Chapter 87: Critical Feminist Theory:

Over the last few decades, feminists have challenged fundamental understandings of the way we think about and research, women, men and social-political contexts. They have offered a perspective and research strategies that consider women from the perspective of their own experiences, that emphasize identification, trust, empathy, and relationships, and that has as one of its primary goals providing “women explanations of social phenomena that they want and need” (Harding, 1987, p. 8). In doing so, it has produced radical reexaminations of assumptions and reconstructions of previously accepted interpretations across a broad range of disciplines. Within this chapter we discuss the development of feminist theories, and attempt to disentangle some of the issues concerning generalizability, validity and method regarding feminist critical theory. Subsequently, we turn our attention to how the theory has been used within educational research and then address some of the most common and robust critiques of this perspective.