Investigating gender in a world of gender consciousness

For better or worse, it has become difficult to conduct research in the social sciences without encountering gender, even well beyond fields that specifically focus on it. Since the advent of gender studies as a discipline, the concept has gained momentum both as a social fact and structure of social action, and as the analytic category through which these are conceptualised. This special issue of the BMS is embedded in the idea that the analysis of gender itself is indissociable from the history of the concept, and that the increasing spread of this notion throughout society has an impact on the way(s) gender is investigated. In the space of just a few decades the world has evolved from one in which researchers were working to give consistency to a nameless force, to one which is now gender conscious, where gender is mobilised, criticised, claimed, resisted, and debated. In a gender conscious world, the rules of research are changing. The notion of gender consciousness that is proposed here borrows carefully from research in the sociology of law developed under the name legal consciousness studies (LCS). The fact that there are different definitions of gender that compete with each other does not prevent us from considering that there is gender, and we may even consider that the proliferation of definitions participates in the stability of the social phenomenon we are studying, just as, for the theorists of LCS, the multiple representations of the law contribute to its hegemony. One of the central issues here is the problematization of the dialectic between categories of practice and categories of analysis, with a focus on the methodological and epistemological questions of these studies. This ‘return to the field’ will provide answers to these questions, beginning with a personal summary overview of what feminist epistemologies (I) and feminist methodologies (II) have contributed to social sciences, before moving on to contemporary research questions that emerge through the prism of gender consciousness (III).