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  • Feminist approaches

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    Definitions

    Epistemology—the branch of philosophy which investigates the origin, nature, methods, and limits of human knowledge (The Macquarie Dictionary 1991).

    Modern social philosophy—Social philosophy that emerged from classical nineteenth century social philosophy (Wikipedia).

    Postmodern social philosophy—A complex set of reactions to modern philosophy. There is disagreement within postmodern social philosophy about what constitutes the presuppositions of modern philosophy, and the philosophers that epitomise it. There is agreement in rejection of foundationalism, essentialism and realism (The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy 1999).

    Foundationalism—the view that knowledge has a two tier structure in which one is non-inferential or foundational and forms the basis of inferential knowledge (The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy 1999).

    Essentialism—a metaphysical theory that objects have essences and that there is a distinction between essential and non-essential or accidental predications (The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy 1999).

    Realism—interest or concern for the actual or real as distinguished from the abstract, speculative, etc (The Macquarie Dictionary 1991).

    Androcentrism—male centred (The Macquarie Dictionary 1991).

    Empiricism—the view that experience has primacy in human knowledge and justified belief (The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy 1999).

    Empirical—derived from or guided by experience or experiment (The Macquarie Dictionary 1991).

    Praxis—the process by which a theory, lesson, or skill is enacted or practiced, embodied and/or realized. 

    Introduction

    As a body of research and scholarship, feminist thought is philosophically diverse. Consequently, feminism is an area of scholarship marked by significant philosophical debate. This topic looks at feminist critiques of classical social theory, and of science, and covers standpoint feminisms, including both early interpretive and Critical theory versions. An examination of these feminist positions is important not only to introduce feminist critiques of social and scientific thought. This topic also provides a means for reviewing what we have covered thus far in this series of web resources.

    What feminists share is the argument that much scientific and social science knowledge is androcentric, or reflects the point of view of men, with negative political consequences for women. Feminists argue that women have traditionally been written about in a way that de-legitimises them as rational holders and producers of knowledge. Some key feminist critiques of androcentric knowledge are summarised in the first part of this resource, particularly in relation to classical social theory and feminist critiques of science.

    Feminists attempt to redress androcentrism by producing feminist knowledge that accurately represents the social condition and perspectives of women. However, there is some debate about how this should be accomplished.

    Standpoint feminists argue that knowledge must be produced by and for women. Standpoint feminists emphasise the need to ground research in the standpoint of women and other oppressed groups. Early or 'classical' standpoint feminism reflects the social constructionist view that knowledge is produced by culturally situated knowledge makers. This leads to an attempt to understand and represent the distinctive way in which women know, seen to arise in their common situation within gendered social relations, by research designs that enable women to present their own point of view.

    More recent and dominant versions of standpoint feminism reflect Frankfurt School Critical theory and place less methodological emphasis upon women as meaning makers and more upon the social structures that condition experience. The suspicion of un-theorised everyday experience reflects the critical hermeneutic understanding that the subject's received versions of their social conditions do not describe a naturally occurring world, or an authentic understanding, but are a product of historically and culturally grounded power relationships. For Critical feminism, the discourse of women must be critically interrogated in order to understand how it both reflects and disrupts the unequal social relations characteristic of capitalism and patriarchy. In this approach, the analysis should explain not simply women's interpretations, but the social context within which those interpretations are given. Feminist theory is to be drawn upon to enable researchers to understand the social context, and to hear and interrogate the experience of gendered social subjects within that context.

    While there is considerable agreement among feminists, postmodern feminism emerges from an anti-foundational, anti-essentialist philosophical point of view that is different from the feminist positions introduced in this topic. Postmodern feminist responses to standpoint feminism will be covered in greater depth in the topic on poststructuralist feminisms.

    Feminist critiques and classical social theory

    From Adkins, L. 2005, 'Feminist social theory', in Modern social theory: An Introduction, edited by A. Harrington, Oxford University Press, Oxford.

    Before considering the different feminist research perspectives, it will be helpful to understand feminist arguments about, and their responses to androcentrism in social thought and scientific knowledge. Feminist critiques of the classical social theory covered earlier in this series of web resources can serve as an example.

    Modernist feminists have argued that, despite the claim of classical social theorists to offer a universal account of social development, classical social theory is in fact complicit in, and reproduces, the gendered norms that have accompanied the rise of modernity. There is agreement that the separation of public and private spheres that was the result of labour relations within industrial capital, gave birth to new ideals of competitive masculinity and domestic, nurturing bourgeois femininity. However, feminists argue that these same ideals, and the associated notion that men and women properly belong to separated public and private spheres, are reproduced in the dualisms within classical social theory.

    For instance, according to feminists, classical sociological descriptions of modernity privilege the masculine subject and exclude women by situating them outside the worlds of rationality, capitalism, the urban, and industrialism. Feminists argue that, within classical social theory, women's lives are situated in pre-industrial or non-capitalist realms and are thereby represented as outside the realm of social theory. For many feminists, classical social theory positions women in the sphere of the natural beyond processes of modernity.

    For instance, Weber assigns the domination of women within the household to natural causes, whereas men's position within modernity is assigned to cultural transformation. For Weber, the rise of modern legal-rational forms of power emerges from traditional modes of power in which husbands and fathers dominate within kinship relations. Modern forms of power involve a transformation of patriarchal forms of power from a direct form of rule to an impersonal, public mode of male power. Women are understood to be dependent on men as a result of an apparently normal superiority of the physical and intellectual energies of men. In short, men are seen to be products of society, whereas women are seen to be products of nature.

    According to feminist critiques, classical social theory:

    1. relies on a gender dualism in which masculinity is associated with rationalization, and femininity is associated with the irrational;
    2. positions women outside the social relations of modernity, and sees them as incapable of achieving a rational way of life within modernity;
    3. relies on a mind/body dualism in which the former must transcend the latter;
    4. denies or ignores the role of the body, imagining the human subject as disembodied, abstract, and rational;
    5. depends upon a gendered dualism such that women are associated with the body.

    Alternative feminist explanations of the transition to modernity:

    1. aim to bring women into the social explanations and modes of subjectivity and agency associated with modernity;
    2. emphasise the ways that women are alienated in the workplace;
    3. designate women a distinctive social class and form of political consciousness rather than reading women's class position off the class of husbands and fathers;
    4. perform studies of female dominated occupations;
    5. analyse the social organisation of domains of life previously considered to be 'natural', 'private' and 'bodily' such as reproduction and sexuality (for example the role of medicine and technology in regulating women and reproduction, and the institutionalised construction of heterosexuality and of women as passive objects of an active male gaze);
    6. theorise housework as central to the operation of capitalism via its reproduction of labour power;
    7. theorise the oppression of women as relatively autonomous from capitalism and economics, and as carried by ideology (Michele Barrett);
    8. highlight the role of heterosexual familial ideology, or the positioning of women and children as the dependents of men, and its support of unequal gender divisions of labour at home and at work; as well as the institutionalisation of familial ideology in welfare and wage systems (Michele Barrett);
    9. highlight the way that heterosexual familial ideology is embedded in gendered subjectivity and entangles men and women in the reproduction of the familial structures of oppression (Michele Barrett).

    In short, modernist feminisms have highlighted both a bias against women within social thought, and a distinctive female or feminine experience or form of oppression within modernity. Neilsen (1990) argues that feminist scholarship has involved a ‘paradigm shift’ involving:

    1. a critique of androcentrism;
    2. a focus on women as the subjects of research and as knowledge makers;
    3. research that asks ‘does this theory work for women’?;
    4. an insistence upon the political nature of ‘private’ life;
    5. topics such as domestic violence, rape, pornography, prostitution, abortion, domestic labour, reproductive technologies;
    6. personal and political involvement with research participants – for example, action research;
    7. evolution of concepts such as ‘patriarchy’, ‘male domination’ and an exploration of the role of women’s domestic and sexual labours in the reproduction of capitalist/patriarchal relations.

    However, feminism has adopted a range of philosophical approaches in their attempts to reverse the androcentrism of knowledge.

    Feminism and science

    From Hundleby, C. 2007. 'Feminist empiricism', in Handbook of feminist research: Theory and praxis, edited by S Hess-Biber, SAGE publications, Thousand Oaks.

    The first feminist perspective to be considered in this topic is pragmatist feminism, focusing  on a critique of the knowledge produced by the scientific method, including a call for a more rigorous application of scientific standards. 'Feminist empiricists' (like Lynn Hankinson Nelson) encourage feminist confrontations with science arguing that its male bias is entrenched and should not be ignored.

    In the same way that gendered norms shape theories of society, feminist epistemologists argue, gendered norms inform science. For example, feminist critiques of sexism in scientific knowledge (Emily Martin and Helen Longino) observe that cellular biology:

    1. describes the egg in passive and the sperm in active terms;
    2. sees a relationship between egg and sperm which is described in terms of romantic courtship;
    3. sometimes describes eggs as whorish, in terms of dutiful wifehood, or as hunted prey;
    4. describes the sperm as the victorious hero;
    5. describes the meeting of the egg and sperm in asymmetrical terms rather than cellular fusion;
    6. obscures the real activity of the egg;
    7. generalises its gendered understanding of cells so that the nucleus of all cells are understood as masculine dominators of the whole cell;
    8. describes genetic inheritance via cellular cytoplasm as 'maternal'.

    Empiricist feminists are influenced by Thomas Kuhn and explain gender bias in science in terms of the under determination of theory by data or observational evidence such that:

    1. background beliefs form the basis upon which a particular belief is revised;
    2. social ideologies are deeply hidden and difficult to detect within hypotheses;
    3. the operation of social ideologies is more difficult to detect within the life sciences than within the social sciences;
    4. the operation of social ideologies is more difficult to detect in the physical sciences than in the life sciences because the former have fewer clear political implications;
    5. new evidence does not lead to a new theory because prevailing overarching theoretical and practical paradigms ensure the new evidence results only in slight revisions of the existing paradigm.

    Some feminists (for example, Louise Antony, Jane Duran, Phyllis Rooney, Annette Baier) turn to the naturalism proposed by Quine to address the issue of determination. Naturalism within feminism:

    1. utilises science to test how inquirers attach specific beliefs to specific data explaining why some beliefs are chosen over others;
    2. does not seek to find final standards or beliefs, but to reveal which assumptions prevail;
    3. rejects assumptions about a God's eye view of knowledge focusing on physical and cultural embodiment;
    4. argues that disassociating from the material realities of human existence is foreign to the way women relate to the world;
    5. examines and critiques the underpinning motivations and background assumptions of social and individual cognitive sciences like biology and psychology.

    Feminist empiricists acknowledge the social and political nature of scientific knowledge. Contextual empiricism (Helen Longino, Louise Antony), influenced by pragmatism, has been posited as an alternative to traditional forms of empiricism.

    Pragmatism:

    From Cambridge dictionary of philosophy. Second edition. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, p. 730.

    1. reality cannot be known prior to experience, truth claims can be justified only by repetitive experiment and inquiry;
    2. the first point of reflection must be direct action or praxis;
    3. theory and practice are not separate, theory is an abstraction based on experience which provides for directed action, theory is an integral part of intelligent practice;
    4. knowledge is guided by interests or values;
    5. knowledge is instrumental, a tool for organising experience satisfactorily;
    6. concepts are habits of belief or rules of action;
    7. values are culturally and historically contingent, and are useful as a guide to decision making to the extent that they satisfactorily resolve problems as determined by those affected or likely to be affected.
    8. the value of life as growth is an ultimate principle for decision making;
    9. when order prevails, conditions reflect their deliberate transformation according to intentional and desired ends.

    Contextual empiricism holds that:

    1. since science reflects social values, and social values are diverse, science should be sensitive to the diversity of social values rather than reflect a particular element of the community;
    2. there should be a social basis for assessing the objectivity of scientific claims;
    3. in order to provide objectivity and avoid destructive biases, the community must provide opportunities for open criticism, response to criticism, public standards against which claims can be assessed, and equality of intellectual authority;
    4. scientists, including feminist scientists, can choose a community to be accountable to;
    5. since representations of truth are always changing, scientific knowledge must be continually revised to reflect changing social norms. 

    This position reflects the feminist empiricist view that good science is aware of the political forces and biases that influence it and should have built-in mechanisms to ensure that the knowledge it produces reflects data and theory testing, rather than the unconscious views of the men who have, by and large, produced it. Feminist empiricists also insist upon opportunities for open criticism, public standards against which claims can be assessed, and equality of intellectual authority in order to avert future bias. The scientific community must be accessible to a diversity of views, and continue to question its own authority

    Standpoint feminism and situated knowing

    From Harding, S. 2007, 'Feminist standpoints', in Handbook of feminist research: Theory and praxis, edited by S Hess-Biber, SAGE publications, Thousand Oaks, and Neilsen, J. 1990. Feminist research methods: Exemplary readings in the social sciences, Westview Press, San Francisco.

    Standpoint feminism, which emerged in the 1970s and 1980s, agrees with empiricist feminists that dominant modes of knowledge are androcentric. They also question the ability of empirical science to produce unbiased knowledge by pointing to the way that scientific abstractions, such as the concepts of the natural and the social, rationality, and objectivity, reflect cultural values and interests. This bias is referred to as the 'conceptual practices of power' (Dorothy Smith). For standpoint feminists, science is deeply implicated in legitimising the exploitation, oppression and domination of women by naturalising women's role in the family and their exclusion from wage labour. Standpoint feminists argue that this representation of women's role supports male interests because men benefit from women's unpaid domestic labour and can monopolise opportunities in paid work.

    Standpoint feminism argues that dominant modes of knowledge production:

    1. exclude women and the feminine;
    2. deny women and the feminine epistemic authority;
    3. denigrate feminine cognitive styles and modes of knowledge;
    4. produce theories of women and the feminine that represent them as inferior, deviant, or significant only in relation to men and the masculine;
    5. produce knowledge that renders women and gender power relations invisible;
    6. produce knowledge (science and technology) that is not useful, or that reinforces gender and other hierarchies.

    Consistent with their interpretive and Critical frames, standpoint feminists turn to explorations of culturally mediated experience in their knowledge production practices. For standpoint feminists, knowledge is always culturally and socially mediated, and women and the oppressed, by virtue of their social placement, must be consulted to provide an alternative and more accurate picture of the social world. The difference between the two lies in Critical standpoint feminisms insistence, unlike interpretive standpoint feminism, that the lives of the oppressed must themselves be interrogated to see how broader social systems delimit people's life chances. Critical standpoint feminism does this by an analysis of the social context, including potentially the conceptual frameworks of the disciplines.

    'Classical' standpoint feminism

    Early or 'classical' feminist standpoint research, reflecting a more interpretive than Critical frame:

    1. sought to ground knowledge production in women’s experience;
    2. emphasized the need to hear alternative and silenced ways of knowing;
    3. preferred qualitative over quantitative methods (the latter being seen as a ‘masculinist’ form of knowing);
    4. argued that quantitative methods fail to get an in-depth understanding of people’s lives, and pre-coded categories carry a male bias;
    5. saw the subjective experience of the researcher, and the relationship between the researcher and the research subject as part of the knowledge production process.

    Feminists of this persuasion provide accounts of how gender relations are reflected not only in scientific and social science claims about men and women, but within the conceptual frameworks of the disciplines and the institutions that support them. By looking at the conditions of women's everyday lives feminists argued that:

    1. ethical philosophy ignores, and fails to elevate the kinds of moral decision making women make in their everyday lives, focusing instead on the kinds of decisions men make as managers, administrators and lawyers─emphasising a male oriented, justice view of morality rather than a female oriented view which emphasises solidarity, community, and caring about one's special relationships (Carol Gilligan);
    2. institutionalised public thinking, for example within law courts, reflects the kinds of social experiences men have and neglects women's experiences (for example the view that women 'ask for' rape or to be sexually harassed reflects male points of view) (Catherine McKinnon).

    Within this perspective the social constructionist perspective that knowledge of the world is developed and transmitted within an essentially social context by active meaning makers is a clear driver of the approach. Standpoint feminists insist upon situated knowledge production. Feminist standpoint theory aims to produce knowledge that reflects the social values and interests of women. For standpoint feminism, this is the only way that male bias can be overcome.

    Critical feminism and standpoint theory

    From Harding, S. 2007, 'Feminist standpoints', in Handbook of feminist research: Theory and praxis, edited by S Hess-Biber, SAGE publications, Thousand Oaks.

    Critical feminist approaches to standpoint theory have given rise to an emphasis upon the politically produced and socially stratified nature of experience. The Critical theory influence within standpoint feminism can be seen in the assertions that:

    1. the way societies are structured has epistemological consequences;
    2. a person's position within the social structure enables and limits what they can know;
    3. the way that rulers and the ruled understand hierarchical social relations are opposed;
    4. dominant groups legitimise their position;
    5. those who are ruled are more likely to delegitimise domination;
    6. the false and perverse perceptions of oppressors are made operative in institutions forcing everyone to live in a society designed to suit their interests;
    7. conceptual practices solidify and disseminate the oppressors power as natural, inevitable, and desirable;
    8. science plays an important role in maintaining oppressive ideologies;
    9. both science and politics are required to see the world 'behind', 'beneath' or 'from outside' the oppressor's version;
    10. no one can escape the historical moment;
    11. standpoint research requires only a degree of freedom from dominant concepts, not complete freedom from it;
    12. women do not automatically have access to a feminist or women's standpoint;
    13. such a standpoint can only be achieved by struggling against the apparent realities produced by the dominant group;
    14. it requires methods of 'strong objectivity' (Sandra Harding) to reveal the practices of power;
    15. liberatory research is grounded in the everyday lives of the oppressed, rather than the conceptual frameworks of dominant social institutions and the disciplines;
    16. however, liberatory research does not stop with the act of learning about the everyday lives of the oppressed in the same way that conventional hermeneutic and ethnographic approaches do;
    17. the causes of oppression cannot be detected simply by observing the lives of the oppressed;
    18. it is important to critically examine how broader social systems (law, government, capital flows, institutions) delimit people's life chances;
    19. feminists must critically examine the conceptual frameworks of the disciplines (sociology, economics, and the natural sciences) to understand dominant institutions;
    20. standpoint theory provides the possibility for liberation;
    21. an oppressed group must struggle to see the world from its own perspective rather than from the perspective of others;
    22. the women's movement has enabled women to see their shared interests, needs and desires and to struggle 'for women';
    23. women's movements created a group consciousness, or different group consciousnesses among different groups of women;
    24. similar group consciousnesses enabled movements of African Americans, Gays, Lesbians, Chicanos and Mexican Americans;
    25. new group consciousnesses were created in these movements that produced new understandings of social relations.

    Methodological process to prevent standpoint feminism reproducing dominant conceptions of power:

    1. objectivity is to be maximised, but not by achieving social neutrality;
    2. objectivity is to be achieved by framing ones research questions and problems from 'outside' the field or discipline, or from 'outside' society;
    3. while one can never get fully 'outside' one's cultural group and float freely above it, it is necessary to find or create as much distance from the 'normal' as possible;
    4. this is the best way of enabling new and critical perspectives;
    5. objectivity in this approach is not based on achieving value-neutrality, but in recognising that some values, interests and assumptions can be productive of knowledge;
    6. for instance, some democratic or social justice commitments offer resources for expanding knowledge.

    These claims are underpinned by the philosophical assumption in Critical theory that real hierarchical social structures determine people's experience, and what they can know. The aim is not to produce objective knowledge, in the sense that it stands outside culture and history, but knowledge that reflects the real needs of the people and of particular groups among the people. It is only on the basis of processes of struggle that emancipatory knowledge can be created.

    Althusser and feminism

    From Grosz, E 1990, ‘Contemporary theories of power and subjectivity’, in Feminist Knowledge: Critique and construct, edited by Sneja Gunew, Routledge, New York and Mansfield, N. 2000. Subjectivity: Theories of the self from Freud to Haraway, Allen and Unwin, Sydney, pp. 52-53.

    The use made of Althusser within feminist thought has enabled a further elaboration on the tenets of thought given by Critical theory. Althusser's influences on feminism can perhaps be described in the following insights:

    1. women’s oppression is seen to be an unconscious structural feature of society, not something perpetrated by individual interests, whether consciously or unconsciously held;
    2. there is a shift away from men as knowledge producers or as possessed of specific interests, to a critique of social claims which are in no one's interests.

    Key tenets of Althusser's thought:

    1. capitalist society reproduces itself by producing the docile workers and consumers it needs;
    2. capitalism does not achieve this simply via repressive forces like the army, the police and the prison system (or Repressive State Apparatuses);
    3. capitalism produces docile capitalist subjects via institutions like the church, the family and the school (or Ideological State Apparatuses);
    4. these institutions promulgate capitalist values and capitalist subjects to ensure a fatalistic acceptance of the economic order;
    5. the ideological production of subjectivity involves a process of 'interpellation';
    6. interpellation involves the social production of a way of being, of values, desires, needs and expectations (false consciousness).

    Feminists have also been critical of Althusser claiming his work:

    1. is blind to the specificity of female subjectivity─for example, it is not the nuclear family per se that socializes subjects, as Althusser argued, but the mother;
    2. did not analyse the sexually bifurcated ways in which subjects are interpellated as masculine and feminine;
    3. gives no theoretical space for the operation of patriarchy and its relation to capitalism.

    Conclusion

    Feminists agree that there is an androcentric bias within dominant forms of knowledge. Empiricist feminists following pragmatist lines of thought emphasise continual testing and critique of knowledge within a democratic scientific community to ensure knowledge reflects agreed social values. Standpoint feminists with interpretive or social constructionist leanings argue that only knowledge situated in the perspectives of women themselves and of the oppressed can challenge male bias. This is based on the premise that knowledge arises from the meaning making activities of culturally situated social subjects. Critical standpoint feminists emphasise the importance of situating everyday experience within broader structural relations and of developing liberatory perspectives that can fuel political change and new disciplinary knowledge that reflects democratic and social justice values.

    Each refers back to a source of knowledge─rigorous science driven by consensual values, for empiricist feminism, or, the meanings socially situated agents produce in their interactions with the world, for interpretive feminism. Critical and hermeneutic feminist thought, stresses the cultural and historical context of knowledge and aim for an empirically grounded scientific study that produces liberatory knowledge about social subjects and the social world.

    References

    Adkins, L 2005, 'Feminist social theory', in Modern social theory: An Introduction, edited by A. Harrington, Oxford University Press, Oxford.

    Grosz, E 1990, ‘Contemporary theories of power and subjectivity’, in Feminist Knowledge: Critique and construct, edited by Sneja Gunew, Routledge, New York.

    Harding, Sandra, 2007, 'Feminist standpoints', in Handbook of feminist research: Theory and praxis, edited by S Hess-Biber, SAGE publications, Thousand Oaks.

    Hundleby, Catherine, 2007, 'Feminist empiricism', in Handbook of feminist research: Theory and praxis, edited by S Hess-Biber, SAGE publications, Thousand Oaks.

    Neilsen, J 1990, Feminist research methods: Exemplary readings in the social sciences, Westview Press, San Francisco.

    This web resource was developed by Wendy Bastalich.  


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