Week One: Feminist Research Practice - Log

• Please go back to your B.A. thesis and reflect on how your methodology, epistemology, and ontology are entangled.

I wrote my B.A thesis with no clear methodology, epistemology or ontology in mind. However, after reading Nina Lykke’s essay “Methodologies, Methods and Ethics” in Feminist Studies and Sharlene Nagy Hesse-Bibe’s “"Feminist Research: Exploring, Interrogating, and Transforming the Interconnections of Epistemology, Methodology, and Method" in Handbook of Feminist Research: Theory and Praxis, I believe there may have been some methodology, epistemology and ontology to my work.

My B.A thesis focused on the gendered term ‘hysteria’ and Hamlet’s Ophelia. I followed ‘hysteria’ from the popular incarnation by the ‘Queen of hysterics', Marie "Blanche" Wittmann, a patient of Jean-Martin Charcot at the Salpêtrière Hospital in late 19th century Paris, through the performances and portrayals of Ophelia in films, theatre and in portraits, to a live production of Hamlet, where I investigated how the term may finally have been disassociated from women due to Hamlet being played by the actress Maxine Peake.

Methodologically speaking, I planned to conduct research from primary and secondary sources, including books, articles, images, films and theatre. I understand methodology as the “theory of how research is done or should proceed” (Lykke, 2011, p.5), and upon reflection of how I planned the research to be collected, can safely say there was little to no theory. However, in Lykke’s essay, she writes that making women visible and eliminating the gender bias is an important goal for feminist empiricists. Although I had never heard the term ‘feminist empiricist’, I was trying to make women visible through exploring the portrayal of Ophelia and highlighting the mistreatment of female patients in psychiatric hospitals. I was also uncovering the gender bias in a term that is widely used today to describe women, but is rarely ever used in relation to men. These two points were instrumental in the research I carried out, so methodologically, perhaps this was my aim.

In regards to epistemology, I only learnt what this word meant upon reading Hesse-Bibe’s work. The theory of knowledge, including the methods, validity and scope was a foreign concept to me. Despite the fact I was writing about the invalidity of the work of Jean-Martin Charcot, I did not question the later critical research of which I used. I could say that the epistemological approach used was “How will the power dynamics of ‘madness’ be altered when Hamlet is played by a woman?” I believed that neither or both women playing Hamlet and Ophelia would be seen as hysterical. To uncover this knowledge, I studied the performance for gendered actions, body language or anything relating to the binary that might distort the traditional performance of the role. The problem with my epistemological approach was that the director, Sarah Frankcom, was not trying to disrupt gender binaries. In fact, as an Observer review reassured, “The gender switches in Sarah Frankcom’s Hamlet may unsettle for a moment but they do not distort the play” (Susannah Clapp, Observer, 2014). The problem with my research, which I discovered but didn’t fully understand at the time, was that replacing a white woman for a role traditionally played by a white man, achieves nothing if the character is then completely unsexed but retains all other characteristics. An interesting feminist standpoint epistemology would have been if research had been collected to include another person’s views that were from a completely different background to my own.

The question running throughout the thesis was, "What influence did Ophelia have on Wittmann, and how did Wittmann influence modern portrayals of Ophelia?" I investigated how Wittmann had based her hysterical performances on Ophelia, and then, through the development of the term hysteria, artistic, filmic and theatrical performances of Ophelia embodied that term. I want to place my research in the modern day by including the comparison between performances in a theatre in Manchester in 2015 and in a psychiatric hospital in Paris in the 1890's.