity trait, but rather the result of an a-posteriori interpretation of the authors of the studies. Such studies suggest the possibility of acting for gender equality even latently, silently, in a non-demonstrated and unclaimed manner: these ways of expressing feminism are well explained by the theory of quiet encroachment and contribute to strip the term feminist entrepreneur of the identity and manifest instance that seems to characterize Western experiences. For those reasons, our definition of feminist entrepreneur mentions that feminist values could be enacted both “manifestly and latently”. Furthermore, it has recorded relative absence of overtly cross-cultural studies aimed at detecting the differences and similarities between various feminist entrepreneurial experiences. The work also contributes to informing feminist research and gender studies about an emerging phenomenon, i.e. feminist entrepreneurship, which seems, as emerged in our study, poorly represented and investigated.

As to RQ-3 (Industry and Size), the review shows that feminist entrepreneurs operate in several different industries. Most studies investigate samples containing heterogeneous entrepreneurial experiences in terms of industry and size. On the other hand, a certain homogeneity can be observed in terms of size: studies tend to focus on micro or small enterprises. In any case, none of the studies used size or industry as comparative analytical variables, so further confirming that the domain is still academically unexplored.

Conclusions

Feminist entrepreneurs are an underexplored entrepreneurial reality at the level of empirical academic research. The neo-liberal paradigm sees entrepreneurship as the ultimate expression of individual human fulfilment, and presents the entrepreneurial world as freely accessible. The dominant entrepreneurial models, also, provide prejudicial representations of the entrepreneur and contribute to the exclusion of minorities from the entrepreneurial world. By using a systematic literature analysis protocol embedded with bibliometric framing and content analysis, we investigated extant literature aimed at empirically investigating the relations between feminisms and entrepreneurship to shed light on the theoretical and methodological frameworks used, the definitions and operationalization adopted, and the characteristics of the samples investigated. The results confirmed that feminist entrepreneurship is described as a challenger of the neoliberal model and highly patriarchal contexts. The research carried out on feminist entrepreneurs investigates different aspects of the entrepreneurial experience, ranging from entrepreneurial identity and leadership to networking and community building. Different theoretical frameworks are used to adapt to the topics investigated: such heterogeneity is not reflected at the methodological level, where the tool of the semi-open interview emerged as dominant. The large number of studies aimed at exploring the possibility of creating new theories underlines the novelty of the topic and the need to identify or develop a theory capable of framing feminist values and ethics in the entrepreneurial field, as also argued in (Orser et al., 2013 ). At the definitional level, the identified studies have not always adopted a precise definition and operationalization of feminist entrepreneurship. Also, despite the extreme fragmentation of concepts pertaining to feminism, scholars rarely associate their samples to a particular feminist strand. That results in a lack of homogeneity in the studies which could be overcome by leveraging on the sociological-psychological literature that tries to frame the feminist experiences in distinct categories (e.g., Henley et al., 1998 ; Lee & Wessel, 2022 ) as suggested in the “ Discussion ” section. The literature has investigated feminist entrepreneurs working in different industries: it seems, however, that the heterogeneity is more due to the difficulty of identifying feminist entrepreneurs pertaining to the same industry than to the need to include the industry as an element of investigation.

The systematic literature review made it possible, from a research point of view to collect, analyze and compare the literature on feminist entrepreneurship, so allowing the main themes, theoretical lenses and methodological approaches to be highlighted. Also, a first attempt of defining an ontology concerning feminist entrepreneurs is provided. The ontology can be expanded and further detailed by future research. Finally, the work highlights the themes and relationships between them so providing researchers with a summary of the knowledge currently available on the topic.

From a managerial perspective, the research contributed to analyzing and comparing heterogeneous entrepreneurial experiences, laying the foundations for a holistic understanding of the feminist entrepreneurial phenomenon. From a societal point of view, the research contributes to gathering and synthesizing knowledge on feminist entrepreneurship, a phenomenon potentially disruptive in terms of impact on local and national economies, as well as on the lives and careers of individuals traditionally excluded from the entrepreneurial ecosystem.

Starting from the considerations illustrated in the Discussion, issues that could be further investigated include: (i) the role of feminisms on entrepreneurial experiences within unexplored cultural settings (e.g., Europe and Africa); (ii) how feminist values are or could be translated into more environmentally and socially sustainable entrepreneurial choices; (iii) how feminist ethics is introduced and translated at the level of business model and processes. With regard to the latter two points, some initial attempts of research can be retrieved within the grey literature (Harquail, 2016 , 2019 ). Also, further studies could deal with the development of grounded theoretical frameworks able of explaining the phenomenon of feminist entrepreneurship.

The paper is not exempt from limitations. Despite the accurate literature review protocol, it is not certain that all the material studies with the themes were selected. The set of keywords used and the filters applied, despite the adoption of an approach that, by leveraging on lemmatization, ensured a certain caution, could have excluded potentially relevant research.

Data availability

None – Not applicable.

Code availability

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What is a Literature Review?

The scholarly conversation.

A literature review provides an overview of previous research on a topic that critically evaluates, classifies, and compares what has already been published on a particular topic. It allows the author to synthesize and place into context the research and scholarly literature relevant to the topic. It helps map the different approaches to a given question and reveals patterns. It forms the foundation for the author’s subsequent research and justifies the significance of the new investigation.

A literature review can be a short introductory section of a research article or a report or policy paper that focuses on recent research. Or, in the case of dissertations, theses, and review articles, it can be an extensive review of all relevant research.

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The introduction should define the topic and set the context for the literature review. It will include the author's perspective or point of view on the topic, how they have defined the scope of the topic (including what's not included), and how the review will be organized. It can point out overall trends, conflicts in methodology or conclusions, and gaps in the research.
In the body of the review, the author should organize the research into major topics and subtopics. These groupings may be by subject, (e.g., globalization of clothing manufacturing), type of research (e.g., case studies), methodology (e.g., qualitative), genre, chronology, or other common characteristics. Within these groups, the author can then discuss the merits of each article and analyze and compare the importance of each article to similar ones.
The conclusion will summarize the main findings, make clear how this review of the literature supports (or not) the research to follow, and may point the direction for further research.
The list of references will include full citations for all of the items mentioned in the literature review.

Key Questions for a Literature Review

A literature review should try to answer questions such as

Who are the key researchers on this topic?
What has been the focus of the research efforts so far and what is the current status?
How have certain studies built on prior studies? Where are the connections? Are there new interpretations of the research?
Have there been any controversies or debate about the research? Is there consensus? Are there any contradictions?
Which areas have been identified as needing further research? Have any pathways been suggested?
How will your topic uniquely contribute to this body of knowledge?
Which methodologies have researchers used and which appear to be the most productive?
What sources of information or data were identified that might be useful to you?
How does your particular topic fit into the larger context of what has already been done?
How has the research that has already been done help frame your current investigation ?

Examples of Literature Reviews

Example of a literature review at the beginning of an article: Forbes, C. C., Blanchard, C. M., Mummery, W. K., & Courneya, K. S. (2015, March). Prevalence and correlates of strength exercise among breast, prostate, and colorectal cancer survivors . Oncology Nursing Forum, 42(2), 118+. Retrieved from http://go.galegroup.com.sonoma.idm.oclc.org/ps/i.do?p=HRCA&sw=w&u=sonomacsu&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA422059606&asid=27e45873fddc413ac1bebbc129f7649c Example of a comprehensive review of the literature: Wilson, J. L. (2016). An exploration of bullying behaviours in nursing: a review of the literature. British Journal Of Nursing , 25 (6), 303-306. For additional examples, see:

Galvan, J., Galvan, M., & ProQuest. (2017). Writing literature reviews: A guide for students of the social and behavioral sciences (Seventh ed.). [Electronic book]

Pan, M., & Lopez, M. (2008). Preparing literature reviews: Qualitative and quantitative approaches (3rd ed.). Glendale, CA: Pyrczak Pub. [ Q180.55.E9 P36 2008]

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Evidence Matrix Special thanks to Dr. Cindy Stearns, SSU Sociology Dept, for permission to use this Matrix as an example.
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AN INTRODUCTION TO FEMINIST LITERARY CRITICISM: AT A BRIEF GLANCE

A type of literary criticism that became a dominant force in Western Literary studies in the late 1970 ‟ s, feminist theory more broadly conceived was applied to linguistic and literary matters. Since the early 1980 ‟ s, feminist literary criticism has developed and diversified in a number of ways and is now characterized by a global perspectives. It is nonetheless important to understand differences among the interests and assumptions of French, British and North America,(United States and Canada), feminist critics writing during the 1970 „ s, and early 1980 „ s, given the context to which their works shaped the evolution of contemporary feminist critical discourse.

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Literature Review Basics

What is a Literature Review?

Literature reviews are designed to do two things:

1) give your readers an overview of sources you have explored while researching a particular topic or idea

2) demonstrate how your research fits into the larger field of study.

1) Decide on a topic and identify the literature base you will review

-Become familiar with the relevant databases for that subject

-Identify search terms that capture your subject

-Start with general search terms and experiment with different terms noting which work

-Identify the important studies on the topic

-Redefine your topic if necessary. Try to narrow it to a specific interest area with the broad area

2) Analyze the literature (Your role is to evaluate what you’ve read.)

-Usually a review covers the last 5 years of literature on a topic

-Skim the articles to get an idea of the purpose and content.

-Group the articles into categories and sub-categories

-Take notes: Define key terms, key statistics, identify useful quotes

-Note strengths, weaknesses and emphases

-Identify trends or patterns

-Identify gaps in the literature

-Identify relationships between studies, which led to others etc.

-Stay focused on your topic

3) Synthesis

-Identify your area of focus and say why it is relevant or important to the topic

-summarize the contributions of important studies/articles to the topic

-evaluate the current “state of the art” point out gaps or inconsistencies in research or theories point out areas of possible future research

-provide some insight into the relationship between the central topic of the literature review and a larger area of study

-write a conclusion that clarifies how the material in the review has supported your proposition in the introduction

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THE MOVEMENT: How Women’s Liberation Transformed America 1963-1973 , by Clara Bingham

It’s a common stereotype about second-wave feminism: all anger and no joy. When the syndicated columnist James J. Kilpatrick snidely reviewed the inaugural issue of Ms. magazine, he likened the reading experience to “looking at the slides of carcinoma in a cancer magazine” and accused both Ms. and its staff of being petulant and bitchy, not to mention whiny and self-pitying.

And yet, “The Movement,” a 559-page oral history of that era in women’s liberation, is rollicking good fun. In fact, as the veteran journalist Clara Bingham demonstrates in this deftly arranged collection of remembrances, anecdotes, explications and arguments, the 10 years leading up to the Roe v. Wade decision were downright exhilarating. In addition to the book’s first-person narratives, Bingham peppers it with contemporary documents — advertisements, quotes from newspaper and magazine articles — to underscore the challenges faced by American women generally, as well as those who were active participants in the movement.

An oral history can be difficult to review; the reader doesn’t know what was excluded or why, and can only guess what is behind the thinking of the editor (and, in this case, interviewer). How might the outtakes have changed the meaning of this book? At its most effective, a book like this one can imbue history, however recent, with energy and continued relevance. (Full disclosure: I was probably going to be interested in this book regardless; my godmother, Anna Arnold Hedgeman, was one of the founders of the National Organization for Women.)

But Bingham’s curation is historically astute. It gives credit where credit is due and correctly contextualizes second-wave feminism as a direct outgrowth of the civil rights movement. Not only did the latter inspire activists by agitating for the rights of Black Americans, but it also served as a practical training ground for many who would later spearhead progressive efforts on behalf of American women.

Bingham is committed to reinforcing these connections — with special attention to the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) — and her speakers recount, too, how civil rights leaders’ frequent disregard for female contributions served to radicalize many women. This was crucial; it prepared them for fights not only with their ideological rivals, but also with their supposed allies.

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The Traditions of Feminist Criticism

Depictions of Women by Men

Rise of the Woman Writer

Women Writers and Class

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Literary Theory and Criticism

Feminist Literary Criticism

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Article contents

Introduction

Histories, Origins, and Theories of U.S.–Based Feminism

Standpoint Epistemology

Intersectionality

Feminist Poststructural Theory

Tenets of Feminist Qualitative Research

Positionalities and Reflexivity

Methods and Challenges

Examples of Feminist Qualitative Research in Education

Power, Canons, and Gender

Feminist Pedagogies, Curricula, and Classrooms

Teacher Education, Identities, and Knowledge

Possibilities for Feminist Qualitative Research

Acknowledgements

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