Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective Author(s): Donna Haraway Source: Feminist Studies, Vol. 14, No. 3 (Autumn, 1988), pp. 575-599 Published by: Feminist Studies, Inc. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3178066 Accessed: 17/04/2009 15:40 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=femstudies. 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Feminist Studies, Inc. is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Feminist Studies. http://www.jstor.org SITUATEDKNOWLEDGES: THE SCIENCEQUESTION IN FEMINISM AND THE PRIVILEGEOF PARTIAL PERSPECTIVE DONNA HARAWAY Academic and activist feminist inquiry has repeatedly tried to come to terms with the question of what we might mean by the curious and inescapableterm "objectivity."We have used a lot of toxic ink and trees processedinto paper decryingwhat theyhave meant and how it hurts us. The imagined"they" constitute a kind of invisible conspiracyof masculinistscientists and philosophers replete with grants and laboratories.The imagined "we"are the embodiedothers, who are not allowed not to have a body, a finite point of view, and so an inevitablydisqualifying and pollutingbias in any discussion of consequence outside our own little circles, where a "mass"-subscriptionjournal might reach a few thousand readerscomposed mostly of science haters. At least, I confess to these paranoidfantasies and academicresentments lurking under- neath some convolutedreflections in print under my name in the feminist literaturein the history and philosophy of science. We, the feministsin the debatesabout science and technology,are the Reagan era's "special-interestgroups" in the rarified realm of epistemology,where traditionallywhat can count as knowledgeis policed by philosopherscodifying cognitive canon law. Of course, a special-interestgroup is, by Reaganoiddefinition, any collective historicalsubject that daresto resistthe stripped-downatomism of Star Wars, hypermarket,postmodern, media-simulatedcitizen- ship. Max Headroomdoesn't have a body; therefore,he alone sees everythingin the greatcommunicator's empire of the GlobalNet- work. No wonder Max gets to have a naive sense of humor and a kind of happily regressive,preoedipal sexuality, a sexuality that FeministStudies 14, no. 3 (Fall 1988).? 1988 by Feminist Studies,Inc. 575 576 Donna Haraway we ambivalently-with dangerousincorrectness - had imaginedto be reserved for lifelong inmates of female and colonized bodies and maybe also white male computer hackers in solitary elec- tronic confinement. It has seemed to me that feminists have both selectively and flexibly used and been trapped by two poles of a tempting dichotomy on the question of objectivity.Certainly I speak for myself here, and I offer the speculationthat there is a collective discourse on these matters. Recent social studies of science and technology,for example,have made availablea very strongsocial constructionistargument for all forms of knowledgeclaims, most certainlyand especiallyscientific ones.' Accordingto these tempt- ing views, no insider'sperspective is privileged,because all draw- ings of inside-outsideboundaries in knowledge are theorizedas power moves, not moves toward truth. So, from the strongsocial constructionistperspective, why should we be cowed by scien- tists'descriptions of their activityand accomplishments;they and their patronshave stakes in throwingsand in our eyes. They tell parablesabout objectivityand scientificmethod to studentsin the first years of their initiation,but no practitionerof the high scien- tific arts would be caught dead actingon the textbook versions. Socialconstructionists make clearthat officialideologies about ob- jectivity and scientificmethod are particularlybad guides to how scientific knowledge is actually made.Just as for the rest of us, what scientistsbelieve or say they do and what they reallydo have a very loose fit. The only people who end up actuallybelieving and, goddessfor- bid, acting on the ideologicaldoctrines of disembodiedscientific objectivity-enshrinedin elementarytextbooks and technoscience boosterliterature-are nonscientists,including a few very trusting philosophers.Of course, my designationof this last groupis prob- ably just a reflection of a residual disciplinarychauvinism ac- quiredfrom identifyingwith historiansof science and from spend- ing too much time with a microscopein early adulthoodin a kind of disciplinarypreoedipal and modernist poetic moment when cells seemed to be cells and organisms,organisms. Pace, Gertrude Stein. But then came the law of the fatherand its resolutionof the problemof objectivity,a problemsolved by always alreadyabsent referents,deferred signifieds, split subjects,and the endless play of signifiers.Who wouldn't grow up warped?Gender, race, the Donna Haraway 577 world itself-all seem the effects of warp speeds in the play of signifiersin a cosmic force field. In any case, social constructionistsmight maintain that the ideologicaldoctrine of scientific method and all the philosophical verbiageabout epistemologywere cooked up to distractour atten- tion from getting to know the world effectivelyby practicingthe sciences.From this point of view, science-the realgame in town - is rhetoric,a series of effortsto persuaderelevant social actors that one'smanufactured knowledge is a routeto a desiredform of very objectivepower. Such persuasionsmust take accountof the struc- ture of facts and artifacts,as well as of language-mediatedactors in the knowledge game. Here, artifacts and facts are parts of the powerful art of rhetoric. Practiceis persuasion,and the focus is very much on practice.All knowledge is a condensed node in an agonistic power field. The strong program in the sociology of knowledgejoins with the lovely and nasty tools of semiologyand deconstructionto insist on the rhetoricalnature of truth,including scientific truth. History is a story Western culture buffs tell each other;science is a contestabletext and a power field;the contentis the form.2Period. So much for those of us who would still like to talk about reality with more confidencethan we allow to the ChristianRight when they discuss the Second Coming and their being rapturedout of the final destructionof the world. We would like to think our ap- peals to real worlds are more than a desperatelurch away from cynicism and an act of faith like any other cult's,no matterhow much space we generouslygive to all the rich and always histori- cally specific mediations through which we and everybody else must know the world. But the further I get in describing the radical social constructionistprogram and a particularversion of postmodernism,coupled with the acid tools of criticaldiscourse in the human sciences, the more nervous I get. The imageryof force fields, of moves in a fully textualizedand coded world, which is the working metaphorin many argumentsabout socially negoti- ated realityfor the postmodernsubject, is, just for starters,an im- agery of high-techmilitary fields, of automatedacademic battle- fields, where blips of light calledplayers disintegrate (what a meta- phor!) each other in order to stay in the knowledge and power game. Technoscienceand science fiction collapse into the sun of their radiant(ir)reality-war.3 It shouldn'ttake decadesof feminist 578 Donna Haraway theoryto sense the enemy here. Nancy Hartsockgot all this crystal clear in her concept of abstractmasculinity.4 I, and others, startedout wanting a strongtool for deconstruct- ing the truth claims of hostile science by showing the radicalhis- toricalspecificity, and so contestability,of everylayer of the onion of scientificand technologicalconstructions, and we end up with a kind of epistemologicalelectroshock therapy, which far from ushering us into the high stakes tables of the game of contesting public truths, lays us out on the table with self-inducedmultiple personalitydisorder. We wanted a way to go beyond showingbias in science (thatproved too easy anyhow) and beyond separating the good scientificsheep from the bad goats of bias and misuse. It seemed promisingto do this by the strongestpossible construc- tionist argumentthat left no cracksfor reducingthe issues to bias versus objectivity, use versus misuse, science versus pseudo- science. We unmasked the doctrinesof objectivitybecause they threatenedour budding sense of collective historicalsubjectivity and agency and our "embodied"accounts of the truth,and we end- ed up with one more excuse for