Subjectivity and social change in women's life stories: notes on the biographycal method

Abstract

A great part of conceptual innovations produced by the feminist research has been lately
based on qualitative methodology and more concretely in the biographical method. Biography,
by putting the concrete lives of women in the center of the analysis, allows to question the
gender-blinded nature of theorethical concepts that are unable to analyse the specificity and
complexity of feminine experiences. It also allows to call into question the clasical dicotomies
existing in the social sciences like production/reproduction; private/public; family/work and
so on. In reaction to deterministic and structuralist approches, theories of social action has
turn to the biographical metohodology to restore subjectivity to the social actors. This text
explore the contributions of the biography to feminist research, specially its capacity to
analyse women's subjectivity and its influence on social change.