Situated Knowledges
Donna J. Haraway
Terms and concepts 1: what is
objectivity?
 Common sensical definition: how would you define
objectivity?
 Science vs. humanities argument:
 What ‘they’ mean by objectivity: „the imagined ‘they’
constitute an invisible conspiracy of masculinist
scientists and philosophers”
 ‘We’ are the embodied others, who are not allowed
not to have a body, a finite point of view (going back
to Simone de Beauvoir’s definition of woman as the
other). To put it simply: scientists determine what is
objective, what counts as knowledge. This is not a
new problem; Shelley, „A Defence of Poetry”, famous
syaing: „poets are the unacknowledged legislators of
the world”
Terms and concepts 2:
constructionism
 Constructivism vs. essentialism debate in gender studies:
essential feminine voice (French feminism: Julia Kristeva,
Heléne Cixous) vs. as the term „gender” itself suggests: the
feminine is constructed on the basis of social conventions
 Simone de Beauvoir: „One is not born but becomes a woman. [.
. .] It is civilization that produces this creature. She is defined
and differentiated with reference to man, and not he with
reference to her; she is the inessential, the incidental as
opposed to the essential. He is the Subject, the Absolute – she
is the Other.” (The Second Sex, 1949.)
 What are the dangers involved in taking this position?
 Haraway: „recent social studies of science and technology have
made available a very strong social constructivist argument for
all forms of knowledge claims, most certainly and especially
scientific ones”. Danger: this can lead to cynical relativism.
Haraway’s criticism 1: relativism
 She uses an ironical language: „then came the law of the father
and its resolution of the problem of objectivity, solved by always
already absent referents, deferred signifieds, split subjects, and
the endless play of signifiers” - which approaches is she
referring to here? Not just the constructivist approach in gender
studies!
 Her argument: „social constructionism cannot be allowed to
decay into the radiant emanations of cynicism”
 The consequence is absurd: „History is a story Western culture
buffs tell each other; science is a contestable text and a power
field; the content is the form” (I.e., Derrida, Roland Barthes,
Hayden White: the argument that history is a narrative construct,
not an objective account of facts)
Haraway’s criticism 2: reality
 A central issue in the humanities and social sciences;
no longer taken for granted; seen as constructed,
unaccountable
 Haraway is critical of the concept of the real too, yet
she also questions the way radical constructivist
theories think of it: we „would still like to talk about
reality with more confidence than we allow the
Christian right’s discussion of the Second Coming
and their being raptured out of the final destruction of
the world”; why does she use this particular
example?
Haraway’s criticism 3: knowledge and
facts
 She is also critical of the changes new
approaces lead to in education: „We
unmasked the doctrines of objectivity
because they threatened our budding sense
of collective historical subjectivity and agency
and our ‘embodied’ accounts of truth, and we
ended up with one more excuse for not
learning any post-Newtonian physics” why do
social constructivist approaches lead to not
taking knowledge and facts seriously?
Haraway’s agenda 1: a network
connections
 She does not simply aim to criticise existing modes of
knowledge and accounts of the world; she argues
that feminists need new modes of knowledge:
 „Feminists have to insist on a better account of the
world; it is not enough to show radical historical
contingency and modes of construction for
everything”
 Her thesis: „we do need an earth-wide network of
connections, including the ability partially to translate
knowledges among very different – and powerdifferentiated – communities”. Why are connections
so vital for feminist objectivity?
Situated knowledges
Her definition of objectivity on page 188: „feminist
objectivity means quite simply situated
knowledges”. What does situated knowledges
mean?
1. embodied, localised. „objectivity turns out to be
about particular and specific embodiment, and
definitely not about the false vision of promising
transcendence of all limits of responsibility”. Can
you think about an example of ‘transcendental’
knowledge claims?
2. shared, connected. The alternative to relativism is
partial, locatable, critical knowledges sustaining the
possibility pf webs of connections called solidarity in
politics and shared conversation in epistemology”

Some other useful terms
Interpret the following terms:
1. „God-trick” of universalism
2. Non-innocent knowledge
3. Partial perspective
4. Local knowledges
5. Essentialised image of The Third World
Woman
6. Self-reflexivity
In practice: the questions one should
ask before presenting a story
How to see? Where to see from? What limits to
vision? What to see for? Whom to see with?
Who gets to have more than one point of
view? Who gets blinkered? Who wears
blinkers? Who interprets the visual field?
What other sensory powers do we wish to
cultivate besides vision? Why do we need to
ask these questions? What happens if we do
not?
Groupwork
Using Haraway’s theory for the study of the
media:
How would you construct a media text (news
report, film, documentary, etc.) about any
historical or social event? What would you do
to try to remain as objective as possible?
Think about a concrete example!