Doing feminist-demography

This paper is a disciplinary analysis of demography that examines its lack of engagement with feminist theory and the resulting lack of meaningful demographic research on gender. Its aim is to generate intellectual space for feminist-demography and to advance research on gender within the field of demography. I first discuss benefits of feminist-demography to both fields and then examine the reasons for the lack of feminist-demographic research to date by describing the epistemological tensions between the fields. I then analyze the methodological implications of feminist theory for demographic research, and especially the requirements that researchers treat gender as a social construction and attend to the politics of location. This analysis leads to general methodological precepts for feminist-demographic research on gender.