Navigating among women: Digital ethnography and its contributions to feminist research

Abstract

We present some methodological reflections that emerged within the framework of a feminist research in a digital-ethnographic design developed in a Facebook group around mutual support and care, which brings together women from a town in southern Chile. The research objectives seek to understand the patriarchal power relations that are exercised in this space of interaction, the regulations on gender performances, and the meanings of community that their own participants assign to the space. We contextualize the research, explaining how it is made from the reflections of our own experiences as participants. Then, we present the theoretical proposals and the decisions we make when elaborating the methodological design. Finally, we delve into cross-cutting aspects such as our positions, the subject/object dichotomy, the category of women and the exercise of power. The originality of this article is related to the nature of the research itself, that is, the analysis of an online group from a feminist perspective, questioning the positions of power in the production of knowledge and glimpsing their contributions to social transformation and colonization of knowledge, which we contrast with our own experience in the development of digital ethnography in light of the debates on feminist epistemologies and methodological proposals, delving into the potentialities and limitations that we find in the process.