Harley Davidson Feminism And Ethnography

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Register to read the introduction… Women want to put forward their ideologies and beliefs and don’t want it tobe subdued and lost amidst those put forward by men. In order to facilitate this, feminist ethnography is a popular and beneficial method as it elucidates the feminine perspective and adds more valuable knowledge to the area of research. However feminist ethnography has a complex nature as it incorporates features of feminism as well as ethnography. This paper focuses on the essential qualities of a feminist research and shows how feminism can be incorporated into ethnography. There has been a critical analysis of a feminist ethnographic research on the motorcycle owners of Harley Davidson to demonstrate the key features and the negative aspects of the feminist research conducted. Various authors have undermined feminism in research; however this critical review hopes to make explicit the nature of feminist research and role of ethnography in feminist …show more content…
The article is a re‐inquiry into the previous ethnographic study of Harley Davidson motorcycle owners conducted by Schouten and Alexander. It argues from a feminist perspective to elucidate the voice of women riders in a hyper masculine consumption context. It makes explicit the various assumptions, which limited the original ethnographic work, thus restating the problem of hegemonic masculinity (Martin et al). The article has taken a multi‐perspective approach as compared to the narrow perspective taken by the original article –it incorporates features of liberal feminism, women’s voice/experience feminism as well as poststructuralist feminism (Martin et al, 2006). The authors disclose and introduce women’s perspective on the motorcycle consumption in a male dominated society. …show more content…
No research is perfect, it always has few limitations, but overall the authors have successfully achieved their aim of highlighting the importance of women riders in a hyper masculine consumption and bringing forward their aspirations, beliefs, needs and opinions .It has tried to produce social change by creating awareness about how women are being suppressed in society, and how there is a need for their standpoint to be included in research. It can also be seen that feminist ethnography is very useful in practicing research and adds value to it .It provides a different perspective to how research is usually conducted and displays the common features of ethnography and feminist research and their reliance on the use of qualitative methods, hence the concept of feminist ethnography is very important in research, specially qualitative.

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