F eminist and g ender t heories
Feminist and Gender Theories
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Feminist and Gender Theories
325 Institutional Ethnography (2005) Dorothy Smith W omen ’ s s tandpoint : e mBodied k noWinG vs the r ulinG r elations It’s hard to recall just how radical the experience of the women’s movement was at its inception for those of us who had lived and thought within the masculinist regime against which the movement struggled. For us, the struggle was as much within ourselves, with what we knew how to do and think and feel, as with that regime as an enemy outside us. Indeed we ourselves had participated however pas- sively in that regime. There was no developed dis- course in which the experiences that were spoken originally as everyday experience could be trans- lated into a public language and become political in the ways distinctive to the women’s movement. We learned in talking with other women about experi- ences that we had and about others that we had not had. We began to name “oppression,” “rape,” “harassment,” “sexism,” “violence,” and others. These were terms that did more than name. They gave shared experiences a political presence. Starting with our experiences as we talked and thought about them, we discovered depths of alien- ation and anger that were astonishing. Where had all these feelings been? How extraordinary were the transformations we experienced as we discovered with other women how to speak with one another about such experiences and then how to bring them forward publicly, which meant exposing them to men. Finally, how extraordinary were the transfor- mations of ourselves in this process. Talking our experience was a means of discovery. What we did not know and did not know how to think about, we could examine as we found what we had in com- mon. The approach that I have taken in developing an alternative sociology takes up women’s stand- point in a way that is modeled on these early adven- tures of the women’s movement. It takes up women’s standpoint not as a given and finalized form of knowledge but as a ground in experience from which discoveries are to be made. It is this active and shared process of speaking from our experience, as well as acting and organiz- ing to change how those experiences had been cre- ated, that has been translated in feminist thinking into the concept of a feminist standpoint—or, for me, women’s standpoint. However the concept originated, Sandra Harding (1988) drew together the social scientific thinking by feminists, particu- larly Nancy Hartsock, Hilary Rose, and myself, that had as a common project taking up a stand- point in women’s experience. Harding argued that feminist empiricists who claimed both a special privilege for women’s knowledge and an objectiv- ity were stuck in an irresolvable paradox. Those she described as “feminist standpoint theorists” moved the feminist critique a step beyond feminist empiri- cism by claiming that knowledge of society must always be from a position in it and that women are privileged epistemologically by being members of an oppressed group. Like the slave in Hegel’s par- able of the master-slave relationship, they can see more, further, and better than the master precisely because of their marginalized and oppressed condi- tion. She was, however, critical of the way in which experience in the women’s movement had come to hold authority as a ground for speaking, and claim- ing to speak truly, that challenged the rational and objectified forms of knowledge and their secret masculine subject. Furthermore, feminist stand- point theory, according to Harding, implicitly reproduced the universalized subject and claims to objective truth of traditional philosophical dis- course, an implicit return to the empiricism we claimed to have gone beyond. The notion of women’s standpoint—or indeed the notion that women’s experience has special authority—has also been challenged by feminist theorists. It fails to take into account diversities of SOURCE: Excerpts from Institutional Ethnography by Dorothy Smith. Copyright © 2005 by AltaMira Press. Reproduced with permission of AltaMira Press via Copyright Clearance Center. |
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