How to Investigate Social Relations: Phenomenology and Feminist-Materialist Sociology

This paper articulates how the feminist sociologist Dorothy E. Smith provides a phenomenology of the social sciences without committing to a transcendental-phenomenological idealism. That is, in her early methodological work, Smith provides a careful description of both a feminist attitude and its object in social inquiry, which is a description that can be understood as a phenomenology of the social sciences. While sociological inquiry in Smith’s view starts from embodied selves in their everyday context, the social relations sociology ought to inquire into are not immediately visible within this context. For Smith, these social relations are to be understood as relations of ruling (which are, among others, bureaucratic, institutional, economic, political, and cultural in kind) that both materially constrain the activities of women and constitute the meaning of their local worlds. In this paper, I contrast Husserl’s phenomenological account of the attitude and object of the social sciences with Smith’s feminist-materialist account. In doing so, I show how a restriction of sociological research to the everyday world may restrict our understanding of what constitutes its meaning as well as what could enable social change.