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Feminist Epistemology and the Politics of Knowledge: Questions of Marginality

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Feminist Epistemology and the Politics of Knowledge: Questions of Marginality 1 Feminist epistemology and the politics of knowledge: questions of marginality Lorraine Code Epistemology was a late-comer to feminist silence the sceptic. Any hint of relativism analysis and critique. Although various such as is implicit in the suggestion that sex – a explanations for its tardiness might be non-intellectual, non-rational, individual advanced, central among them must surely characteristic of putative knowers – could be the intransigence of a conviction that, play a constitutive part in the production of while ethics and politics might well be knowledge threatened to undermine the shaped by gender relations and other human founding principles of ‘the epistemological ‘differences’, knowledge worthy of the project’. It unsettled taken-for-granted beliefs (honorific) title must transcend all such spe- about human sameness across putatively cificities. Thus, although feminist ethical incidental and inconsequential bodily differ- and political theory were rapidly growing ences, and thus appeared to contest the very areas of inquiry during the 1960s and 1970s, possibility of achieving knowledge worthy only in the 1980s was a set of questions and of the name. It is no surprise, therefore, that proposals articulated to address the possi- few epistemologists, feminists or other, bility that there could, after all, be so seem- would have given an affirmative answer to ingly oxymoronic an area of inquiry as my 1981 question: ‘Is the sex of the knower feminist epistemology. In twentieth-century epistemologically significant?’ (Code, 1981). Anglo-American philosophy there were Indeed, to some interlocutors the implica- good reasons for such resistance. Episte- tions of responding in the affirmative seemed, mologists sought to establish universal, in those early days, to suggest that if indeed necessary and sufficient conditions for the the sex of the knower were declared episte- existence of knowledge in general: knowl- mologically significant, then it would be to edge that could serve as a model at which the detriment of women’s aspirations to knowledge-seeking as such should aim – knowledgeability. It would consolidate the that could yield empirical certainty, and time-worn assumption that women could not 01_Evans et al_BAB1404B0065_Ch-01-Part-I.indd 9 26-Apr-14 6:08:39 PM 10 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF FEMINIST THEORY know in the well-established, descriptive usually in token substitutions of female for and normative, sense of the word. male pronouns: instead of ‘Sam knows that Yet whether such a confirmation would the book is green’ we read ‘Sally knows that amount to reaffirming women’s epistemic the book is green’. Ordinarily, such knowl- marginality is a more subtle issue. So long edge claims are made about perceptual ‘sim- as the view prevails that women cannot ples’: they refer to medium-sized physical know according to the highest criteria for objects that are presumptively part of every- establishing knowledge, it seems that they day life in the materially replete societies are in fact not just marginalized but tacitly taken for granted as the backdrop for excluded, confined somewhere beyond the references to such knowing. Normally, too, limits of both marginality and centrality. the sex of the knower would in such circum- This way of putting the point may exceed stances be regarded as being of no greater the parameters of an analysis designated significance than the size of her or his feet, specifically to address marginality, but I while her or his race, ethnicity, sexuality, think it does not stretch the purpose of the age would figure not at all in the analysis. In discussion to observe that in at least one short, the formal structure of empiricist/ sense of the word, in one central exclusion- post-positivist twentieth-century Anglo- ary preserve – namely, universities and American epistemology prior to the feminist other institutions of higher education – challenges of the 1980s was such as to rein- when women are refused admission then the force settled presumptions of human homo- implication seems to be that they cannot geneity. know, that they are incapable of, not mar- The idea that the sex of the knower could ginalized within, the kinds of knowledge be epistemologically significant gives rise to disseminated there. So even moving to the a range of questions about knowledge and fringes in the form of women’s colleges, subjectivity which were just as startling at colleges of ‘home economics’, nursing first posing, but have come to be integral to schools is, in the institutions of knowledge- subsequent feminist inquiry. No longer is production and validation, already a move ‘the knower’ imaginable as a self-contained, to the margins – if indeed only there. When infinitely replicable ‘individual’ making uni- women are restricted to studying/learning in versally valid knowledge claims from a such institutions, which claim less prestige ‘god’s eye’ position removed from the inci- than universities, they clearly are marginal- dental features and the power and privilege ized, both institutionally and epistemologi- structures of the physical–social world. Once cally (cf. Rossiter, 1982: esp. 65–70, 240). inquiry shifts to focus (following Haraway, Nonetheless, with respect to the content 1988) on ‘situated knowledges’, it is no and methodology of the empirical knowl- longer feasible to assume before the fact edge that functions as exemplary for early- which aspects of situatedness will be signifi- to-mid-twentieth-century epistemologists, cant for the production, evaluation and circu- both descriptively and normatively, the con- lation of knowledge. Inquiry opens out into tention that women are marginalized is apt in analyses of multiple intersecting specificities the sense – and this is no small point – that of subjectivity and positionality in their the subject S, in the standard S-knows-that-p social, political and thence epistemological formula in which propositional knowledge implications for the production of knowledge claims are ordinarily stated, is presump- and knowers; and into questions about credi- tively male to the extent that there is no need bility, marginality, epistemic responsibility even to mention his maleness. That he is and the politics of testimony, none of which white and of the privileged classes is also an would have been meaningful in the discourse uncontested given. Thus women enter the of orthodox epistemology. My analysis in philosophical scene as would-be knowers this essay pivots on these questions. 01_Evans et al_BAB1404B0065_Ch-01-Part-I.indd 10 26-Apr-14 6:08:39 PM FEMINIST EPISTEMOLOGY AND THE POLITICS OF KNOWLEDGE 11 BEGINNINGS not individuals, who are the knowers: their background assumptions shape knowledge In the mid-1980s Sandra Harding, in The as process and product. In genetic research, Science Question in Feminism (Harding, Longino shows how assumption-(value-) 1986), began to map the developing theoretical driven differences in knowledge-production divisions in feminist epistemological inquiry, contest the possibility of value-neutrality. Yet first distinguishing between feminist empiri- she endorses community respect for evidence cism and feminist standpoint theory. and accountable, collaborative cognitive Empiricists, on this analysis, sought to develop agency. Similarly, Lynn Hankinson Nelson a method of evidence-gathering that would be (1990) develops from (Quinean) ‘naturalised cleansed of androcentrism, paying attention to epistemology’ a neo-empiricism for which evidence neglected or discounted as worthy of again communities, not individuals, are the notice in received theories of knowledge. The primary knowers; and knowers come to evi- idea was that an empiricism committed to dence through webs of belief, open to com- objective evidence-gathering and justification, munal endorsement and critique. Because yet informed by feminist ideology, could pro- those who are socially marginalized cannot duce more adequate knowledge than classical realize their emancipatory goals without empiricism, which is ignorant of its complicity understanding the intractable aspects and the in sustaining a ubiquitous sex/gender system. malleable, contestable features of the world, An enhanced sensitivity to such issues enables they have to achieve a fit between knowledge feminists to enlist empiricist tools to expose and ‘reality’, even when ‘reality’ consists in the sexism, racism and other ‘isms’ that (often such social artefacts as racism, power, silently) inform knowing. Such exposures oppression or pay equity. Because an empiri- often depend on examining the so-called cism alert to gender-specificity (and, latterly, ‘context of discovery’, where aspects of a situ- a range of other specificities) is well equipped ation, inquiry or experiment are singled out for to achieve just such knowledge, politically investigation, yet where sex/gender specific informed inquiry, according to Harding, features may be ignored or deemed irrelevant yields a better empiricism than the received from the get-go, so to speak. A well-known view allows, based in what she has called example from the 1990s is the tardy recogni- ‘strong objectivity’. tion in cardiac medicine that symptoms sig- Standpoint theorists, by contrast, were nalling heart disease in women commonly turning their attention to the historical– failed to show up in standard tests developed material positioning of women’s practices from testing male patients alone. Only in con- and experiences. For such theorists as sequence of persistent
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