Women’s situated experience, their situated-ness or locality leads to constructing knowledge about the self relating the situation. Particular ideas of their (women’) identities are produced corresponding to the specific manifestations of power or patriarchal rules within any given culture. Women are defined and interpreted by others around them who have the legitimated authority for accounting them. This means that women’ identities and femininities are constructed not only by themselves but also by others corresponding to the particular notions invented and developed by the vantage group, men.
Women have often resisted the dominant account about them and the traditionally assigned roles to them. However, discussing women’s resistance usually focuses on collective or organized movements, not individual women’s resistance. It is important to examine individual resistance and how such resistance emerges, so that we can better understand different levels of resistance and how these levels might interact.
Expressing the mutual dependence of social structure and agency, Giddens argues that “social structure is produced and reproduced in what people do (Giddens and Pierson, 1998: 77).” The social structure invisibly exists or is formed in people’s day-to-day use of it, and it becomes real in the consequences of recurrent individual interactions.
Whilst individuals’ everyday interactions in traditional societies were based on clearly defined expectations and roles, in the modern age individuals have to develop roles for themselves. The shift from the traditional to the modern era gives individuals a space and time for reflecting on who they are and what they do to interact with other individuals. This chance for reflexivity is viewed as particularly important for the modern self. For Giddens, individuals, who live in the modern world, experience the process of monitoring, questioning and speculating about the behavior of the self and others within the particular social conditions. Modern individuals give reflected feedbacks to their own actions responding to the relations with others. Inquiring into self (the self-identity) is explicating the relations between the personal and the social. In terms of this, individual reflecting process is “institutional” because it is a “basic structuring element of social activity in modern settings (Giddens, 1992: 28).”
Giddens credits Foucault’s exploration of the modern power and the subject.
Foucault argues that the modern power exerts through self-disciplining mechanisms of surveillance. Attentive and curious individuals come to understand the relations with others through constant observation and examination of the self (Foucault, [1978] 1990;
Foucault, [1977] 1995). So, having confessions and uttering narratives about the self are the moment or the space when/where the individual (the subject) meets the self.
Psychoanalysis and psychiatry invade the moment or the space with knowledge, and the knowledgeable power disciplines the individuals’ emotion, desire, behavior about the self. In spite of his preeminent exploration about the modern self and its relations with structural power, Giddens criticizes Foucault portrayal as a “one-way” intrusion of power-knowledge into social organization (Giddens, 1992: 28). In Foucault’s discussion, by disciplining the bodies corresponding to the scientific knowledge about appropriate relations, the subjects have been absorbed into the structural web of relations of others.
This means that modern subjects are disciplined to make socially acceptable relationships – relations in the moral, sexual, educational, religious, and other domains.
The disciplined subjects achieve significant meanings only for maintaining the relations with other members of society.
Different from Foucault, Giddens posits self-understanding and autonomy of action to the self monitoring or self examination process of the modern individuals.
Associating self-identity with personal autonomy, Giddens asserts that the process of reflexivity opens many “emancipatory” politics and “autonomous development” of the modern individuals (Giddens, 1992: 64). For Giddens, the development of reflexive attention entails the recognition of choice – the way to access life style opportunities.
The creative construction of lifestyle becomes feasible through diverse ways – political resistance, distinctive cultural life style, or social movement. The reflexive shaping of self-identity is constituted in the exploration of different opportunities in everyday life.
While Giddens seeks to examine the reflexive modern self and its emancipatory possibility, Dorothy Smith explores the socially and culturally assigned condition of the
individual for a particular emancipatory possibility, resistance. Claiming “the social” at
“the actual local site of the body,” Smith argues that the sociological inquiry should start with the social agent who is actually (physically) located in the web of social relations (Smith, 1999: 4).
“The knowing subject” is always located in a particular spatial and temporal site, and sociological inquiry explicates what s/he does not know – “the social relations and organization pervading her or his world but invisible in it (Smith, 1999: 5).” Giddens is not satisfied with G. H. Mead’s I/me/you (the generalized others) relation because ‘I,’
the unsocialized subjectivity, is not successfully founded for the emergence of self-awareness or reflexivity (Giddens, 1991). But Smith more focuses on how the social emerges in the three-way relations of I/you/me. Referring to Mead’s view of the object constituted in the social act, not external to the individuals, Smith finds practices of referring to objects as moments in a social act by observing the self and others.
“Referring is a concerting of consciousnesses through symbolic interaction” (Smith, 1999: 115), and for an individual, referring is significant to make the self accountable to others and also to the self because referring is always based on “the social grammar”
(Smith, 1999: 117). Thus, Smith asserts that in the three-way relation, not just subject-object, but subject-object-subject, the social agent achieves its social significance or actually exists relating with always “implicitly present” others (Smith, 1999: 117).
For Smith, the spatial uniqueness of the agent gives her/him the space of resistance. This is the place or the moment, in which the subject is situated or located;
“I” and “me” meet (Mead); the subject looks at the self in the “looking-glass” (Cooley);
the subject feels deflection (ACT); the subject confesses to the psychiatrist (Foucault);
the subject speculates or reflects on the self (Giddens); the “situated knowledge” is produced (Haraway); “the social” emerges (Smith); the subject defines and redefines the situation s/he encounters; and the resistance emerges.
Women in engineering schools are situated and located in a particular context.
They have learned cultural expectations about women through the socialization process, and they have also learned what is expected for an engineer through encountering events in engineering schools. They acknowledge the rules and regulations for being an engineer, but they sometimes want to violate the rules invented and maintained by the dominant members of engineering schools, men. Women in engineering volunteer to follow the rules to be an engineer, but simultaneously they seek to find the chances to be different from the expected engineers. Their situated-ness or locality triggers the opportunities to reflect upon the self as a woman and as an engineer, and the situated-ness or locality can lead to resistance.
CHAPTER III
METHODS AND RESEARCH DESIGN