Feminism and Critical Realism

Abstract

Standpoint theory One of the obvious casualties has been feminist standpoint theory (FST). This emerged out of the philosophy of consciousness raising, which held that women had common experiences by virtue of their social positioning, and that the “subjugated knowledge” which came from that perspective was not only different but better. In other words, women were epistemologically privileged. In its more sophisticated versions this became the view that by reflecting on their common women’s perspective through a process of collective intellectual and political work, feminists could reach a more accurate take on reality than was available to those with vested interests in its misrepresentation. By the time black women, lesbians, working class women and others had angrily repudiated the amalgamation of their experiences to those of white, professional, straight women; by the time judgmental relativists had insisted there could be no grounds, other than those of affiliation and preference, for judging between feminist knowledge and other “knowledges”, by the time its Enlightenment heritage had been properly picked over and disparaged, FST’s sun was very low. In an article published last year in Signs, Hekman claims that FST always tried to reconcile the irreconcilable by bringing together a conception of truth as perspectival and an opposing notion of truth as absolute and subject-centred (1997, 356). For her, FST represented a bridge from modernism to postmodernism. She wants us to welcome the demise of the modernist notion of objectivity, which opens the door to a Foucauldian understanding of knowledge — and of power. But what Hekman, and others, see as a contradiction in the heart of FST stems from their own confusion of the transitive and intransitive, of epistemology and ontology. The conceptual and practical means we use to grasp the world are historically relative, but the characteristics and powers of the world they address are independent of our means of knowing. Knowledge is situated and perspectival, but that does not mean all perspectives are equally good, or that there are no good ways of judging between them. While there are no self-evident criteria for making such judgements, the internal coherence of the account, its scope and power to “situate possibilities” (Bhaskar 1989, 46), its implications for other accounts, and its practical effects are all relevant. Certainly, FST needs radical overhauling. It must substitute for the notion of “epistemological privilege” the idea of different opportunities for, and interests in, knowledge afforded by different social positions. But if FST is repudiated rather than developed or replaced, with it goes the aim of a non-sexist, yet fallibilistic, “successor science” which looks to explain the often ignored varied phenomena of women’s lives in order to change their unwanted features.