scholarship, proposals that receive such support can be construed
as substandard by unsympathetic panelists. A political scientist de-
scribes his reaction to a women’s studies proposal:
This proposal that I thought was really badly done might have
gone through because they were giving this woman a break. It was
related to a women’s studies question, her thesis. She was a
woman. She was coming from a real second-tier institution. But it
was a project in an area of women’s studies that clearly needed
more research and everything. So...Feminist research is valued in part because it serves practical pur-
poses and is meant to have a transformative social role. This stan-
dard of evaluation, however, is rejected by those panelists who value
the production of knowledge as an end in itself (typically, the same
panelists who espouse comprehensive or positivist epistemological
styles). These opposing understandings of the purpose of research
create tension. An anthropologist who directed a program in wo-
men’s studies for several years notes that “women’s studies people”
frequently are in “a defensive battle [where] they are having to say
that ‘feminist’ doesn’t mean that academic excellence is lowered.”
Despite the field’s increased legitimacy, “Some people are still going
to bridle at the preface ‘feminist’ because they’re going to think,
‘Well, if it’s related to a cause, then it can’t be necessarily trust-
worthy.’”
The tension is not only over the aim of knowledge, but also over
conceptions of objectivity and of “positionality” in the production
of high-quality research. Because positivism as an epistemological
style requires bracketing the relationship between the researcher and
her topic, it is incompatible with developments in feminist research,
whereas standpoint theory emphasizes that one’s relationship with
the object of study defines the lens through which the research is
232 / Considering Interdisciplinarity and Diversity