Gadamerian Hermeneutics and Feminist Thought: Exploring Preunderstandings to Uncover Experiences of Prejudice

Abstract

German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer is best known for his contribution to the development of philosophical hermeneutics, an interpretive approach to knowledge, understanding and meaning-making. It has become a well-established research approach in the health sciences to shed light on the lived experiences of people living with challenging chronic health conditions. Some feminist scholars have gravitated to Gadamer’s hermeneutics for its steadfast rejection of positivism and its intention to uncover preunderstandings and prejudices. However, others have critiqued the approach for its lack of focus on prescribing action for social change and its reluctance to evaluate the prejudices present in its own tradition. In this paper, the authors will demonstrate how using feminist hermeneutics can help health researchers deepen their understanding of illness narratives by examining the power structures contributing to the marginalization of chronically ill people within and outside the healthcare system. They will juxtapose a reflexive investigation of the first author’s experiences with a focused literature review of the dialogue between hermeneutics and feminism. By examining the first author’s experiences with Gadamerian hermeneutics and feminist hermeneutics through self-study, she can in turn unearth her own preunderstandings. This approach will allow the authors to leverage the depth of interpretive understanding generated by hermeneutics while exploring the power structures involved in the complex process that is patient care, particularly that of people with chronic illness. They conclude that this combined approach of feminist hermeneutics allows health researchers to deepen their understanding of illness narratives with issue-specific and effective recommendations to clinicians and public health officials, leading to better-adapted services through a more just approach to chronically ill people.

Introduction

Hans-Georg Gadamer was a German philosopher whose most notable scholarship is the development of philosophical hermeneutics, an approach to knowledge that rejects positivism and the strict application of a templated methodology. Instead, philosophical hermeneutics relies on dialogue, interpretation, and mutual transformation to uncover knowledge that could only be produced by the interlocutors. It also requires that scholars make explicit the preunderstandings (and prejudices) they have inherited through their situatedness (Gadamer, 2013). As such, Gadamerian hermeneutics as a research approach lends itself well to studies exploring lived experiences within a specific group. Gadamer has also extensively written about health, in no small part surely given his own experience with polio. His work on the experience of “unhealth,” particularly in The enigma of health: The art of understanding in a scientific age (Gadamer, 1996) has inspired scholars of the health sciences to use philosophical hermeneutics to conduct research on the overall experience of being a patient, on the patient-physician experience, and on navigating healthcare systems.

In this manuscript, the authors’ main objective is to reflect on feminist scholars’ understanding and use of Gadamer’s work. Starting with the personal situatedness of the first author, she will take readers through her own journey, under the guidance and advisement of the second author, through hermeneutics and feminist theory. The authors will then explore the feminist opportunities in and critiques of Gadamerian Hermeneutics and recount their experiences in incorporating feminist methods into Gadamerian hermeneutics in analyzing qualitative data. Finally, the authors will use the hermeneutic wager to evaluate the risks of applying Feminist Hermeneutics to the aforementioned qualitative data analysis.

The following section serves to situate my (first author) relationship to the topic and, thus, my approach to it. In using a research approach where “the researcher becomes the methodology” (R. Hovey et al., 2022, p. 2), my past experiences become as important to discuss and dissect as would be the research methodology in a different project. It is a way to both hold myself accountable by exploring my intentions and motivations and unlock knowledge of myself. In turn, it deepens my understanding of the topic and the possible contributions to the field. More importantly, making my relationship with the topic explicit allows me to examine my own preunderstandings and prejudices.

A Note on Ethics

The authors wish to note that the primary analysis of the research data can be found in the first author’s master’s thesis (Vigouroux, 2022) and the full secondary analysis has been published (Vigouroux et al., 2023). The study was approved by the McGill University Research Ethics Office of the Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences (project A06-B44-19B). To be eligible to participate in the study, participants had to (1) be fourteen years of age or older, (2) be a current or past member of Curvy Girls, a peer support group for girls living with scoliosis, (3) speak French or English, and (4) currently be living in Canada. Eligible participants above the age of eighteen signed the consent form themselves, while those between the ages of fourteen and eighteen had their parent or guardian sign the consent form.

Personal Situatedness

I began my master’s degree in 2019 with no experience with feminism as a field of study. In fact, I had very little research or scholarly experience at all. I had finally completed a bachelor’s degree after over a decade marked with personal challenges due to my disability. The only research experience I had was as a research collaborator on a project eventually funded by the Movember Foundation. The Principal Investigator, who would later become my thesis supervisor, and the second author of this manuscript, had asked me for my help in putting together a video pitch that was required as part of the application process. Given my previous experience in video editing, I was glad to work on a video project for the first time in a few years. The video was a success, as demonstrated by the fact that the application was pushed to the next stage of the competition. Eventually, the project was funded, and the research began. The research team used applied philosophical hermeneutics to examine the experiences of men living with chronic pain and explore support groups as a disrupting factor in the cycle of social isolation created by the experience of chronic pain (Karnick, 2018; Khayat, 2019).

I participated in introductory focus group discussions as a note-taker, which significantly impacted my career trajectory. Upon reflection, the content of the conversations I recorded subverted any expectations I may have had. The men discussed their ongoing loneliness and grief, how their pre-pain identity as people, but also as men, had been taken away from them, slipping further and further away as time went by and their condition was not “cured.” They wondered how to rebuild that sense of identity and belonging and what became of their identity as men. If they could no longer work and provide as they had always done, and been told they had to, then who were they? The most surprising aspect was the active deconstruction of the masculine norms ingrained in their upbringing as part of the process of rebuilding or rediscovering their identity. Their pain had significantly eroded the attributes typically associated with their gender identity. They perceived an inability to meet the expectations of strength, boldness, and confidence they previously embodied (Jillani, 2019). Through these conversations, I developed an interest in exploring the effect of gender on the experience of pain and illness.

My master’s thesis was a Gadamerian hermeneutic exploration of the lived experiences of adolescent girls living with scoliosis and the effects of belonging to a peer support group. The research and data that resulted from the study were rich in previously understudied findings with regard to the population (Vigouroux, 2022). After engaging deeply with the participants and their data, I felt called to investigate this topic through a feminist lens. I suspected that using feminist theories as a framework through which to (re)interpret these data would uncover findings that would otherwise remain obscured from health sciences scholarship. Additionally, this analytical approach would be a departure from most of the literature available in health sciences on patient experience. This originality could be an opportunity to grab the attention of healthcare clinicians and inspire them to think about how social structures affect their relationships with their patients. I was empowered to follow my judgment by the reminder that philosophical hermeneutics encourages scholars and methodology to become one and the same (R. Hovey et al., 2022) and I planned my doctoral project around feminist hermeneutics as my research approach.

Weighing the Risks: The Hermeneutic Wager

The purposeful and deliberate lack of strict methodology in applied philosophical hermeneutics can be daunting to those unfamiliar with it. The intention behind writing this manuscript was to shed some light on the specifics of the research process involved in adopting an approach that combines applied philosophical hermeneutics and feminist theory. Taking on such an approach can be risky, as it is relatively novel. One tool that has been highly useful in guiding conversations and discussions through the research process has been the hermeneutic wager. The authors navigated through the hermeneutic wager as a way to decide if and how they should go ahead with the secondary analysis. As they moved through the five conversations, namely imagination, humility, commitment, discernment, and hospitality, they were able to imagine a different way to analyze the data, recognize where they needed more knowledge and training, commit to their project, identify the changes to be made during the process, and finally, be hospitable to new information and challenges as they arise. The hermeneutic wager can therefore help other researchers make decisions throughout the research process.

The second author has worked extensively with the hermeneutic wager in the past and shared his knowledge with the first author through her graduate training. He drew inspiration from Richard Kearney’s wager, which consists of five moments designed to mitigate and manage risky situations (2011). He adapted it specifically to fit research contexts through five conversations: imagination, humility, commitment, discernment, and hospitality (R. B. Hovey, 2023; R. B. Hovey et al., 2016, 2017, 2023). These “are not to be understood as a linear progression nor a series of graduated steps” (R. B. Hovey et al., 2016, p. 5), but rather as “equiprimordial aspects of a single hermeneutic arc” (Kearney, 2011, p. 40).

The first conversation of the hermeneutic wager is imagination, where researchers can envision the possibilities that lie before them. The intention of this conversation is to allow the researchers to think creatively about what they would like to accomplish without worrying about limitations. It also sets the tone for the following conversations, as all ideas are welcomed. Imagination then makes way for humility, where the researchers are reminded that they do not know the way forward. This conversation demands reflection on “encultured perceptions, personal/professional identity, wants, and needs and [a] move toward what has been imagined” (R. B. Hovey et al., 2016, p. 6). The researchers then move on to commitment, a conversation where decisions are made about how to move forward and what objectives they will pursue. It also provides an opportunity for them to decide whether or not they truly wish to be a part of the project at hand. The next conversation is discernment, which “challenges imagination because it recognizes that not all possibilities are equal, valid, or realistic” (R. B. Hovey et al., 2016, p. 7) This is also the time to revisit commitment and ascertain whether the path forward is realistic and feasible or not. Finally, no matter the answer to the latest question posed by discernment, comes hospitality. It invites “an openness in the face of our natural tendency to fear and exclude the strange” (R. B. Hovey, 2023), in this case, the possible outcomes of conducting research using an approach that has historically been challenging to boil down to a tidy methodology section in peer-reviewed publications or grant applications. Such outcomes may include unexpected findings and contributions to the existing literature, as well as rejections and requests for a more prescriptive methodology.

Approach to the Literature

I approached research on feminism and hermeneutics by focusing on the relevance of the sources I decided to include. As suggested by educational scholar David Boote (2012), I used a template for notetaking while reviewing the literature and used the free software Obsidian (2023) to safe keep, compile, and analyze my notes. Obsidian allowed me to create a visual representation of the literature I had reviewed and visually identify which sources provided relevant information regarding the topic of this review. As depicted in Figure 1, I entered each article reviewed as a single data point and associated it with one or more of the following keywords: hermeneutics, feminism, autonomy, methodology, patient experience, bioethics, epistemology, Gadamer, and disability. Obsidian then automatically created a visual representation of these data through a mind map. I was immediately able to see which articles were linked to specific keywords, and, using the search function, I could isolate the articles that were linked to combined keywords.

Figure 1.

Approaching feminist health and disability literature: A network of interconnected concepts and works.

I approached note-taking as a practice to represent, construct, and structure the knowledge present in the literature (Chokly, 2022). As recommended by research methodologist Joseph Maxwell (2006), I steered away from the ideas of breadth and comprehensiveness, favouring instead the relevance of the literature to be reviewed. By focusing on depth of study, I had to develop my knowledge and judgment as a doctoral student regarding the literature I was evaluating, making this assignment one of identity formation (Starke-Meyerring, 2011). As I was deciding what was and was not relevant to the review, I was actively shaping my capacity to better evaluate the pertinence of the studies and other scholarly writing I was assessing. By placing myself into specific discourse communities, I took on their epistemic practices (Starke-Meyerring, 2011).

In the following sections, the second author and I will lay out the feminist opportunities and critiques of Gadamerian hermeneutics in scholarly literature. While this paper mainly discusses gender identity as a factor of oppression, marginalization occurs differently at different intersections of identities (Crenshaw, 1991). The age, race, sexual identity, and health status of patients are factors that affect their experiences and their relationships with physicians. Additionally, despite this paper’s focus on women, people with other gender identities (including agender, genderfluid, gender non-conforming, etc.) experience marginalization. Feminist thought can help hermeneutic scholars lay bare the preunderstandings and prejudices that contribute to this marginalization. In this paper, we approach feminist standpoint as (re)conceptualized by Susan Heckman (1997): “from the perspective of difference” (p. 349), allowing us to reflect not only on differences in gender but in age, race, health status, etc.

Feminist Opportunities in Gadamerian Hermeneutics

Despite their trenchant critiques of Gadamer, feminist theorists (most coming from political science) have been drawn to his work in part because of his staunch rejection of positivism. Feminist philosopher Lorraine Code (2003) examined Gadamer’s interpretive framework:

But many such practices can be productively reconfigured to offer a different “take” on the modes of knowing that engage people more regularly than those of physical science, both in their occupational practices and their everyday lives. This kind of reconfiguring has the potential to enlarge the scope of inquiry into knowledge, understanding, and the responsibilities they invoke when they are relocated into human-social settings. (p. 27)

Code (2003) (re)interprets Gadamer’s work in the health sciences through a feminist lens. Like Gadamer, she acknowledges that the exponential advances in science and medicine of the last few decades have afforded the positivist scientific method a strong scholarly and public trust. This confidence derives from “age-old patterns of authority and expertise” (Code, 2003, p. 30) that have created a tradition of valuing science and medicine as “manly” and art as “womanly.” This realization hints at some of the critical flaws in healthcare systems, stemming from medical education and making themselves felt in patient-physician relationships. Gadamerian hermeneutics would allow for the experiences and ways of knowing of people marginalized by this medical and scientific tradition to be heard and recognized as legitimate.

Over a decade before Code, Eloise Buker (1990), a feminist political scientist, already foresaw promising outcomes, arguing that feminism, through its constant challenge of tradition, “vitalizes the dialectic between the old and the new – between history and social transformation” (p. 35). Buker assessed philosophical hermeneutics, wondering if it might enter into productive dialogue with feminist theory and if so, how. Likely due to her sharp criticism of hermeneutics, she elected to underscore the potential contributions of hermeneutics to feminist social theory instead of those of feminist social theory to hermeneutics. Buker (1990) explained: “I have greater hope for the ability of feminist theory than of hermeneutics as such to address fundamental world problems” (p. 23). She concludes that feminists should employ hermeneutic practices of self-reflection and reflective theorizing in order to “develop an epistemological strategy that has politics as its center” (Buker, 1990, p. 38). Hermeneutics can help feminist theorists center women’s experiences within systems that marginalize them through over-relying on traditional ways of knowing.

Building on Buker, feminist political scientist Georgia Warnke (1993) explored a hermeneutic approach that confronted and reinterpreted traditions that have historically excluded women, offering a framework for constructive dialogue on complex topics than may require differentiated solutions. She refuted the objection that a “hermeneutic feminism” would, just as has been reproached to hermeneutics, focus on theory without prescribing actions for social change. Warnke (1993) used the example of surrogacy to illustrate her argument. She insisted that women should have equal opportunity to enter into contracts, while also stressing that poor women are at risk of exploitation and that surrogacy has its own particularities insofar as its challenge to the traditional relationship between parents and children. She warned against the dangers of discussing this topic through a hermeneutic lens that would not include a feminist standpoint. Instead, Warnke (1993) highlighted the need to hold and acknowledge truths that may seem at odds with each other: “What if we must acknowledge both a commitment to women’s freedom of contract and a rejection of the commodification of family relations and the exploitation of poor women by rich or middle-class women?” (p. 96) She concluded that practicing hermeneutic feminism allows scholars to strive for practices that “reflect the diversity of legitimate, nonexclusionary interpretive perspectives both within and without feminism” (Warnke, 1993, p. 96). Warnke explained that this would translate to differentiated solutions that reflect the diversity and complexity of the topic at hand and the people it affects directly. She added that in the instances where differentiated solutions are not possible, scholars should continue striving for a reflective practice that accounts for “the legitimate, nonexclusionary interpretations that have been excluded from our practices and continue to search for ways to accommodate those interpretations” (Warnke, 1993, p. 96).

Another scholar who reflected on ways to incorporate Gadamerian hermeneutics within feminist theory is bioethicist Chandra Kavanagh (2018). She highlighted the limits of existing disability models, insisting that the arbitrary limits of such models are exclusionary for those disabled people who do not fit the model’s strict criteria of disability. Kavanagh (2018) argues that:

[t]o investigate these claims rather than simply homogenizing or dismissing them as a vertical methodology would, one solution is to employ a phenomenological hermeneutic method as both a critical and constructive tool to develop models of disability capable of incorporating disabled people’s experiences. (p. 73)

While Kavanagh did not explicitly mention the incorporation of feminist theory into hermeneutics, she emphasized the unique possibility to assess “not only the experiences of disabled people, but also the framework that governs those experiences and their interpretation” (Kavanagh, 2018, p. 73). Kavanaugh (2018) asserted that, through its effort to make explicit preunderstanding and prejudice, hermeneutics offers an opportunity to examine, critique, and assess the strengths and weaknesses of frameworks, such as models of disability, and social structures like healthcare systems. With this argument, Kavanaugh places herself in a now-long line of feminist scholars who use Gadamerian hermeneutics to interrogate the existing social and power structures which vulnerable or marginalized people must navigate.

Feminist Critiques of Gadamerian Hermeneutics

Philosopher Kathleen Wright (2003) reminded us of the historical context in which Gadamer’s magnum opus Truth and method was made available to English readers. While it was initially published in German in 1960, the English translation was first published in 1975. The early 1970s also saw the publication of the English translations of Michel Foucault’s The order of things and The archaeology of knowledge as well as Jacques Derrida’s Of grammatology. In comparison with these radical works, Gadamer’s work “appeared overly conservative” (2003, p. 40). As such, “feminist thinkers in North America and Europe have been suspicious about Gadamer’s hermeneutics” (Wright, 2003, p. 39) and instead gravitated toward the works of philosophers who addressed the question of power structures head-on.

Arguably the most famous critique of Gadamer’s ideas was articulated over time by Jürgen Habermas, one of his younger contemporaries. As part of what is now known as the Gadamer-Habermas debate, Habermas accused Gadamer’s hermeneutics of failing to acknowledge the existing social and political power structures baked into the “tradition,” a concept critical to Gadamerian hermeneutics (Buker, 1990). This critique struck a chord with feminist scholars, who have historically had a contentious relationship with tradition. Buker (1990) describes Habermas’ critique as claiming that Gadamerian hermeneutics has “a conservative bias which prevents it from being open to the problems of modern society, despite its own insistence on openness” (p. 35). Buker also deplored Gadamer’s focus on the epistemological nature of hermeneutic conversation without offering guidance on concrete and practical actions that can or should be taken to effect social structures to render them more just. As such, Buker (1990) claimed that “[Gadamer’s] social theory lacks practice” (p. 32). In other words, she stressed that Gadamerian hermeneutic scholars cannot claim to make practical contributions to social justice without explicitly naming the societal and political power structures that marginalize and oppress people. She also lamented a limitation of hermeneutic discourse at the time, namely its lack of acknowledgment of the makeup of its scholarly body:

Researchers working within androcentric contexts produce androcentric research - male centered research. From a hermeneutical perspective, this is not necessarily a fault. It becomes a fault the moment the researchers claim that the research represents both men and women. From a feminist hermeneutic perspective, this claim lacks self-knowledge because it is unaware of its own gender perspective. It is this false claim to universality that a feminist hermeneutics rejects. (Buker, 1990, p. 27)

This quote points to a need for Gadamerian hermeneutics to apply its prized and highly effective means to lay bare the preunderstandings and prejudices it inherited through its scholarly tradition. While Buker’s concerns were primarily of gender, this is true of other aspects of identity that influence situatedness such as race, sexual orientation, age, disability, etc.

Buker was not alone in her critique of Gadamer’s work. Warnke (1993) also noted that the question of power is all but omitted in Gadamerian hermeneutics. She wrote: “a hermeneutic conception of discourse and mutual education seems to have left completely behind it one of the questions with which we began – namely, that of power” (Warnke, 1993, p. 94). Warnke explored the idea of power in hermeneutics and postmodernism, particularly power structures preventing women from fully participating in society with the same rights as men. She highlighted that using hermeneutics to interrogate and develop awareness of our pre-understandings does not, as conveyed by Gadamer, take into account that the hermeneutic tradition itself may “be not only conditioned, but also systematically distorted, by social and economic conditions and relations of power” (Warnke, 1993, p. 94). As such, Warnke warned hermeneutic scholars of the hazards of omitting discussions of power structures as explained by Buker. Namely, participating in hermeneutic conversation within the hermeneutic tradition with scholars of this tradition, could in fact reinforce our existing pre-understandings of social structures as neutral, or presenting equal opportunities to men and women. Warnke (1993) added that the lack of discussion and reflection around structures of power “may mean that there are interpretive voices that have been repressed or excluded from our hermeneutic debates and from which we have therefore been unable to learn” (p. 95). Here, much like Buker, Warnke highlights that people traditionally excluded from political and scholarly debates have not had an opportunity to have their perspectives included within the hermeneutic tradition. This warning reiterates the fundamental need for hermeneutic scholars to interrogate their own preunderstandings, not only of their topic of study, but those they inherited from the very hermeneutic tradition upon which they have built their philosophical and theoretical frameworks.

During a database search, we found theoretical and philosophical papers addressing both feminist opportunities and critiques of Gadamer’s work. However, we could not find research papers that used feminist hermeneutics (or feminism and hermeneutics) as part of the theoretical framework or methodology for human studies. As mentioned throughout the paper, Gadamer’s (1996) examination and critique of modern medicine as overly focused on the “science” and not enough on the “art” has generated a vast and rich hermeneutic scholarship of the health sciences. This may actually be the closest that Gadamer ever came to openly acknowledging the power of social structures and institutions and how marginalized people can attempt to navigate them. It is also a key link to feminist scholarship and could contribute to advances within the framework of patient-centered care and whole-person care not only for women but for anyone navigating health care systems regardless of their situatedness.

Applying Feminist Hermeneutics

Once the first author had established foundational knowledge in hermeneutics and feminist scholarship, both authors decided to analyze the data collected previously as part of the first author’s master’s thesis. The narrative data detailed the research participants’ social and personal experiences at home, in school, and in medical settings. The adolescent girls living with scoliosis, which caused them chronic pain and various degrees of disability, were part of an all-girls peer support group for adolescent girls living with scoliosis.

Together, we reflected on the suitability of analyzing these data through a feminist lens without having designed the study with feminism explicitly in mind. Ideally, feminist principles should be embedded in every stage of the research process. We noted that while the study did not include explicitly feminist methodologies, many of the specific methods used in the study could be considered feminist in nature. Let us think back, for example, to the main bond between philosophical hermeneutics and feminist theory: the desire to reveal preunderstandings leading to a new analysis and a transformed understanding. Through the original analysis, we wanted to explore the experiences of adolescent girls living with scoliosis in healthcare settings. This required designing interview questions inviting participant answers that spoke to a wide range of these experiences, including experiences of prejudice. This design, hermeneutic in nature, allowed us to proceed with the second analysis, with the addition of feminist theory. We also pondered the consequences of writing this paper as we envisioned it versus not writing it. This question immediately raised the prospect of losing valuable knowledge if we chose not write this manuscript. At the time, we did not know what findings would emerge from this new approach to the data, but we knew that they would deepen not only my understanding of the population but that of healthcare providers treating this population. With more education and awareness of their patients, clinicians can provide care and services that are better adapted to the needs of that population.

Confident that the hermeneutic approach used for the original research design and data collection could accommodate a feminist perspective, we began reflecting on what theories to use in the paper. We eventually landed on intersectionality as theorized by Kimberlé Crenshaw and testimonial injustice as theorized by Miranda Fricker. Crenshaw (1991) initially coined the term intersectionality to describe the experiences of compounded racism and misogyny of Black women in the United States of America. However, the academic understanding of intersectionality has now grown to describe the experiences of anyone with marginalized identities (Hill Collins & Bilge, 2020). For example, a disabled Indigenous cisgender man will experience Canadian healthcare differently from an abled white transgender woman. In the study at hand, the participants were marginalized through their gender (women and girls), their age (adolescents), and their health status (disabled or living with a chronic health condition ¹ ). These combined identities are complex, and each component compounds with the others to create a specific experience of healthcare that is unique to people with these identities.

With this in mind, Fricker’s theory of testimonial injustice comes into play. Fricker (2011) posits that testimonial injustice occurs when the hearer of a testimony discredits the testimony based on preconceived ideas about the speaker that live in the social imagination. This injustice harms the speaker, who risks internalizing that their testimony is not worth hearing, and for the hearer, who misses out on the knowledge offered by the speaker through their testimony. In the context of the study at hand, this took the form of clinicians reinterpreting an adolescent girl’s complaint about her hips being uneven as her simply experiencing body dysmorphia. This speaker’s testimony was discredited by the hearer due to their prejudice, resulting in a delayed diagnosis of scoliosis.

These two theories, taken together, offer a robust framework through which to hermeneutically analyze the data previously gathered. The questions in the interview guide were open-ended and exploratory, allowing participants to answer them by drawing on the experiences and memories that were most salient and important to them. Without explicitly asking about these topics, we heard stories relating to body image, dating, and intergenerational learning. Even though we had not designed the questions with gender or girlhood in mind, the hermeneutic nature of the original inquiry opened up the topic to the entire identity of the participants, letting them express parts of their story that they might usually keep to themselves, or not express to their healthcare providers. This whole-person approach offers the participants a dialogical space to reflect on their experiences in a way they previously may not have, resulting in deep, rich, and highly interpretable data.

The main difference that emerged in the second analysis had to do with power distribution, specifically in the physician-patient relationship. In the original analysis, hermeneutic study of the data showed that participants perceived their pain and to be dismissed at times by healthcare and education professionals as well as their friends and family. Additionally, they perceived their knowledge of themselves, such as knowing what physical activity they could or could not perform, to be equally dismissed (Vigouroux, 2022). This first analysis focused on the effect of this feeling of dismissal on the participants and what it meant for their ongoing identity formation as adolescents. In contrast, during the second analysis, we turned our attention to the power dynamics that may lead to feelings of dismissal, namely conducting a discussion of testimonial injustice. Through this discussion, we demonstrated that participants were wronged in their capacity as knowers when their pain or knowledge is dismissed (Vigouroux et al., 2023). Correspondingly, we concluded that “a defining feature of a peer support group might be that, within its confines, it eliminates the testimonial injustice that has been experienced by the group’s members” (Vigouroux et al., 2023, p. 7). This conclusion could explain, in part, the strong feelings of belonging and growing confidence that were reported by participants once they joined the support group. These findings were a direct result of incorporating feminist methods into an existing hermeneutic framework of qualitative data analysis. This example illustrates perfectly the importance of using both approaches concurrently, as together, they can explore the human nuances of similar lived experiences while simultaneously naming and understanding how these experiences are influenced by existing social hegemonies.

Conclusion

Through this paper, we have discussed the relationship between hermeneutics and feminist theory and laid out our own process for this combined research approach. Our hope in writing this article was first to offer insight into applied philosophical hermeneutics as a research approach that can be puzzling due to its lack of prescriptive methodology. Our main objective was to reflect on feminist scholars’ understanding and use of Hans-Georg Gadamer’s work on philosophical hermeneutics. We have meticulously examined the feminist potentials and criticisms inherent within Gadamerian Hermeneutics, offering insights into our own endeavors to integrate feminist methodologies into qualitative data analysis. Finally, we invoked the hermeneutic wager to assess the risks associated with applying Feminist Hermeneutics to our analytical framework, thereby encouraging further dialogue and critical engagement within the scholarly community. We showcased the interpretive possibilities of combining a feminist theoretical framework and an applied philosophical hermeneutic approach. Demonstrating how these theories and approaches are used together in human studies opens up scholarly conversations around findings that would otherwise not have been available. In the case of the study discussed in this paper, the findings hinted at the way that the prejudices against adolescent girls that live in the social imagination can affect not only the patient-physician relationship but also the care that these patients receive. This conversation is crucial to have and keep having in healthcare to offer high-quality care and services across different intersections of identity.