Post-modernFeminism
So far we have discussed the way feminist standpoint epistemology can be justified in terms of what it shares with feminist empiricism and traditional epistemologies. However, the period during which feminist standpoint epistemology was being developed also saw the deluge of anti-Enlightenment thinking known as ‘post-modernism’.
Some feminists, including several of those involved in the creation of standpoint epistemology, were attracted to some post-modern themes. In a number of cases they drew on what they considered to be important insights offered by feminist versions of post-modernism, while holding on to a (revised) standpoint approach, whereas others identified themselves more closely with post-modernism, understood as incompatible with key commitments of standpoint epistemology. This debate is very complex, and many issues remain unresolved.Many of the issues posed by post-modernism are shared by its feminist versions, and since we will be dealing in more detail with post-modernism in Chapter 10, this gives us an excuse for the very limited discussion of the feminist post-modern criticisms of standpoint epistemology here. The most significant of these criticisms are two in number. The first starts out from an acknowledgement made by Hartsock in her original presentation of the standpoint approach. This was that emphasizing women’s commonality ran the risk of marginalizing or suppressing the important differences between the life experiences of women in different social positions: white and black, heterosexual and lesbian, middle class and working class, colonizer and colonized and so on. This recognition of difference within the category ‘woman’ assumed greater moral and political significance with the insistence on the part of some groups of women that the feminist movement had come to represent only the interests of educated, white, middle-class Western women.
The ensuing concern with diversity of social identities coincided with much more general claims being made by post-modernists about the fragmentation and fluidity of identities, and the necessary failure of language to refer to any fixed or general category - such as ‘woman’. Some feminists have responded to the assertion of diversity by proposing a difference-sensitive re-working of feminism, and linked this with wider coalitions of oppressed and exploited groups (Harding 1986, 1991, 1998). Others have opted for a far-reaching ‘deconstruction’ of the category ‘woman’ itself, in line with the post-modernist opposition to ‘essentialism’ (see Sayer 2000: ch. 4 for an excellent critical realist discussion of post-modern anti-essentialism). It is, of course, hard to make any sense of what it might be to remain a feminist having deconstructed the category ‘woman’.The second, closely related, post-modernist theme to be taken up by feminist critics of standpoint epistemology was the rejection of epistemology itself: the abandonment of any attempt to evaluate knowledge-claims, and even of the notion of an independent reality of which knowledge could be gained. In part, as we will see, this form of radical relativism derived from a certain (questionable) reading of the linguistic theory of Ferdinand de Saussure (see Chapter 10), and in part from Foucault’s treatment of truth-claims (‘regimes of truth’) as unavoidably connected to strategies of power or of domination. For the critics of standpoint theory, it was too close to ‘patriarchal’ scientific rationality in its acceptance of the Enlightenment heritage of commitment to truth and objectivity. What was needed was not better science, or more reliable knowledge, since this spelt only yet another ‘regime of truth’. Instead, standpoint theory should give way to a positive welcoming of diversity of cultures and understandings, without trying to establish the truth of any one. The limitations of this abandonment of realism are spelt out by Hilary Rose:
What has been called the ‘linguistic turn’ is a good reason for being grateful to postmodernism which has indeed been feminism’s ally in sharpening our ears to hear the construction of knowledge and its coupling with power, but gratitude does not carry with it any necessary commitment to abandon truth claims. While a historian can read natural science as stories, leaving the scientists with their problems of truthclaims subverted but not resolved, a natural scientist and/or a feminist engaged in health struggles has to be a realist, has to care about ‘hard facts’.
(Rose 1994: 81)