Proceso Interno de selección de candidatos: la consulta amplia

Mary Jo Neitz

Chapter summary

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feminist empiricism, feminist standpoint and radical construction. This chapter focuses on feminist standpoint.

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Introduction

Feminists beginning in the 1960s produced powerful critiques of the male centeredness of soci-ety’s institutions. Education, science and the production of knowledge did not escape. Feminists fi rst asked ‘where are the women?’, but soon the question shifted to ‘how do our theories and ways of doing research change, if we assume that gender is important?’ For feminist anthropolo-gists, historians, psychologists and sociologists concerned with doing research that would reduce inequality, these questions led to a critical examination of the research process. Feminist researchers argued that feminist research mandated feminist methods, informed by feminist epis-temologies and methodologies. However, agreement about which methods were feminist, and what constituted feminist methodology did not emerge. Lively debates about how feminists gather data, our relationships with those who are the subjects of research, how we write and for whom, continue to inform and challenge those of us who seek to do feminist research.

Among feminist researchers today we fi nd at least three different positions on the basic epistemological and ontological questions that undergird the production of knowledge: femi-nist empiricism, femifemi-nist standpoint and radical construction (see Box 1.4.2 ). This chapter focuses on feminist standpoint. Feminist standpoint analysis ¹ in the United States originated in the 1970s out of a powerful dialectic between two kinds of knowledge, one originating in a renewed interest in historical materialism among neomarxists in the academy and the other coming out of feminist consciousness raising groups in the Women’s Liberation Movement.

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s feminist standpoint analysis underwent a number of revi-sions, responding to both post-structural and postmodernist challenges in the academy and debates among activists. In this chapter I will fi rst introduce the main tenets of feminist stand-point analysis; second, briefl y review the debates and outline how feminist standstand-point changed;

third, I will suggest what current versions of feminist standpoint offer for research on religion;

and fourth, I will give several examplars of research that use feminist standpoint analysis.

Core concerns of feminist standpoint epistemology today

In her recent book, Feminist Methodologies for Critical Researchers , Joey Sprague (2005) reviews the debates of the previous 25 years, and articulates clearly and concisely a contemporary version of feminist standpoint methodology. Sprague’s interpretation of what is at the core and what can be discarded follows from her critical perspective: she assumes that all knowledge is interested , and that mainstream social science ‘tends to assume the position of privileged groups, helping to naturalize and sustain their privilege’ (ibid.: 2). As a quantitative researcher who practices feminist standpoint analysis, Sprague separates the methodology of standpoint anal-ysis from any particular method, quantitative or qualitative. This provides an important starting point for thinking about the ways that standpoint analysis can be used today.

Standpoint researchers believe that an individual’s actual location in the social and physical world and the work that s/he does there shapes her/his understandings. In particular locations, inhabitants develop interests in the knowledge that supports their activities. In addition, people in different locations have different access to various discourses, and different tools for under-standing and articulating their interests. Standpoint researchers believe that people in locations of relative power have an interest in maintaining their position, and that they are supported by the dominant institutions and discourses. A key issue for researchers, then, is refl exivity about one’s own interests, and the interests of one’s subjects. For Sprague, one of the distinctive quali-ties of feminist standpoint research is the choice to work for the disadvantaged rather than for those in power. This has ramifi cations for how we frame our questions, how we perform our analysis and whom we imagine as our audience. Rather than pursuing norms of objectivity, a practice which tends to support the status quo, Sprague asks social researchers to ask passion-ately, analyze critically and disseminate empoweringly (Sprague 2005: 199–200).

Box 1.4.1 Descriptive characteristics of standpoint methodology

• Work from the standpoint of the disadvantaged • Ground interpretations in interests and experience • Maintain a strategically diverse discourse

• Create knowledge that empowers the disadvantaged

(Sprague 2005: 75–80)

In common with other feminist standpoint researchers, Sprague distinguishes feminist stand-point from positivist and neopositivist methodologies, and also from radical constructionism and postmodernisms. In her view, conventional practices of doing research and reporting the results serve to defl ect criticism, limit the size and scope of the audience to specialists, hide the workings of power, and deaden potential emotional responses to fi ndings about the status quo (Sprague 2005: 167).

Box 1.4.2 Comparison across feminist methodologies

• Feminist empiricism. Feminist empiricists follow positivism in believing in the existence of a world outside of our experience of it, and that observations of it reveal patterns. The goal of the researcher is to objectively observe this world, in order to explain regularities and predict the future. They argue that much of previous research failed to achieve these ideals because researchers had race, class and gender biases. Feminist researchers seek to conduct research that avoids these biases (Hundleby 2007).

• Standpoint research: Standpoint researchers believe in the existence of a material world and emphasize starting analyses with people’s practical activities in specifi c locations in the world, and, at the same time, integrate assumptions about the social construction of subjects. All knowers are located in time and place, and all knowledge is partial. Empathy and attachment offer pathways for understanding others. The best research is multivocal with researchers owning their own positions.

• Postmodernism/radical constructionist : Knowledge is socially constructed; order and/or truth are not discovered existing out in the world, but rather are produced through language and culture. One goal of researchers is to deconstruct meanings embedded in existing theories and categories, including the category ‘woman’. Knowledge is a text, and there is no privi-leged interpretation. Researchers are no more authoritative than readers (Clough 1992;

Mascia-Lees et al. 1989).

Sprague criticizes conventional positivist methodologies in particular for failing to ask what it is about the social order that makes social problems more likely. She objects to research employing logical dichotomies and abstract individualism. She also rejects the process of objectifi cation, treating people as objects who have no ability to act on their own behalf.

While not positivist per se, she criticizes conventional ways of reporting fi ndings which have the effect of hiding the researcher. She cites Paget, who cautioned that ‘The author’s activity is displaced by the methods which act on the data for the author’ (Sprague 2005: 22). Sprague argues for using active voice when writing results: active voice necessitate writing that someone is doing something to someone. This is in contrast to conventional social science writing where ‘passive voice amounts to hiding the exercise of power’ (ibid.: 24). The issue of voice raises the question of how to put the author in the text. For Sprague, the researcher’s voice can be present as part of a multivocal text in which the researcher’s voice speaks along-side the voices of others.

Sprague makes a clear distinction between feminist standpoint epistemology and the idea of ‘giving voice’ to under-represented people as has been advocated by some qualitative feminist researchers (e.g. Gluck and Patai 1991). She argues that this idea misrepresents the power dynamics between the researcher and the researched. Not only does this neglect

consideration of the ways that the researched have power, but it also discounts the power that researchers have as authors, and often as possessors of specialized knowledge.

Furthermore, in contrast to some previous writers, for Sprague feminist standpoint is not about subjectivity; rather it is about location (Sprague 2005: 67). ² For Sprague, a feminist standpoint refers to, fi rst, an actual location in nature and the interests with regard to that location; second, the (shared) discourses that provide people with tools for making sense; and third, the positions in the social organization of knowledge production. This does not mean, however, that one cannot do research from a feminist standpoint and examine subjectivities;

rather it is a caution against assuming that they are the same.

Finally, Sprague argues that we can increase the likelihood that we will ask critical ques-tions, to the extent that we develop practices that move us outside of our closed academic conversations. She advocates getting involved in a community group, interrogating public discourse, studying up—starting with the experiences of people at the bottom of hierarchies rather than with the understandings of those at the top—and learning to pay attention to what is missing (Sprague 2005: 182–88).

Early expositions of standpoint theory: Hartsock and Smith

The political theorist Nancy Hartsock and sociologist Dorothy Smith independently worked early on in their careers on developing explicitly feminist epistemologies. In the late 1960s and early 1970s both were activists in the women’s movement and both were fi nishing grad-uate degrees in the social sciences: Smith, a British woman who would make her career in Canada, earned her doctoral degree in sociology at the University of California at Berkeley, and Hartsock, a US scholar, was in graduate school in political science at the University of Chicago. Both observed the contradiction between their experiences as knowers in the women’s movement and in the elite academic institutions where they were students: knowl-edge and ways of knowing validated through the women’s movement were dismissed in the academy. Hartsock (1983) drew on a Marxist framework, using the tools of historical mate-rialism to develop what she called a feminist standpoint. Hartsock wanted to show how women as knowers occupied a privileged location for understanding the gender order. She argued that women have access to the rules and understandings of the men in power, but they also have knowledge that comes out of the material conditions of their own subordinate posi-tion. ³ While women, similar to the working class for Marx, occupied a position of epistemo-logical privilege, the knowledge does not come ‘naturally’ by virtue of having a body that can be recognized by oneself and others as ‘female’; rather it is achieved through a collective process that Hartsock described as ‘Consciousness Raising’, a term with a specifi c reference to the practices of second-wave feminists.

In the 1970s Dorothy Smith began developing her critique of sociology, asking what soci-ology would look like from the feminist standpoint of women, which for her meant the actualities of women’s everyday life experiences (Smith 1974, 1987). Smith was infl uenced by ethnomethodology, a branch of sociology ‘which seeks to uncover the taken-for-granted that is prenormative and prior to discursive positing’ (Smith 1997: 398). ⁴ This provided her with tools for understanding women’s experience as identifi ed within the women’s movement as constituting a kind of tacit knowledge that could provide the starting point for a critical femi-nist sociology. Smith wrote about the profound dislocation she felt between her experience as a knower in the everyday world, and her experience as a social scientist in which she could be a ‘knower’, but only if she assumed a universalist, objective stance removed from and contra-dicting her experiences as a woman and mother. She described the disjuncture between her

experience as a scientist/knower/subject and the treatment of women as objects in sociology as a ‘line of fault’ (Smith 1987: 49). Her proposal for sociology from the feminist standpoint of women offered a way to understand social organization and the relations of ruling from starting in actual experiences of people in daily life. Her project puts the authority of the inquirer on the same epistemological plane as the authority of the subjects of inquiry.

Smith and Hartsock both used the word ‘feminist standpoint’ and both were familiar with and drew on the language of Marxism. However, it was the philosopher of science, Sandra Harding, who brought together Smith and Hartsock (along with Hillary Rose) under a common rubric as ‘feminist standpoint theorists’ in her award-winning book, The Science Question in Feminism (Harding 1986). Harding’s formalization of feminist standpoint theory became the received version, and critics internal to feminism and from the outside immedi-ately contested the claims of feminist standpoint theory. It is the former and how they changed the shape of feminist standpoint theory that interests us here.

Challenges: difference and postmodernism

In the 1980s new social movements and identity politics bloomed in North America and Western Europe. Within the feminist movement, ‘difference feminism’ gained visibility. As soon as feminist scholars began to articulate an epistemology starting from ‘the feminist standpoint of women’, critics began to deconstruct the category of ‘woman’ arguing that there was no one universal ‘woman’ and therefore there could be no ‘feminist standpoint of women’. Hartsock responded that her formulation does not posit a universal woman, and she pointed out that she emphasizes the achieved nature of a feminist standpoint. It is not given, but rather is the product of a political process of consciousness raising. Her epistemology is about a ‘feminist standpoint’ not a standpoint of women (Hartsock 1998). Smith’s response to the critics emphasized the local and particular nature of starting with the experience of women, whereby the feminist standpoint of women always refers to the particular women and their actual experiences, and is always open to including whoever is there or may come.

For Smith there is no abstracted (universal) ‘feminist standpoint of women’. ⁵

Postmodern critics also took issue with feminist standpoint theory. Radical deconstruction-ists cast away the careful claims of feminist standpoint epistemologies, along with more neop-ositivist ones of feminist empiricists: no knowledge claims could be privileged: all is rhetoric and persuasion. Donna Haraway, coming out of feminist science studies, responded to the postmodern arguments while maintaining an appreciation for the feminist critique of power at the heart of feminist standpoint epistemologies. She wrote of her radical desires for science:

how to have simultaneously an account of the radical historical contingency for all knowledge claims and knowing subjects, a critical practice for recognizing our own

‘semiotic technologies’ for making meanings, and a no nonsense commitment to faithful accounts of a ‘real’ world, one that can be partially shared and friendly to earth-wide projects of fi nite freedom, adequate material abundance, modest meaning in suffering, and limited happiness.

(Haraway 2004: 85) Contemplating these desires, Haraway offered the term ‘situated knowledges’ to describe a view of embodied knowledge, and argued for thinking in terms of scientifi c knowledge as partial and located visions brought into conversations with each other and contributing to a strategically diverse discourse.

All of these issues—how to respond to the concerns about difference among women and multiple perspectives while at the same time retaining the focus on power that was at the core of the original feminist theorists—are integral to the work of Patricia Hill Collins (1986, 1997, 2000). She maintains the idea that feminist standpoint is the product of group-based experiences. Like other standpoint feminists, she argues that feminist standpoint theory is a tool for talking about how dominant groups maintain their power in part through control over culture and knowledge production. Hill Collins also developed the concept of ‘ inter-sectionality ’—the study of interlocking matrices of oppression. ⁶ This concept is crucial for how feminist standpoint researchers today theorize location. Hill Collins describes what she and hers have come to call the intersectionality paradigm, as follows:

What we have now is increasing sophistication about how to discuss group location, not in the singular class framework proposed by Marx, nor in the early feminist frameworks arguing the primacy of gender, but within constructs of multiplicity residing in social structures themselves, and not individual women. Fluidity does not mean that groups disappear, to be replaced by an accumulation of decontextual-ized, unique women whose complexity erases politics. Instead the fl uidity of bound-aries operates as a new lens that potentially deepens understanding of how the actual mechanisms of institutional power can change dramatically while continuing to reproduce long standing inequalities of race and gender and class that result in group stability.

(Hill Collins 1997: 377) For Hill Collins, all knowledge is partial, and she values knowledge generated outside the academy. In her work Black Feminist Thought , she described the position of black feminist academics as ‘outsiders within’ the academy and argued that black feminist academics use their marginal status to produce black feminist thought that refl ects a feminist standpoint generated within African-American culture by black women. Furthermore, black feminist thought can also be generated by storytellers and blues singers, novelists and other organic intellectuals, and these local knowledges offer tools for resisting dominant knowledge (Hill Collins 1986). Acknowledging these other voices as authoritative contributes to maintaining a strategically diverse discourse, one of the core tenets of standpoint research.

Although the perspective originated in an Anglo-American political and intellectual context, postcolonial feminist scholars also contributed to feminist standpoint theory. They criticized the limitations of the ‘women in development’ research with its imposition of Western assumptions about gender, and some saw feminist standpoint as a perspective that could facilitate research for third world women. Feminist discourse that assumed a ‘universal woman’ was extremely problematic for third world writers, and some of these writers argued that standpoint analysis with its starting point in the actualities of women’s lives—particularly in time and place—is a useful methodology for moving the project of decolonialization forward. Chandra Mohanty (2003) suggests that Smith’s conceptualization of ‘the relations of ruling’ is a tool for understanding the intersectional oppressions of postcolonial social organi-zation, both at the discursive level and at the material level of daily life. ⁷

All these writers advocate for the continued importance of uncovering or attending to subjugated knowledges. Harding, for example, argues that ‘marginalized lives are better places from which to start asking casual and critical questions about the social order’ (Harding 2004:

130). Feminist standpoint authors locate feminist standpoint in a shared consciousness that can arise out of experiences of a particular location, but, at the same time, epistemic privilege is

achieved, not given. All contend that feminist standpoint epistemology connects issues of

achieved, not given. All contend that feminist standpoint epistemology connects issues of