Feminist Epistemologies in Action
Week 5:
1.
Feminist Epistemologies: An Overview
What is Epistemology?
Ontology:
The study of what there is that can be known. What is knowable?
What is reality?
Epistemology:
The study of what knowledge is and the relationship between knower
and known. On what basis are claims to knowledge made?
Methodology:
The study of how we find things out.
Methods:
What we actually do to generate knowledge
Epistemology is the study of the production of knowledge, asking where knowledge comes
from and how much confidence we can have in it.
Associated with Aristotle and Descartes in western philosophy
Most important when new paradigms emerge
Sandra Harding in Feminism and Methodology sees epistemology as asking the key question:
Who can be a knower? That is, who will be accepted as an appropriate generator of
legitimate knowledge?
2.
What is Feminist Epistemology?
A concern with how the gender and gender politics of the knower enter into knowledge
production.
Shift from Women as Object of Knowledge to Women as Subject of Knowledge
New areas of research eg private domestic domain, women’s friendships
Concerns about why knowledge produced by men had distorted or ignored women’s
positions
Feminists sought their own cognitive authority
Instead of asking what can be known from a general vantage point about a specific category,
eg women, asked what can be known from a specific vantage point (feminist) about the wider
world.
3.
Feminist Empiricism
Elimination of male bias in theory and research practice through strict adherence to rigorous
norms of ethical, objective research practice in the different disciplines.
Assumes that all knowledge is empirically verifiable if correct and unbiased procedures are
used. That way objective knowledge can be attained.
Harding on traditional social science:
it has asked only the questions about social life that appear problematic from within
the social experiences that are characteristic for men (white, Western, bourgeois men,
that is). It has unconsciously followed a “logic of discovery” which we could
formulate in the following way: Ask only those questions about nature and social
life which (white, Western bourgeois) men want answered. How can “we humans”
achieve greater autonomy? What is the appropriate legal policy towards rapists and
raped women which leaves intact the normal standards of masculine sexual behavior?
(1987, p. 6).
The feminist empiricist project is to make research gender neutral, avoiding sexism in titles,
language, concepts, research design, interpretation and evaluation
4.
Feminist Standpoint
Harding adopts the term standpoint in Feminism and Methodology.
Attempt to validate feminist knowledge based on women’s specific standpoint, their social
location and political engagement.
Standpoint theorists seek both to critique the dominant conventional epistemologies and to
claim a basis for the legitimation of feminist knowledges
Feminist standpoint sees the problem of ‘malestream’ knowledge as deeper than one of ‘bias’
- it’s not enough to add women into existing frameworks of enquiry, rather the frameworks
themselves must be challenged.
Knowledge produced from the standpoint of women is argued to more comprehensive than
that produced from the standpoint of men.
a)
Smith’s feminist standpoint theory
Dorothy Smith (1987) The Everyday World as Problematic – writes of her experiences as
academic and single mother.
She found that moving ‘between a consciousness organized within the relations of ruling [the
University] and a consciousness implicated in the local particularities of home and family
transgressed a gender boundary’ (p. 7). The intellectual world appeared genderless but was
in fact highly gendered.
Women could be ‘known about’ only – there was no talking back. Smith seeks a Sociology
from the standpoint of women rather than from the relations of ruling that decentre women’s
experiences.
Feminist standpoint epistemology criticizes dualisms (eg mind-body; reason-emotion) and
their gendering.
Attention is paid to the way in which the apparently uninvolved, rational, universal
‘objective’ standpoint from which the natural and social sciences derived their legitimacy was
in reality a male standpoint, but a male standpoint which denied its own specificity.
Standpoint privileges women’s knowledge above other truths.
Women’s greater capacity to know is based on different aspects of women’s lives in different
accounts:
b)
Hartsock’s and Rose’s Feminist Standpoint Theory
Women’s superior ways of knowing are seen as deriving from their position in the sexual
division of labour.
Building on marxist epistemology whereby the material conditions of labour condition
perspective, such that the standpoint of the proletariat is privileged over that of the
bourgeoisie.
Women’s responsibility for social and biological reproduction, for care-work, means that
they refuse to separate feeling and intellect.
Women have a structurally-located double consciousness.
c)
Narayan’s Feminist Standpoint Theory
The foundations of feminist knowledge lie in women’s subordinate status and in the strategic
knowledge produced through political struggle. The oppressed have ‘double vision’ – to
survive they must know the practices of their group and those of the dominant group.
They are both insider and outsider simultaneously.
Tanesini distinguishes the claim that women have epistemic privilege over the social relations
shaped by patriarchy from the claim that women have epistemic privilege over all knowledge.
Is there an affective way of knowing? Eg Carol Gilligan’s ethic of care?
5.
Critique of Feminist Standpoint Epistemologies
a)
Essentialism
Relies on the idea of a universal woman’s perspective.
b)
Difference
Women’s experiences are so different therefore they will produce different knowledges.
How can these be judged?
Narayan – do feminist standpoint epistemologies western-centric concepts translate to the
majority world?
Is the standpoint of a woman synonymous with that of a feminist woman? How could
different knowledges be weighed?
c)
Experience
Experience makes a problematic foundation for knowledge because our access to it is a
construction.
d)
Power and Knowledge
Is being oppressed a guarantee of clarity of vision or possession of truth? Is the slave’s
knowledge more encompassing than the master’s, the subordinate’s than the ruler’s? The
master may be blinded by the will to power but the slave’s knowledge may be distorted by
internalised inferiority, envy and exposure to knowledge controlled by the oppressor.
Narayan: double vision is hard work.
It’s important not to idealize epistemic advantage.
Language of oppression-domination has been critiqued
6.
Responses from Feminist Standpoint Epistemology
a)
Standpoints
‘cognitive authority is associated not only with gender, but with, for example, ‘race’, class,
sexuality, culture and age (Alcoff and Potter, 1993, p. 3).
b)
Starting from marginal lives.
Harding’s Strong Objectivity (based not on method but going outside canon)
Examining the values that lie behind claims to knowledge
c)
Implications for Male Researchers
Does their privileged patriarchal position and implication in the ‘male gaze’
disqualify men from researching women’s lives?
Should pro-feminist men research men’s lives?
Should men’s experiences be attended to or will this only reproduce their apparently
universal but actually masculinist standpoint?
Haywood and Mac an Ghaill: the risk of male to male research relations generating
anti-feminist knowledge must be acknowledged, but so should be potential for what
Redman calls ‘empowering men to dis-empower themselves’.
And the potential for the world-view of researcher and researched to remain very
different, as in Schacht’s research with US rugby players.
7.
Poststructuralist Feminist Epistemology
Postructuralist epistemology will not privilege women’s knowledge above other truths.
Felski: the rejection of an objective, all-embracing standpoint problematises simultaneosly
the absolute authority of any of these, including feminism.
Postmodern feminist epistemology is interested only in deconstructing official discourses, in
deconstructing legitimacy claims around knowledge, and would not attempt to build a
discourse, to build legitimacy claims of its own.
Questions for Group Work
1.
What sorts of ‘knowers’ have you met in your life thus far, and on what basis have
they claimed the right to know? Think of as many different types as possible.
2.
List the various arguments used by feminist standpoint theorists to claim women’s
epistemic privilege. What do you think?
3.
Why does Narayan object to the concept of one feminist standpoint?
4.
Could men ever claim epistemic privilege?
5.
If feminist standpoints are in the plural, how could we resolve differences between
them?
6.
What epistemology will your dissertation pursue?