Re-telling ‘Us’: Researching the Lives of Singaporean Women

Extract: Feminist scholars have long been interested in the politics of speech acts. Early calls for a ‘feminist methodology’ were premised on a claim that in order to overcome the bias of malestream science, women should write about their own lives and experiences. Feminists asserted that androcentrism had as much to do with who was conducting the research as what was under investigation. Growing criticism that feminists themselves had replicated such practices in their writings about ‘other’ women signalled a renewed interest in the politics of speech. This interest is based on an acknowledgment that women are “not politically equal, and, given that politics is connected to truth, all are not epistemically equal” (Alcoff, 1991:14-15).