Feminist Curiosity as Method

This case study demonstrates how feminist curiosity can serve as a methodology from which methods and research procedures can be drawn. It focuses around our research on women in the “Arab Spring” across the Middle East and North Africa in 2011. We show how starting with a question about where women are in a particular political situation affords a number of method choices while foreclosing others as inappropriate. In the Arab Spring case, we show that any first take on where women were and what role they may or may not have played was not to be taken as representative because of the political biases of the reporting outlets and their readers. We suggest that the theoretical and methodological approach of feminist curiosity could be best served in this case by careful narrative analysis. Here, we look to guide the reader from the broad methodological choice of feminist curiosity through the utility of narrative analysis for this particular research.