The Philosophical Bases of Feminist Literary Criticisms

Abstract

able, and often autonomous, those in the feminist domain are assumed to be interactive as a system and demarcated by the decision of inquirers. The methods of traditional literary study include differential, integral, principled, causal, inferential, and analogical thinking; they are employed to classify, interpret, and judge literary works. The methods of feminist literary study include specifying, patterning, and approximating systems that include us; they are employed to discover and change the gendered literary-cultural system. While traditional literary critics as agents fade from the domain of study, leaving their stances like plumes of smoke trailing behind them, feminist literary critics stand forth in a domain of our making, revealing our perspectivity-and theirs. Feminist epistemology is based on the assumption that we as diverse knowers must insert ourselves and our perspectives into the domain of study and become, self-reflexively, part of the investigation. These perspectives are the requisite of our knowledge. Perspective is the effect of relative position and distance; visually it means that the configuration seen varies with the observers' standpoints. Through the circumstances of life, people acquire specific feelings, ideas, and values that situate them relative to any subject. Because their situations differ, their perspectives diverge. The circumstances that diversify perspectives are: (1) our affiliations with a sex, race, This content downloaded from 157.55.39.178 on Fri, 05 Aug 2016 04:13:28 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms PHILOSOPHICAL BASES OF FEMINIST CRITICISMS 89 class, affectional preference, and other cultural circumstances; (2) our personal histories; (3) our technical approaches to inquiry; and (4) our self-reflexivity or awareness of the ways these factors organize existence. Feminists have shown that we all stand in different relationships to the subjects of science and taste, an assumption I call perspectivity, as distinct from objectivity, an allegedly unsituated stance, and uniformity, a normatively imposed one. Unlike these, perspectivity requires us to include people with diverse perspectives, to learn a repertoire of cultural as well as technical perspectives, and to make knowledge collectively. Thus, perspectivity would restructure inquiry by institutionalizing a diversity grounded in cultural, personal, technical, and selfreflexive variables; by using viewpoints as a chief methodology; and by composing manifold knowledge. Reflecting on multiple stances, we need to develop perspectivism, a feminist philosophy that counters objectivism, which privileges objects, and subjectivism, which privileges subjects. Perspectivism would bring together, in processes of knowing, the personal and cultural, subjective and objective-replacing dichotomies with a systemic understanding of how and what we see. It would explain how we affiliate culturally, acquire a self-centered perspective, experience the perspectives of others, and deploy multiple perspectives in inquiry. It would show that perspectivity arises from and defines knowers qualified (in both senses of the word) by their experiences, self-reflection, and contingent standpoints. When we are diverse knowers who insert our agencies and perspectives into literary study, then knowing becomes a collective endeavor grounded in experience, experience gains acceptance as evidence, and knowledge is transformed from an authoritative, freestanding construct to a common, conditional formulation.54 The criteria for what counts as knowledge change too. Truth no longer functions in the traditional senses of gauging the universality and predictability of knowledge, nor does verisimilitude demand accuracy in representing reality. Instead, equity and epistemic awareness are the standards for self-conscious, other-conscious, relational ways of knowing. Equity pronounces the inadequacy of knowledge that denigrates or excludes the experiences, perspectives, and indeed persons of most of the human race; it prompts us to open the domain of literary study. Epistemic awareness pronounces the inadequacy of critics who avow neutrality and technical virtuosity; it prompts us to enter the domain of literary study and study ourselves. There we place a premium on how much we see not of objects but of ourselves and others as knowers with feelings, ideas, and values. This content downloaded from 157.55.39.178 on Fri, 05 Aug 2016 04:13:28 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 90 NEW LITERARY HISTORY