Feminist Standpoint Theory and the Question of Experience
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FEMINIST STANDPOINT THEORY AND THE QUESTION OF EXPERIENCE Ph.D. Thesis submitted to MANIPAL UNIVERSITY ASHA ACHUTHAN CENTRE FOR THE STUDY OF CULTURE AND SOCIETY, BANGALORE (Affiliated to Manipal University) BANGALORE- 560061 JUNE 2009 Bangalore 6 June 2009 Declaration I, Asha Achuthan, do hereby declare that this thesis entitled Feminist Standpoint Theory and the Question of Experience contains original research work done by me in fulfillment of the requirements for my PhD Degree in Cultural Studies from the Centre for the Study of Culture and Society and that this report has not previously formed the basis for the award of any degree or diploma in this or any other institution. This work has not been sent anywhere for publication or presentation purpose. Asha Achuthan Bangalore 6 June 2009 Centre for the Study of Culture & Society (Affiliated to Manipal University) 827,29th Main, Poorna Prajna Layout, Uttarahalli, Bangalore-560061. Certificate Certified that this thesis entitled Feminist Standpoint Theory and the Question of Experience is a record of bonafide study and research carried out by Ms. Asha Achuthan under my supervision and guidance. The report has not been submitted by her for any award of degree or diploma in this or in any other university. Dr. Tejaswini Niranjana (Supervisor) Dr. Sitharamam Kakarala (Member, PhD Committee) Dr. Sitharamam Kakarala (Director) CONTENTS Acknowledgements v INTRODUCTION A ROADMAP TO THE THESIS 1 CHAPTER 1 SCIENCE AND ITS CRITIQUES: OVERLAPS, GAPS, AND SOME QUESTIONS TO THE FUNCTION OF CRITIQUE 20 CHAPTER 2 FEMINISM AND THE POLITICAL IN A MARXIST SPACE: YEARNING TO BE, YEARNING TO BE DIFFERENT 62 CHAPTER 3 IS SCIENCE HEGEMONIC? SOME APPROACHES TO CRITIQUING SCIENCE IN INDIA 120 CHAPTER 4 CRITIQUES OF DEVELOPMENT: BETWEEN MODELS OF RESISTANCE AND REVOLUTION 167 CHAPTER 5 TOWARDS A DIFFERENT METHODOLOGY OF CRITIQUE: LEARNING FROM FEMINIST STANDPOINT EPISTEMOLOGIES AND MARXIAN APPROACHES 226 CONCLUSION TOWARDS NEW BEGINNINGS 290 Appendix 298 Bibliography 318 CD of Moushumi Bhowmick’s Songs inside back cover v Acknowledgements I have several people to thank for their valuable support and encouragement which has made my journey through this thesis both possible and enjoyable. I thank the faculty at CSCS for their support and sharp criticisms at every step, without which this thesis would not have been possible. Especially and again, I thank my supervisor Tejaswini Niranjana who always provided signposts to give some direction when there appeared to be none. I thank Sitharamam Kakarala, member of my PhD Committee, who has, in our conversations, managed to re-present my thesis to me in ways I had not thought about. Among CSCS faculty, I also thank Vivek Dhareswar who was formative of this thesis in several ways, Ashish Rajadhyaksha whose vision of the possibilities in this effort was a constant inspiration, SV Srinivas for his qualified skepticism; Mrinalini Sebastian for too much, but mostly for holding my hand through all my intellectual and emotional dramas. I thank my co-students at CSCS for every raised eyebrow, every vigorous nod, every animated discussion that sharpened this thesis, as also for the happy times spent foraging for food and in other simple pleasures. Nishanth, Dunkin, Sushumna, Teena, Sahana, Bitasta, Sufiya, Polly, Ashwin, and Nitya, especially you. For eleventh-hour hand-holding, I thank all my friends at CSCS, including Meera and Rakhi. I thank Maheswari and Pushpa for being the amazing librarians they are. For his smile of welcome in sunny and stormy weather, for holding the fort in every circumstance, and for being around at CSCS to ask every kind of question to, I thank Nagaraj. I have Nagesh to thank for being around to help in many many ways. For early comments on the thesis, I am grateful to Dr. Sharmila Rege. I thank Prof. Gadagkar for his interest and support for this enterprise, as also for providing an institutional environment that helped change it into something more useful than it had been. I have my previous teachers, in particular Shefali Moitra, Jasodhara Bagchi, and Ajit Chaudhuri, to thank for the thought-world I came into this thesis with. To Papa and Amma, for not letting me grow too much into recognizable adulthood. To Chetan and Edathiyamma, for being around in ways I had not expected. To Rochelle, I owe razor-sharp analyses of shared insanities, as also a little bit of my sanity, at a point when it had promised to desert me altogether. To Nithin, the beginnings of belief, and the ability to find pleasure in beauty. To Nisha, the first feeling of sisterhood. vi To Joe, for being so incredibly gentle, and for bringing music to me. Sushmita, for being me, and loving me for it. To Malabika, Akanksha, and others at Sappho for a warmth I do not know I deserve. To my ‘scientist’ friends at Indian Institute of Science, who proved at every step that they were as human (and animal) as scientific. In particular, Vivek. To Aruna, for not knowing what I think, but knowing, nevertheless, what I want. To Radhika, for sharing my love of books, my attachment to strictures, and my struggle to find ways out of them. To my many 23-year olds, including Radha and Supraja, wisdom. Arup, for being the man most wedded to feminism I’ve known, and the most unafraid to ask questions of it. Anjan, for his unflagging energy, his ability to be a gifted teacher, and at the same time an eager learner. Nirmal, for his vagaries, his sensitivity, his genius, his humility, and his narcissism, all in one large body. Debarshi, for being the unguided missile in the conventional political spaces I occupied. Anup, for being the reason I began, for supporting and believing in me every step of the way, and for continuing to be around … To Radhika, what do I not owe? Her unwavering belief that my sentences would finally make sense. Laughter and life. And most of all, love. Also food! To Reena, for being around to compulsively pick up the pieces. I will do better next time, I promise. To another … I owe the courage to welcome a whole new world of possibilities, and the ability to laugh at my own ignorance of them. INTRODUCTION:AROADMAP TO THE THESIS This thesis began work on the premise that a feminist critique of science is possible, and necessary. It moved into an ambivalence, although not apology, regarding the conditions of such a possibility. It is this movement which I wish to mark in this introduction, with a stress on the contours of the possibility - neither a fiction nor a truth - that I have explored in the thesis.1 Concentrating as I did on the actual world of the Indian situation, I was aware that a feminist response to science in India, as relative to the large volume of such a response elsewhere, was marked more by an absence, or at any rate a paralysis, than a presence or significant debate. Without getting into the ‘failure’ model here, or slipping into an easy reading of ‘difference’, I knew, however, that I needed to find an explanation for this too, if I were to contribute to the debate in any significant way. It is with this in mind that I made my formulations regarding the problem. The original hypothesis was for a model of knowledge as situated and perspectival, where the perspectival is not equivalent to the conjectural. It had, as it stood, three claims – one about the validity of contextual criteria for knowledge- making, one about critique, and one about the relation between critique and knowledge-making. I proposed to use as allegorical resource the lived experiences of women, that had been dismissed in dominant understandings of scientific knowledge- making as inchoate, conjectural, and limited, to ask the question of what constituted valid criteria of knowledge, and to suggest a model of knowledge-making based on and beginning from such a place. Such a place would be, then, both a critique of 1 Statements or propositions can be either necessary, possible, or contingent. 2 dominant models and a different model of knowledge-making. The formulation also anticipated a separation from dominant feminist turns to experience that spoke of bringing back the fully subjective, of recognizing the embodied woman as knower, and that, in so doing, either proposed relativist epistemologies or took an anti- epistemological turn. A feminist standpoint epistemology as proposed by the thesis would offer such a different contour of critique. The hypothesis ran into two difficulties. For one, what was this „place to begin from‟, this originary point for perspectival knowledge? What was the claim of the lived experiences of women as an originary point, if not intended as a one-among- many relativist claim? I will come back to this later, to try and sift through the various strands of feminism that talk of women‟s experiences, or of experience as feminine. The other difficulty was – why critique? In proposing a feminist, or any critical response to science, the first task would be to understand why or whether such a response might be necessary or valid in the first place. I found that existing critiques of science in the Indian context, including postcolonial work,2 liberal historiographies, eco-feminist positions, and non-feminist gender work, posed such a necessity in their reading of Western science as a hegemonic entity that precluded experience. Experience has meant, in these critiques, one of the following – the experiences of an empirically excluded community or category of people, the excluded (disavowed) experience, or sometimes experience as a category excluded from knowledge-making, most often the first. There is a theory of exclusion here that informs the need for critique.