Comment on Hekman's "Truth and Method: Feminist Standpoint Theory Revisited": Whose Standpoint Needs the Regimes of Truth and Reality?

Abstract

I AGREE WITH SEVERAL of Susan Hekman's central arguments (in this issue). Feminist standpoint theory has indeed made a major contribution to feminist theory and, as she indicates at the end, to late twentieth-century efforts to develop more useful ways of thinking about the production of knowledge in local and global political economies. We can note that feminists are not the only contemporary social theorists to struggle with projects of extricating ourselves from some of the constraints of those philosophies of modernity that began to emerge in Europe three or more centuries ago. Moreover, Hekman is certainly right that current reevaluations of marxian projects, of the "difference" issues, and of poststructuralism are three sites of both resources and challenges to the further development of standpoint theories, as they must be also for other contemporary social theorizing. These last three sets of issues are intimately related. The modern understanding of how to go about knowledge seeking, retained in the marxian epistemology, assumed that one should imagine a kind of single, ideal knower, "homogeneously" constituted since he purportedly represented no particular cultural identity, interests, or discourses. The proletarian standpoint, once it was generalized as the truly human standpoint, provided just such an ideal unitary knower no less than did social contract theory's "rational man." Issues neither of differences between knowers nor of the cultural constitution of knowledge-the multicultural and poststructuralist issue about discourses-could arise as long as knowledge acquisition was figured as performing the "God-trick," as Donna Haraway famously put the point (1988). Thus, early articulations of feminist standpoint theory retained some of these problematic modernist assumptions about truth and reality. However, it seems to me that Hekman distorts the central project of standpoint theorists when she characterizes it as one of figuring out how to justify the truth of feminist claims to more accurate accounts of reality. Rather, it is relations between power and knowledge that concern these thinkers. They have wanted to identify ways that male supremacy and the production of knowledge have coconstituted each other in the past and