Researching Women in the Legal Professions: Reflexivity and Ethics in feminist qualitative research

This chapter examines reflexivity and ethics in researching women legal professionals in China, with a focus on researcher positionality and the place of emotion in field research. Drawing on my experiences as a female socio-legal researcher conducting two empirical studies on women judges and lawyers across courts and law firms within the jurisdiction, I explore how shifting positionality, emotional labour and the ethics of care are negotiated in the field. More specifically, I reflect on how shifting hierarchies influenced research access, researcher-participant interaction and the interpretation of findings, and how care for participants intersected, sometimes uncomfortably, with care for the self. Employing feminist standpoint theory, Bourdieu’s concepts of field and capital, and the frameworks of emotional labour and feminist ethics of care, I illustrate that positionality is not fixed but shifts across contexts, participants and encounters, and that emotions are not just fieldwork costs but epistemologically significant. Together, rigorous reflexivity itself contributes distinctively to knowledge production. The chapter highlights the ethical dilemmas and methodological challenges of qualitative socio-legal research with judicial and legal professionals, offering empirically grounded, compelling narratives of women in the Chinese legal world, to enrich gender-and-law scholarship which has too often been grounded in the Northern experiences.