Las altas tasas de interés incrementaron el riesgo sistémico en el sector

An important contribution of feminist thinking about methodology has been the questioning of traditional notions about knowledge and objectivity. Western feminist thought developed from ways of thinking deriving from the European Enlightenment, and which were influential in nineteenth and twentieth century ideas about social

research (Ramazanoğlu and Holland, 2002). Feminists then began to challenge the basis of such ways of thinking, highlighting its masculinist bias and exclusion of women’s experience. Enlightenment thinking, broadly speaking, employs reason as a means of acquiring knowledge, leading to the freedom and autonomy of ‘mankind’. Descartes is said to have established the principles of modern scientific method in the seventeenth century by proposing that knowledge of the natural world can be gained only through the mind or reason, rather than the senses or intuition (Ramazanoğlu and Holland, 2002: 26). His dualism of mind (conscious being) and matter (objects of knowledge) has become embedded in Western ways of thinking, that employs taken-for-granted dualisms. For example, reason and rationality is pitted against emotion, mind against body, subject versus object and male against female, with the second half of the pair consistently devalued (Maynard, 1994). Feminists have shown the influence of such thinking in prevalent views that position women as mistresses of passion and emotion, and closer to nature than men, who are able to use their superior capacity for reason to master their passions and bodies (Ramazanoğlu and Holland, 2002: 29). Exposing the prevalence and political nature of such dominant modes of thought has thus been one of the tasks of feminists, particularly those seeking to reposition women as possessors of equally valid knowledge. Dorothy Smith (1988), for example, highlighted the

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detached from experience and takes a supposedly universal stance, which masks the fact that sociology is dominated by males and expresses their experience. She argued that the creation and dissemination of the way we think about society form part of the “relations of ruling” – the intersecting forms of social relations, based on capitalist relations and a gender subtext. Thus “positions of power are occupied by men almost exclusively, which means that our forms of thought put together a view of the world from a place women do not occupy” (Smith, 1988: 19). To redress this, Smith proposed starting from a women’s standpoint as a way of seeing, from where women actually experience their daily lives – feminist standpoint theories are explored further below. Another influential feminist writer, Donna Haraway ([1991] 2004), also revealed the claims to neutrality and objectivity made by male science that performs “the god-trick of seeing everything from nowhere” (ibid: 86). She questioned the “illusion” that knowledge is produced from a disembodied position, and instead insists on “the particularity and embodiment of all vision” (ibid: 87). However feminists’ claims to produce a ‘better’ knowledge of society that incorporates women’s experience is also beset by epistemological difficulties in trying to define the relationship between knowledge and reality. Ramazanoğlu and Holland (2002) describe four positions that can be taken by modernist feminists (as opposed to those taking a postmodernist stance) on connecting knowledge and reality and the relationship between objectivity and subjectivity.

In the first of these, objectivity is seen as separate from, and superior to, subjectivity, and to be objective, researcher’s findings must be impartial, general and free from personal and political biases. From the arguments already made, it will be clear that few feminists would argue that reason is productive of objective or unbiased knowledge, and a political commitment to research for women precludes claims to neutrality in any case. Sandra Harding ([1993] 2004), though, has tried to resist relativism by retaining a notion of objectivity in feminist research, arguing for a ‘strong objectivity’ that includes a critical reflection on the knowledge production process. However, Ramazanoğlu and Holland (2002) argue that Harding reflects a common confusion between objectivity (referring to knowledge that is free from bias or subjectivity) and validity (telling a better story of women’s experiences and therefore making connections between ideas and reality). Harding’s steps for ‘maximising strong objectivity’ include critical reflection on the production of knowledge and grounding research questions in the

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standpoint of the marginalised. But Ramazanoğlu and Holland (2002: 52) argue that reframing objectivity in this way cannot escape the dualism of subject and object. Harding is trying to “strengthen objectivity in the service of validity”.

A second position on the relationship between objectivity and subjectivity sees subjectivity as separate from, and superior to, objectivity (Ramazanoğlu and Holland, 2002). Some radical feminists have been accused of reversing the duality between subjectivity and objectivity by arguing that women’s close relationship with their bodies gives women feminine powers of thought and therefore access to feminine sources of knowledge. Such views have been criticised as essentialist, although Ramazanoğlu and Holland (2002: 53) point out that valuing personal experience is an important

contribution of feminist thought, and is not the same as taking subjectivity as superior to objectivity.

A third position views objectivity and subjectivity as inseparable, and draws on the Marxist method of material dialectics in which subjectivity and objectivity are problematically inseparable. This view sees all efforts to describe social reality as political, but argues that it is still possible to be scientific in connecting ideas to

underlying realities. Thus Marx conceptualised actual connections between observations of workers’ lives and his theories of exploitation and capitalism. Marx’s notion that political commitment is inevitably part of the process of knowledge production is shared with feminist thought, and Marxism has been influential in the development of feminist standpoint (Harding, 2004).

A fourth position, relativism, argues that valid knowledge of an external social world is neither directly nor indirectly accessible. In this view, all that can be known is

interpreted within a particular language of knowing, and there is therefore no way of judging between competing claims to truth. There are only multiple and contingent truths. Ramazanoğlu and Holland, however, believe that a wholly relativist position is incompatible with feminist politics and ethics based on principles of emancipation and justice:

“It matters which accounts of reality are believed and acted on; it matters who has the power to determine what counts as authoritative knowledge; it matters how knowledge claims are expressed and what weight they carry. Feminism is politically dismembered by relativism” (2002: 57).

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Outlining these broad stances on the relationship between truth and reality and feminist ideas has served to highlight some key debates within social research more generally, which connect to theories of what the social world consists of (ontology). This is discussed further below in relation to Derek Layder’s ideas. I now turn to a particular version of feminist thinking, feminist standpoint theory, that has attempted to escape the constraints of specifying a relationship between feminist knowledge and truth/reality.

4.2.1 Feminist standpoint theory

Instead of concerning itself only with justifying the validity of truth claims, taking a feminist standpoint implies examining questions of how knowledge and power are connected. Sandra Harding, one of the foremost proponents of standpoint theory, rejects a characterisation of standpoint theory as seeking to justify the truth of feminist claims to more accurate accounts of reality, saying that “rather, it is the relations between power and knowledge that concern these thinkers” (Harding, [1997] 2004: 255). As shown above, standpoint thinkers such as Smith and Haraway have identified how male supremacy and the production of knowledge have been intertwined: they then outline ways in which knowledge drawn from women’s lives can produce better accounts of society.

Standpoint theories propose that “starting off thought” from the lives of marginalized peoples will generate less partial and less distorted accounts of social life by providing clear grounds for knowledge (Harding, [1993] 2004: 128). Dorothy Smith argues for “discovering society from where people are as participants in it” in order to gain access to knowledge of “what is tacit, known in the doing” (Smith, [1997] 2004: 266). Neither Smith nor Harding argue that such an “epistemologically advantaged starting point” (Harding, [1993] 2004: 128) provides an objective grounds for knowledge on its own, but that it is a necessary starting point for accounts of social reality.

Smith believes, however, that while we must begin examination of society from the accounts of women’s everyday experiences, they cannot be relied upon to explain the wider relations that shape and determine that everyday life: “How they are knitted into the extended social relations of a contemporary capitalist economy is not discoverable with them” (Smith, 1988: 110). Gaining such an understanding is the work of the social scientist. This reflects her ontological beliefs about how the social world is made up of

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two levels of social reality: local practices and the external social relations which affect and determine them (Layder, 2006: 200).

Although not necessarily sharing Smith’s views about the duality of social reality, Donna Haraway is also clear that the standpoints of the subjugated do not offer a total or unbiased perspective. She stresses that such positionings need critical re-examination and interpretation: “the standpoints of the subjugated are not innocent positions”

([1991] 2004: 88). It is precisely because they are situated and not attempting to

perform the ‘god-trick’ of claiming universal knowledge that subjugated standpoints are preferred as offering more adequate accounts of the world. She argues for “situated knowledges” and seeks “partial, locatable, critical knowledges” (ibid: 89). Being explicit about the location or position from which knowledge is claimed is essential for Haraway; ‘unlocatable’ knowledge claims are ‘irresponsible’ as they cannot be called into account.

Black women writers have also employed standpoint perspectives to show how a ‘marginal’ or ‘outsider’ status can generate distinctive perspectives (Collins, [1986] 2004; hooks, [1990] 2004). bell hooks ([1990] 2004: 156) describes how those at the ‘margin’ can offer a radical perspective, based on the experience of Black Americans growing up in a small Kentucky town.

“Living as we did - on the edge - we developed a particular way of seeing reality. We looked both from the outside in and from the inside out. We focused our attention on the center as well as on the margin. We understood both… This sense of wholeness, impressed upon our consciousness by the structure of our daily lives, provided us with an oppositional world-view - a mode of seeing unknown to most of our oppressors.”

In this way hooks presents marginality not as a place from which to escape, but as “a space of resistance” that allows the possibility of change: “It offers to one the possibility of radical perspective from which to see and create, to imagine alternatives, new

worlds” ([1990] 2004: 157).

Critics of feminist standpoint theory have argued that it denies differences between women by prioritising the standpoint of ‘women’, which focuses on commonalities, and may risk essentialising ‘womanhood’. Yet black feminist thinkers have played a

significant role in the development of standpoint thought and in highlighting the diversity of women’s experience resulting from the intersecting and interlocking forms of race, gender and class oppression. Collins ([1986] 2004) shows how attention to the

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interlocking nature of oppression shifts the focus of investigation from one that prioritises one form of oppressive system, for example, class, and then tries to insert other variables, such as race or gender, into this framework. Instead an intersectional approach focuses on the links and interactions between the different forms of

oppression. It thus avoids a universalistic view of the experiences of ‘women’ or ‘black people’ and looks always for interactions between forms of class, gender and race oppression, among others (see 3.3).

A feminist standpoint approach is valuable for my research in several ways. First, it raises important questions about how knowledge is produced: by whom, for whom, and about whom. It has challenged supposedly universal theories by drawing attention to the partial nature of their production, and the absences and exclusions of women and other subordinated groups. Secondly, by “starting off thought” or investigation from the position of the lives of women, the focus can be on both the meanings and

interpretations that they attach to their experiences, as well as the material conditions that they experience in their daily work and home lives. This does not, however, mean that structural inequalities in society will be neglected, but a unified, structural

theoretical framework will not be imposed and tested on the data (see below). Thirdly, although feminist standpoint theory has been criticised for prioritising ‘woman’ over other categories or identities, I believe that this does not have to be to the exclusion of other differences, and a feminist standpoint can be compatible with an intersectional approach that explores the links and interactions between different forms of oppression, as argued by Collins ([1986] 2004).