IN SEARCH OF HEROINES - SOME REFLECTIONS ON NORMATIVITY IN FEMINIST RESEARCH

Feminist research is explicitly committed to validating (women) inform ants' experiences, situating them in a context of gender and power rel ations, and explicating the researcher's own social and cultural posit ion. Such commitments may not be enough, however, when our negative an d positive feelings about our informants get in the way of doing our r esearch. In this article, we draw upon our research on women in care p rofessions and our own desire to find feminist heroines within their r anks. After describing our respective experiences of glorifying or dis missing our informants, we explore three strategies Sor coming to term s with implicit or 'grit-level' normativity in feminist research.