Feminist Knowledge Research Articles

Reviews

Vexing questions: Women and philosophy Moira Gatens, Feminism and Philosophy: Perspectives on Difference and Equality (Polity Press) Cambridge, 1991; Rosi Braidotti, Patterns of Dissonance (Polity Press) Cambridge, 1991. Rethinking democracy, reaffirming equality Ann Ferguson, Sexual Democracy: Women, Oppression, and Revolution (Allen & Unwin) Sydney, 1991; Anne Phillips, Engendering Democracy (Polity Press) Cambridge, 1991. Women's health Claudia Bepko (ed.), Feminism and Addiction (Haworth Press) Binghamton, 1991; Helen Roberts (ed.), Women's Health Matters (Routledge) London, 1992. Distinguishing the Intertwined: Multiplicity as Methodology and Recent Studies of Gender, Class, Ethnicity and Culture Gill Bottomley, Marie de Lepervanche and Jeannie Martin (eds), Intersexions: Gender/Class/Culture/Ethnicity (Allen & Unwin) Sydney, 1991; Kalpana Ram, Mukkuvar Women: Gender, Hegemony and Capitalist Transformation in a South Indian Fishing Community (Asian Studies Association of Australia Women in Asia Publication Series) (Allen & Unwin) Sydney, 1991; Shanti Rozario, Purity and Communal Boundaries: Women and Change in a Bangladeshi Village (Asian Studies Association of Australia Women in Asia Publication Series) (Allen & Unwin) Sydney, 1992; Ann Game, Undoing the Social: Towards a Deconstructive Sociology (Open University Press) Buckhingham, 1991 Writing through the body? Judith A. Allen, Sex and Secrets: Crimes Involving Australian Women since 1880 (Oxford University Press) Melbourne, 1990. Re‐mapping terrains Carol Pateman, The Disorder of Women (Polity Press) Cambridge, 1989; Lorraine Code, What Can She Know? Feminist Theory and the Construction of Knowledge (Cornell University Press) Ithaca & London, 1991; Elisabeth J. Porter, Women and Moral Identity (Allen & Unwin) Sydney, 1991. Inversions Betsy Warland (ed), Inversions: Writing by Dykes, Queers and Lesbians (Press Gang) Vancouver, 1991. Living laboratories Robyn Rowland, Living Laboratories, (Sun) Melbourne, 1992. Sharing household work Janeen Baxter, Diane Gibson with Mark Lynch‐Blosse, Double Take: The Links Between Paid and Unpaid Work (Australian Government Publishing Service) Canberra, 1990; Michael Bittman, Juggling Time: How Australian Families Use Time (Office of the Status of Women, Department of Premier and Cabinet) 1991. Feminist knowledge Sneja Gunew (ed.), Feminist Knowledge: Critique and Construct and A Reader in Feminist Knowledge (Routledge) London, 1990. Emotion and Gender June Crawford, Susan Kippax, Jenny Onyx, Una Gault and Pam Benton, Emotion and Gender: Constructing Meaning from Memory (Sage) London, 1992. As good as a yarn with you Carole Ferner (ed.), As Good As A Yarn With You: Letters between Miles Franklin, Katharine Susannah Prichard, Jean Devanny, Marjorie Barnard, Flora Elder show and Eleanor Dark (Cambridge University Press) Oakleigh, 1992. Women's rights Elizabeth Kingdom, What's Wrong With Rights?: Problems for Feminist Politics of Law (Edinburgh University Press) Edinburgh, 1991; A‐J. Arnaud and E. Kingdom (eds), Women's Rights and the Rights of Man (Aberdeen University Press) Aberdeen, 1990.

Epistemology or Bust: A Maternal Feminist Knowledge of Knowing

This work was originally published as Miller-McLemore, Bonnie J. 1992. Epistemology or Bust?: A Maternal Feminist Knowledge of Knowing. Journal of Religion 72 (2): 229 - 47.

Telling Tales: Historians of Our Own Lives

Telling Tales: Historians of Our Own Lives Lise Vogel The comments I make here flow from the puzzling experience I had reading and rereading these two papers in preparation for the Berkshire Conference session.1 My perplexity centered on the way the authors placed their analyses within the larger framework of the development of women's history and feminist theory over the past two decades. Although I had been actively involved during the years in which the new women's history emerged, I did not recognize the story they told. As I examined the pieces of the story that baffled me, I put the puzzle together another way.2 History and Theory In "Critical Theory and the History of Women: What's at Stake in Deconstructing Women's History," Louise Newman describes a developing antagonism between what she caUs women's history and gender history. Where historians of women explore "why specific groups of women share certain experiences," gender historians analyze "how gender (defined as a 'set of meanings constructing sexual difference') operates through specific cultural forms." Despite the apparent methodological and phüosophical guff between the study of women's experience and that of the representation of gender, Newman argues that the two approaches "might be integrated into one discursive practice." Such an integration, she believes, is the only way to produce understandings of the past that can empower us for the future. If historians do not succeed in melding analyses of experience and representation within their research, historical scholarship may degenerate into a disempowering practice "that aUows us only to watch from the sidelines as a new God, now in the form of Language, wreaks havoc on human Ufe."3 Luce Newman, Joan Wiltiams urges feminists to move beyond a düemma in contemporary scholarly interpretation. In "Domestidty as the Dangerous Supplement of Liberalism," she reads the work of Carol GUtigan primarily as "a status report on female gender ideology in the late twentieth century" and challenges feminists who adopt its framework uncritically. The powerful impact of In a Different Voice is best understood, she argues, as a refledion of internal conflicts felt by contemporary women, caught between "the mandates of two inconsistent ideologies—domestidty and UberaUsm." Where GilUgan's solution is a retreat to domestidty via the ethic of care, Williams's provocative rereading of GUUgan's inter- © 1991 Lise Vogel 90 Journal of Women's History Winter views suggests that the conflict could be an opportunity to mobilize a more effedive feminist sodal critique. In particular, the language of domestidty must be transformed "so that it no longer functions as the voice of the victim." (69) Both papers pose important questions, at least imptidtly, concerning the sociology of feminist knowledge. Wiltiams investigates the reception of GilUgan's work, focusing on its "stunning popularity." How is it, she asks, that GiUigan's essentiaUst understanding of womanhood "rings so true"? Why do so many women still read In a Different Voice "with a shock of seU-recognition"?4 Newman suggests that feminist knowledge has been produced in response to an ever-increasing awareness of theory, culminating most recently in feminist embrace of post-structuratism. A Straw Women's History In the course of addressing the substantive issues in their papers, Newman and Wiltiams touch very briefly on the origins and development of the field of women's history. Their papers rely on a version of this academic subspedatiys history that is apparently commonplace; indeed, Newman and Wiltiams present the fads as unproblematic. But the narrative they use—which Newman and Wiltiams have simply adopted, not invented, and for which they are therefore not reaUy responsible5—has serious problems. In order to consider what these problems entaü, I must first reteU the story. In the beginning, according to this widely believed account, there was women's history. These were the bad old days, when feminist historians had to stumble forward using what limited tools they could find or fashion. Despite their best efforts, these pioneers could not help but make errors. In particular, they made three. First, they viewed women as an undifferentiated group sharing an essential womanhood; that is, they ignored such fadors as race, class, ethnidty, age...

An Introduction to Sociology: Feminist Perspectives

1. Introduction: Feminism and the Sociological Imagination 2. Feminist Sociological Theory 3. Stratification and Inequality 4. Education 5. The Life Course 6. The Family and the Household 7. Health, Illness and Medicine 8. Sexuality 9. Work and Organisation 10. Crime, Deviance and Criminal Justice 11. Politics 12. Media Culture 13. Feminist Knowledge

‘The Trouble is it's Ahistorical’: The Problem of the Unconscious in Modern Feminist Theory

Many people have a problem with psychoanalytical theory because it is grounded in the concept of the unconscious. They find this concept distasteful and justify their distaste on the basis of two fundamental criticisms: that they can find no empirical evidence for it and that it is ahistorical. In this paper I want to begin by looking briefly at what I think constitutes evidence for the unconscious and then move on to consider the charge of it being ahistorical and examine what this charge really means. I shall then argue that rejection of the unconscious on these grounds is part of a more serious problem for the production of feminist knowledge of the personal - the problem of anxiety often experienced as distaste. A feminist knowledge which can theorize the link between sociology and psychoanalytic theory - integrate social and psychical reality - may only be possible if we can find a way of moving beyond anxiety to an integration of our own personal social and psychical dimensions in the form of insight. Most of us are familiar with the following kind of behaviour. We feel anxious - guilty - or vulnerable, so we hit out at the people closest to us and act as if they were attacking us. This mechanism is known in psychoanalytic theory as 'projection'. We find a part of ourselves unacceptable (the thing we feel guilty about - our anxiety or insecurity, our vulnerability) and instead of allowing ourself to consciously feel and acknowledge the feelings we don't like, we project them onto other people and then feel under attack from these people. These same people then represent to us the alienated part of ourself we've thrown out. Feeling under attack we attack them (usually much to their surprise!). At it's simplest it's the 'kicking the cat' reaction (much as I dislike that

Improving on Sociology: The Problems of Taking a Feminist Standpoint

The case for feminist knowledge as an improvement on male-centred sociology is a strong one. Taking a feminist standpoint produces knowledge of gendered meanings and relationships of which we may not be aware and which sociology has generally ignored. This resolves some of the problems posed by male-centred versions of sociology. Taking a feminist standpoint, though, also raises serious problems of how to make both sociological and feminist knowledge convincing. It enables us to improve on existing sociological knowledge, but exposes many further problems which still need attention. The implications of taking a feminist standpoint are explored by considering some methodological problems of improving on a 1960s study of shiftworking women.

Knowers, Knowing, Known: Feminist Theory and Claims of Truth

paper. 1 For general arguments against an excessive philosophical preoccupation with epistemology, see Jacques Derrida, Dissemination (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981); John Gunnell, Between Philosophy and Politics (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1986); Mark Krupnick, ed., Displacement (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1983); Paul Kress, "Against Epistemology," Journal of Politics 41, no. 2 (May 1979): 526-42. For specific arguments against foundationalism, see Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1979); Richard Bernstein, Beyond Objectivism and Relativism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983); Don Herzog, Without Foundations: Justification in Political Theory (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1985). It is worth noting the irony that even those most intent on repudiating epistemology on the grounds that traditional epistemological concerns involve claims altogether beyond the possibilities for human knowledge are themselves advancing epistemological claims.

Is academic feminism an oxymoron?

An oxymoron by definition is a paradox, a universal contradiction. But no words or concepts have such stability. Indeed, any concept subject to a feminist critique is quickly revealed as a social construction whose so-called paradoxical status is but the beginning of redefinition and the foundation for political action. So it is with academic feminism. While apparently a contradiction to ‘teach’ feminism within an exclusive authoritarian academy awash with masculine ways of knowing and doing, my experience in Women's Studies at Deakin University has revealed the positive as well as the negative sides of this paradox. In particular, by subverting the academy as the sole custodian of ‘higher learning,’ in confronting men's knowledge with the possibility of feminist knowledge, and in juxtaposing feminist ways of working and organising with pre-existing structures of power and status (even if without success), avenues of redefinition and political action have been exposed which undermine academic feminism as an oxymoron.

Knowledge and Women's Interests: Issues of Epistemology and Methodology in Feminist Sociological Research*

This analysis focuses on feminist methodology in the field of sociology by surveying the techniques used in recent research concerning gender‐related topics as well as feminist analyses of epistemological assumptions underlying the conduct of inquiry. In addition to the critique and reformulation of standard research practice, feminist methodology involves the development of innovative methodological approaches, including visual techniques, conversational and textual analysis, and analysis of spontaneous events. Linked to the development of innovation is the feminist analysis of the epistemological assumptions which underlie different ways of knowing. These principles of feminist knowledge include (1) the necessity of continuously and reflexively attending to the significance of gender relations as a basic feature of all social life, including the conduct of research; (2) the centrality of consciousness‐raising as a specific methodological tool and as a “way of seeing;” (3) the need to challenge the norm of “objectivity” that assumes a dichotomy between the subject and object of research; (4) the concern for the ethical implications of research; and (5) an emphasis on the transformation of patriarchy and the empowerment of women.

Women, Graduate Education, and Feminist Knowledge

This paper argues that knowledge and strategies of inquiry for producing knowledge are not gender-neutral. Bias in existing academic disciplines goes deeper than simply ignoring the existence of women as scholarly contributors or as a category for study. Bias extends to the very philosophical foundations of how inquiry is conceptualized. It extends to theories about how we think and to judgments about what constitutes “good” thinking. As a result, women in graduate school are often constrained to inquire in ways that are male-oriented and discontinuous with their life experience—to the detriment of their persistence in graduate programs. The paper discusses the relationships between feminist scholarship, science, feminist epistemology, and developments in the philosophy of science. The paper concludes with a discussion of the implications of these relationships for the education of women.