The contextualized location of knowledge in personal feminist sexual accounts

Abstract

: Introduction. This article presentes the personal feminist sexual accounts, analytical units generated in my doctoral thesis that refer to narratives that share the specificity of belonging to the discourse of feminist and LGTB militantes, and of pro-feminist men who embody new masculinities and that deal with the topic of sexuality. Methodology. A qualitative methodology based on in-depth interviews and their systematized analysis has been used. Results. The aforementioned accounts emerge from the convergence of Hemmings’ feminist narratives, Plummer’s sexual stories and broader paradigms such as modernism, postmodernism and neomaterialism. These unions provide a coherent corpus to analyze and situate socially, politically and historycally the knowledge provided by personal narratives, according to the notions of feminist standpoint theory. Conclusions and discussion. I have distinguished three feminist sexual accounts: modernist accounts of loss, postmodernist accounts of progress and neomaterialist accounts of return, which serve to contextualize the discourses of the participants within the historiography of Western feminism, showing ethical and political tensions, and the immense richness of feminist critical theory. However, an issue that has not been properly addressed is my own situated and biased location as a researcher, which is presented as a future challenge that could be addressed from feminist phenomenology, as well as from autobiographical narrative.