Subjectivity's Limit: The Unsolved Riddle of the Standpoint

Abstract

Several years ago the American Sociological Association's newsletter Footnotes carried an opinion piece which argued, in effect, that feminist sociology was a fraud and an annoyance. The idea of this little piece was that gender is already an important variable; therefore, a feminist sociology is unnecessary. Positive method could generate the truth of women's social reality. More recently, however, it has been rumored that a once major department of sociology in a prestigious university denied tenure to a sociologist who is known for her contributions to research on women's social reality. The seniors in that department are said to have claimed that a major reason for their decision was that gender is not really a variable. One might find this rumor hard to believe were it not for the hard fact that this same department not too long before had denied tenure to a distinguished female sociologist, for which it was found guilty of sex discrimination. Decide for yourself whether these two events (one quite possibly apocryphal) properly represent the uncertain understanding in sociology of either feminism or women's reality. Many will find both irritating, neither surprising. Taken together, their contradictions notwithstanding, they point to the still-missing feminist revolution in sociology (Stacey and Thore 1985). Dorothy Smith's work over more than a quarter-century illustrates the price sociology has paid for its refusal to take feminism seriously. It is not that Smith has solved problems sociologists cannot. Nor is it that, were her work magically recovered from neglect, sociologists would be instantly converted to feminism. Neither, probably. Rather, Dorothy Smith's recently edited and republished work (Smith 1987, 1990a, 1990b) instructs sociologists on just what they have been missing while missing the revolution. Smith is decidedly a partisan feminist. She is also a tough-minded sociologist-hard on the discipline for its neglect of women's reality, yet devoted enough to sociology not to abandon it. She continues to write sociology while other feminists have given up on it entirely. There are today so many important publishers eager to present work on women's reality that a feminist, once tenured or otherwise established, hardly need be bothered to please those who deny gender is a variable or those who think because it is, all that needs be done has been done. Smith continues to do sociology. Why? One plausible answer is that Dorothy Smith's social theory draws on sociological sources-most especially Marx and ethnomethodology, secondarily Schutz-from which she has fashioned empirical and theoretical studies on a stunning array of topics. In well over 60 articles (many reprinted and translated into several languages) and seven books or collections since the mid-1960s, Smith has written on suicide, the news, Virginia Woolf's suicide, mental illness, education, family life, ethnography, and power relations,