Critical Possibilities on Social Research: The Abortion Dispositif from a Feminist Perspective

Abstract

Taking the case of abortion, this article unveils by considering the contributions of critical theory to the methodology of social sciences in general. It expounds and defends the value of some key methodological insights of feminist theory articulated around the notion of dispositive, as a tool of critical theory. This methodological and epistemological critique is part of a wider and ongoing debate with more “traditional” conceptions of methodology for social sciences.  In this paper, the notion of dispositive is considered as a tool to articulate that rewriting, embodied, and articulated in the case of abortion as dispositif. This argument borrows some aspects of Foucault’s methodology to trace the discourses and subject positions surrounding the abortion dispositif as a form of biopolitics in which a tangle of lines of power/knowledge cohabit. In this framework, feminist discourses have an impact on both women and governmentality – that is, in the rationality of power. In studying the prohibition of abortion, the ways in which people understand the prohibition are considered in both legal and ethical sense. Beyond the descriptions of the various ways in which people cope and make sense of the regulation, Foucault invites us to pay attention to the ways in which these understandings of the situation (and these ways of dealing with the present) collectively model or produce such present situation.