This paper is a provocation and reflection on some of the methodological tensions and opportunities I encountered in trying to “get at” gender in my research on the everyday gendered geographies of physical activity. Situated in a feminist methodology, I designed my study on gender and gym environments to include multiple forms of data (interviews, drawings, journals) to foster a participant-centred research process by offering diverse forms of expression. Yet, there were moments where my feminist commitment to recognise participants’ agency in how they articulated their gendered experiences was stymied by seeming self-contradictions throughout their multi-modal narratives, as well as by my researcher interpretations of gender. In this post-mortem, I consider what incongruities in the ways some participants spoke about gender within and across data types tell us about gender as a concept. I illustrate how there is methodological opportunity in using multiple creative methods as a check for rigour in the form of “catalytic validity,” or awareness-raising among research participants, which is consistent with socially transformative feminist geographical aims.

中文翻译：

---

“好吧，性别！你在哪里？！”：关于日常不平等的女权主义地理中催化有效性的潜力

这篇论文是对我在对日常体育活动的性别化地理研究中试图“理解”性别时遇到的一些方法论上的紧张和机会的挑衅和反思。以女权主义方法论为基础，我设计了关于性别和健身房环境的研究，包括多种形式的数据（采访、绘画、期刊），以通过提供多种表达形式来促进以参与者为中心的研究过程。然而，在某些时候，我的女权主义承诺承认参与者在他们如何表达他们的性别体验方面的能动性，因为在他们的多模式叙述中似乎自相矛盾，以及我的研究人员对性别的解释而受到阻碍。在这次验尸中，我考虑了一些参与者在数据类型内部和跨数据类型中谈论性别的方式中的哪些不一致告诉我们将性别作为一个概念。我说明了如何以“催化有效性”或提高研究参与者的意识的形式使用多种创造性方法来检查严谨性，这与社会变革的女权主义地理目标是一致的。