Feminist Standpoint Epistemology Research Articles

The price women attorneys pay for being mothers in South African law firms

AbstractThis paper presents the findings of a study undertaken amongst women attorneys in South Africa, to determine the impact motherhood has on their legal career. The argument is that motherhood is incompatible with the hyper‐competitive male dominant professional culture of the legal profession. The paper employs Edgar Schein's concept of organisational culture and Pierre Bourdieu's concepts of field, habitus and culture to understand how women continue to experience unequal outcome in their careers, despite the removal of formal barriers and the enactment of laws and policies. The concepts further illuminate how and why the male dominant culture of the profession embeds itself and remains one of the hardest elements to change. The study was furthermore underpinned by a feminist standpoint epistemology, interviewing 27 attorneys across three corporate law firms in South Africa. The key findings show that when becoming a mother, many women attorneys experience a disjuncture between their mothering and professional role, which is attributed to the hyper‐competitive culture of the profession. This leads to many women having less successful legal careers which is manifested in different ways. These findings demonstrate how women are perpetually marginalized in the profession and why we continue to see the lack of women in the senior ranks of the profession despite a robust legal and policy framework promoting equality.

Understanding women's performance of entrepreneurship in the Sri Lankan context

PurposeThe aim of this study is to explore how women in Sri Lanka cultivate entrepreneurial personae to navigate the various gendered roles they situationally enact, as they attempt to secure legitimacy and acceptance and overcome their otherness. Drawing on Goffman's theorisation of symbolic interaction, this study investigates how gender informs the performance of entrepreneurship in Sri Lanka. In this way, the study engages with the challenges women in the Global South navigate while undertaking entrepreneurship, and it contributes to the critical entrepreneurship literature on the intertwined nature of gender and entrepreneurship.Design/methodology/approachFollowing feminist standpoint epistemology (FSE), this qualitative study focuses on women entrepreneurs in Sri Lanka by examining the performance of entrepreneurship through 44 life history interviews (LHIs) and 40 Field Observations conducted over a seven-month period.FindingsThe findings reveal that women carefully cultivate entrepreneurial personae by striking a balance between entrepreneurial ideals and patriarchal social expectations around womanhood. The findings of the study present how the entrepreneurial personae are constructed by way of appearance, mannerism and setting, which presents opportunities for future research to explore the dramaturgical aspect of gender and entrepreneurship.Originality/valueThis study contributes to the growing body of feminist research surrounding women entrepreneurs, by drawing on insights from the lived experiences of women entrepreneurs in the Global South. This study also expands Goffman's theorisation of audience segregation and shows that a subject's understanding of the audience shapes their personae. A further contribution of this research is how space becomes an extension of the personae at play.

Fire inside me – Exploring the possibilities of embodied queer listening

ABSTRACT In this article, I develop the methodological approach of embodied queer listening, which allows capturing, analyzing, and writing with/through/about the researcher’s embodied experience as part of the research process in interview-based studies. The approach combines anti-narrative research with embodied and queer listening to enable researchers to engage critically with normative narratives shared in interview situations and listen to their own embodied experiences that are otherwise suppressed in normative discourse. Embodied queer listening enables careful reflection of the researcher’s positionality and power relation vis-à-vis the research participants and recognizes embodied experience as a source of knowledge that can guide further conceptualization and theorization in organizational research. Homing in on Black feminist standpoint epistemologies and the importance of ‘Outsiders Within’ who create knowledge ‘from the margin’, it contributes to epistemological discussions on the relationship between knowledge production and gendered and racialized power structures in organization studies.

Situating Cancel Culture

Many view cancellation as a method for holding influential personalities accountable for bad behavior, while others think cancelling amounts to censorship and bullying. I hold that neither of these accounts are worth pursuing, especially if the aim is social progress. In this paper, I offer a situated account of cancellation and cancel culture, locating the phenomenon in our exclusionary history while examining the social dynamics of belief. When we situate cancel culture, we can see how problematic instances of cancelling are embedded in ignorance. While combatting ignorance appears to call for a remedy rooted in feminist standpoint epistemology, there are risks in adopting naive practices of deference. Applying criticisms of epistemic injustice and adopting Táíwò’s elite capture framework, I explain how well-intentioned cancelling can work against social movements. Since epistemic trust mechanisms discourage self-reflection and belief revision, the relevant tactics for enacting social change—coalition politics and education—seem out of reach. I conclude by sketching cancel culture as a diagnostic tool: cancellation can be used appropriately in marginalized communities, but when it comes to combatting ignorance among privileged folks, we should view cancel culture as a method for determining where our social institutions are failing us.

“I’m Described as Good Journalist Because I Am ‘Tough’”: How Femininity Is Still Considered a Weakness in Zimbabwean Newsrooms

ABSTRACT This paper investigates journalism practice and newsroom cultures in both private and state media companies in Zimbabwe. The paper moves beyond the gender body count to analyse journalists’ cultural interpretations of their everyday work and actions and how this contributes to the structuring of power relations in the newsrooms. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 16 journalists from selected Zimbabwean newsrooms to unearth their lived experiences of the profession. Using the journalism culture concept, feminist standpoint epistemology and intersectionality, the study found out that Zimbabwean journalists continue to experience gender biases owing to cultural interpretations of the roles of women and men; increasing subtle sexual harassment from both media managers, male colleagues and sources; and deliberate silencing of women’s voices. Further, a poor performing economy contributes to unethical journalism practices. The study also reveals how gender intersects with other social norms such as the location/positioning of women, ethnicity, age, and years of experience in the newsroom to further dis-privilege female journalists. There are deliberate efforts by journalists (both male and female) to employ feminist journalism—with the goal of contributing towards a journalistic culture that is non-oppressive.

In feminism we trust! On how feminist standpoint epistemologies shape journalism practices in two argentine digital newsrooms

In this exploratory study, I conduct a textual analysis of the online content produced by two Argentine feminist news outlets, LatFem and Diario Digital Femenino (DDF) to examine how feminist standpoint epistemologies (FSE) shape news-making. The findings show that these newsrooms showcase features of a strong reflexivity which allows journalists to consider their own position in the social fabric, to contextualize their journalistic practices, and to question instances of systemic discrimination. Furthermore, the use of FSE enables the expression of solidarity and advocacy by reporters. I argue that the intervention to journalism as performed by feminist Argentine journalists and editors yields profound transformations to journalism practice and news content, as FSE destabilize and complicate traditional notions of journalistic objectivity and its role in democratic societies.

Love (and Loss) in the Time of COVID-19: Translating Trauma into an Archives of Embodied Immediacy

ABSTRACT This article contributes to the emerging body of literature on grief and trauma in archival and records management work through the lens of COVID-19. The pandemic has put into stark relief the fragility of our individual and collective lives and livelihoods. Now, more than ever, we must take seriously the mental health and well-being of archivists. Inspired by the loss of a lover due to coronavirus-related symptoms, which brought on a deep grief that had profound professional, academic, and personal affects, this article—in a nod to Michelle Caswell's writing on feminist standpoint epistemology—represents the author's effort to “[value] the view from the margins.” More acutely, it speaks from the vantage point of a queer, Filipino, precariously employed archival student and practitioner grasping for meaning during a global pandemic. Engaging with affect theory, queer studies, and work on grief in archives, the author develops the concept of affective porosity, a means through which archival practitioners might seek a richer sense of relationality. Grounding theoretical expansiveness within contemporary practice, this article concludes by using field reports on archival trauma and case studies on BIPOC student labor to productively interrogate the state of archival labor today. As a profession, it is critical that archivists strive toward a path of embodied immediacy, caring for fellow archivists as much as we do archives.

Making Sense of “Microaggression”

Though philosophers are beginning to pay attention to the phenomenon of microaggressions, they are yet to fully draw on their training and skills in conceptual analysis to help make sense of what microaggression is. In this paper, I offer a philosophical analysis of the concept of microaggression. I ultimately argue that ‘microaggression’ as a concept gets its meaning not by decomposing into a set of necessary and sufficient conditions, but rather by means of what Ludwig Wittgenstein (1953) has called “family resemblance.” That is to say, what unifies the concept of microaggression is a set of common, overlapping features that link related instances together, but are not necessarily all present in all cases. I identify and explain a common set of features that together form the basis for a family resemblance account of the concept. I then argue that despite the difficulty that microaggressions pose in terms of being reliably recognized and understood as such, some people, in virtue of their epistemic standpoint, are better suited to recognize these features and subsequently identify instances of micraoggression in practice. I argue this by drawing on the vast literature in feminist standpoint epistemology (Alcoff, 1993; Hill Collins, 1990, 2004; hooks, 2004; Harding, 2004, 2008; Wylie, 2013).

“Should I Stay, or Should I Go?”: The Experiences of, and Choices Available to Women of South Asian Heritage Living in the UK When Leaving a Relationship of Choice Following Intimate Partner Violence (IPV)

Researching South Asian women who have departed social norms and married outside the social conventions of their culture widens our understanding and knowledge on the topic of Intimate Partner Violence (IPV). This paper will investigate how the women participating in the research navigated the socialisation of arranged marriage and expectations on them as women, and how this influenced their decisions to remain in violent and abusive relationships. Often without family support or the “safety net” of an arranged marriage, the women stayed in abusive relationships longer than they would have done if the marriage had been arranged. The findings show that the women’s experiences of leaving the relationship are mediated by the context of forming an intimate relationship. A qualitative research approach using Black Feminist Standpoint Epistemology employed thematic analysis to give voice to South Asian women’s experiences and insights into their experiences of, and responses to, leaving abusive relationships. The analysis shows that women’s agentic act of choosing a partner became the very barrier to leaving the relationship if it turned violent and abusive.

Representation, Ideology and Writing from Below: On the Paradox of Standpoint Epistemology and the Limits of Intersectionality

Feminist standpoint epistemology (FSE) is an important form of writing from below; that is, writing from embodied experience. FSE and other forms of writing from below involve practices of representation that are mediated by ideology. In this article, I tease out some of the complexities and limitations of feminist efforts to use FSE to situate and embody thought. Some feminist standpoint theorists understand Cartesian dualism as a dualism or a division that can be collapsed or reversed, but I show that what is called “Cartesian dualism” is in fact a paradox and therefore cannot be overcome but must be grappled with on an ongoing basis in our efforts to write from below. The article begins with an exploration of the basic tenets and presumptions of two schools of FSE. While neither school can evade the politics of representation, I show that one is able to withstand an intersectional critique whilst the other is not. Having unpacked these schools of FSE, I reflect on Himani Bannerji’s ideology critique of intersectionality to lay bare the limitations of this concept that some writers from below deploy and to advance a reflexive materialist epistemology.

A feminist and decolonial perspective on passing the test in activist ethnography

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to question the idea of “passing a test” within activist ethnography. Activist ethnography is an ethnographic engagement with social movement organizations as anti-authoritarian, anarchist, feminist and/or anti-racist collectives. It is based on the personal situating of the researcher within the field to avoid a replication of colonialist research dynamics. Addressing these concerns, we explore activist ethnography through feminist standpoint epistemologies and decolonial perspectives.Design/methodology/approachThis paper draws on our two activist ethnographies conducted as PhD research in two distinct European cities with two different starting points. While Léa entered the field through her PhD research, Claire partly withdrew and re-entered as academic.FindingsEven when activist researchers share the political positioning of the social movement they want to study, they still experience tests regarding their research methodology. As activists, they are accountable to their movement and experience – as most other activist – a constant threat of exclusion. In addition, activist networks are fractured along political lines, the test is therefore ongoing.Originality/valueOur contribution is threefold. First, the understanding of tests within activist ethnography helps decolonizing ethnography. Being both the knower and the known, activist ethnographers reflect on the colonial and heterosexist history of ethnography which offers potentials to use ethnography in non-exploitative ways. Second, we conceive of activist ethnography as a prefigurative methodology, i.e. as an embedded activist practice, that should therefore answer to the same tests as any other practice of prefigurative movements: it should aim to enact here and now the type of society the movement reaches for. Finally, we argue that activist ethnography relies on and contribute to developing consciousness about the researcher’s political subjectivity.

Speak for Your Self: Psychoanalysis, Autotheory, and The Plural Self

Speak for Your Self:Psychoanalysis, Autotheory, and The Plural Self Carolyn Laubender (bio) "How can a book be both a free expression and a negotiation?" Maggie Nelson, The Argonauts despite his steadfast commitment to being a "man of science," Sigmund Freud had a knack for autobiographical writing. In prefaces, in footnotes, and in parenthetical asides, Freud freely employed allusions to his personal life to help explicate his theories of mind. While some texts like Totem and Taboo and Instincts and Their Vicissitudes contain sly references to Freud's rivalrous friendships and feuds, others like Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-Year-Old Boy, The History of the Psychoanalytic Movement, and Beyond the Pleasure Principle smuggle in narratives from his personal life to substantiate his theoretical excursions. As students of Freud's work learn early on, such autobiographical inclusions litter his writing and provide useful landmarks for making sense of some of his most significant concepts. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine ambivalence be without Eugen Bleuler; the Oedipus complex without Jacob Freud; bisexuality without Wilhelm Fleiss; or the death instinct without Sophie Freud. Freud frequently acknowledged, in letters and in published texts, that self-narration was his own point of entry to what would become psychoanalysis. As Freud realized, The Interpretation of Dreams—that founding ur-text of the field—was essentially a form of experimental, autobiographical writing. However, this was hardly a comfortable recognition for Freud. In the original preface to The Interpretation of Dreams, he anxiously justifies his autobiographical mode, explaining that The difficulties of presentation have been further increased by the peculiarities of the material which I have had to use to [End Page 39] illustrate the interpreting of dreams. … The only dreams open to my choice were my own. … But if I was to report my own dreams, it inevitably followed that I should have to reveal to the public gaze more of the intimacies of my mental life than I liked, or than is normally necessary for any writer who is a man of science and not a poet. Such was the painful but unavoidable necessity; and I have submitted to it rather than totally abandon the possibility of giving the evidence for my psychological findings. (xxiii–xxiv) In this founding moment of psychoanalysis, Freud confronts the features of his work that seem to destabilize the divide between literature and science, requiring (as his work did) narrative methods far more common to poets and storytellers than to scientists. But rather than "totally abandon" his psychological discoveries when the requisite methods challenged the conventional notions of objectivity, Freud dug into the "peculiarities" of his work and embarked on a thoroughgoing analysis of own his dreams. He described this work as an "auto-analysis" and, in doing so, he proleptically joined the autobiographical to what would become the psychoanalytic. Using the technique of free association developed in clinical work with his patients, Freud picked apart accounts of his life and of his dreams, ultimately arriving at his revolutionary theory of the unconscious. Psychoanalysis is, in other words, a modern science born of Freud's deconstruction of self-narration; it is a generalizable theory of mind catalyzed by Freud's experiment with autobiography. Such experimentation with self-narration provides one early example of the multiple ways that critical theory has, in the decades since, reconfigured the relationship between the person of the author and her written texts. Recently, this impulse has (re)emerged in the genre of critical self-narration that Paul B. Preciado has called "autotheory." A supposedly distinct, "genre defying" form of contemporary writing popularized by Maggie Nelson in the mid-2010s, autotheory has been hailed as an alternative to both autobiography and critical theory because of its delivery of a unique style of self-narration in which twentieth-century critical theory melds with representations of personal experience.1 Yet, as Freud's writing shows, some of [End Page 40] the twentieth-century's most important intellectual traditions—from cultural studies to queer theory, psychoanalysis to feminist standpoint epistemology, Audre Lorde to Roland Barthes—have emerged from similar re-narrativizations of the self. Freud's retooling of autobiography in The Interpretation of Dreams constitutes one...

Whose Knowledge? Epistemic Injustice and Challenges in Hearing Children`s' Voices

In this essay, I will discuss the importance of having an awareness about epistemic justice, epistemic ignorance and epistemic injustice, and why this awareness is important in connection to children and patients in mental health care. I also suggest ways to avoid epistemic injustice when working with, and doing research with, children in mental health care. In doing so, I tie this to feminist epistemology where conceptions such as knowledge, knowers and objectivity are questioned, and dominant conceptions and practices of knowledge production are perceived as a systematic disadvantage of women and other subordinated groups (Anderson, 2017). I am as well linking this to queer epistemology which differs from feminist standpoint epistemology in the idea of the identity being “a point of departure for shared consciousness” (Hall, 2017, p. 163).

Dusting for Fingerprints

This article argues that feminist standpoint epistemologies help us rethink both the process by which archival value is determined and the archivists’ role in that process, leading towards a new methodology, epistemology, and political strategy for appraisal, which I call “feminist standpoint appraisal.” Feminist standpoint appraisal inverts dominant appraisal hierarchies that value records created by those in power to justify and consolidate their power at the expense of records created by the oppressed to document and resist their oppression and imagine liberation. As such, feminist standpoint appraisal explicitly and unapologetically gives epistemological weight (thereby assigning value to) records created and preserved by, and potentially activated in service to, those individuals and communities oppressed by capitalism, white supremacy, and patriarchy. Furthermore, feminist standpoint appraisal shifts our thinking about the position of the archivist, from a purportedly objective “view from nowhere” (which in fact belies a dominant but unnamed white male position), towards a socially located, culturally situated agent who centers ways of being and knowing from the margins. In valuing the unique insights gleaned by people on the margins, feminist standpoint appraisal refuses the notion that archivists from oppressed communities must overcome their positionalities to meet institutional goals and professional demands for neutrality, but rather, values and leverages the insights gained from outsider status, viewing the attendant insights as assets, rather than as detriments, to the archival endeavor. Furthermore, feminist standpoint appraisal calls on archivists who inhabit dominant identities to acknowledge their oppressor standpoints and actively work to dismantle them.
 Pre-print first published online 08/26/2019

Conhecimento situado, gênero e raça

Este artigo buscará narrar as interações entre o pesquisador, um homem branco de classe média, e suas interlocutoras, mulheres periféricas, moradoras da Zona Leste de São Paulo, em sua maioria negras, em um trabalho de campo que resultou em tese de doutorado. As diferenças sociais entre os sujeitos foram constantemente demarcadas durante o processo. Como qualquer pesquisa qualitativa, os dados descritos, analisados e interpretados foram produzidos por interações concretas e específicas. Argumenta-se que tais interações não são invariáveis ou mecanicamente previsíveis, pois cada sujeito concreto elabora prática e simbolicamente de formas determinadas estas interações. Os meios primordiais para a coleta de dados foram entrevistas e observações (semi) participantes. Ao mesmo tempo em que são reconhecidos e incorporados vários limites condicionados pela situação social do pesquisador, defende-se que pode existir alguma produtividade específica na posicionalidade de um homem branco de classe média estudando movimentos sociais de mulheres periféricas. Para analisar as relações que resultaram do encontro e do diálogo da pessoa investigadora com outros sujeitos, são mobilizadas reflexões metodológicas e o conceito de “conhecimento situado” da epistemologia do ponto de vista feminista de Haraway.

Solving Journalism’s Post-Truth Crisis With Feminist Standpoint Epistemology

This essay proposes using feminist standpoint epistemology (FSE) to help journalists and scholars who increasingly find their credibility, authority, knowledge, and even their sincerity undermined. FSE foregrounds particularity and experience, arguing that the ways that bodies of knowledge are socially situated and embodied limits but also enables what one can know. I first outline some of the relevant principles of FSE, in order to suggest its applicability to journalism. Then I demonstrate how FSE explains professional journalism issues brought into the open by recent news exposés of work-related sexual harassment, including harassment perpetrated by journalists themselves.

Hard Time

As the number of women incarcerated in the United States continues to rise and their complex needs become more apparent, social workers must fortify their historical commitment to criminal justice reform. However, crafting more effective and compassionate responses to the needs of justice-involved women may very well require a more nuanced understanding of the holistic impact of incarceration on women’s well-being than the current literature offers. Utilizing the framework of feminist standpoint epistemology, the researcher engaged in qualitative content analysis to examine published personal accounts from 43 women to better understand their experiences in prisons and jails in the United States. Two overarching themes emerged from the analysis. First, the personal accounts illustrated that women experience prisons and jails as environments of denial insofar as these carceral environments deny women’s basic needs, their sense of humanity, and their personal power. The second overarching theme pertains to the holistic impact of the carceral environment upon women’s lives, meaning it has expansive effects on women’s biopsychosocial–spiritual functioning. Social workers should dedicate efforts to dramatically reducing the number of women behind bars and engaging in holistic intervention approaches that might counteract the negative effects of incarceration across domains of well-being.

Reassembling the archives: business history knowledge production from an actor-network perspective

This paper addresses the dearth of methodological analysis in business history. Questioning the sources of women’s marginality in Israeli business history, I integrate a feminist standpoint epistemology with a historically nuanced actor–network theory (ANTi-History) into a critically reflexive methodological account. I claim that this valuable analytical tool elaborates on business historians’ craft and offers three main contributions. First, it bolsters the disciplinary rigor of business history and its potential advantages for management and organizational scholarship. Second, the material semiotics of this approach highlights the extent to which nonhuman objects affect power relations in the course of producing a singular historical representation. Third, by tracing the performance of analytical categories such as gender in the course of knowledge production, it delineates the operation of mechanisms of marginality in the past and within the archive. These insights contribute to a better understanding of how business history was rendered masculine.

The Romantic Retreat Is Not Club Med

“Feminist standpoint epistemology” is not a serious philosophy but a romantic evasion of the application of science to social services. There are numerous limitations to the application of the scientific method to the practice of social work and the social services. Nonetheless, a pragmatic approach to understanding social reality and the evaluation of social interventions is more desirable than feminist standpoint epistemology. Yet the romantic dominates social work and social decision-making in the United States and may explain the precipitous decline of social work over the past century. Indeed, much should be said for closing down social work education and the field itself in order to try an alternative that might better serve people in need.

What’s Epistemology Got to Do With It?

Feminist standpoint epistemology is neither a necessary nor a sufficient starting point for social work intervention research. Contemporary social scientists readily grapple with cultural, political, and/or structural aspects of social problems either in the absence of or in conjunction with an explicitly formulated feminist standpoint epistemology. The article also argues against privileging any group’s voice for purposes of social work intervention research, including the voices of marginalized and oppressed groups whose judgments, perceptions, and statement of facts are as prone to error or likely to be as mistaken as anyone else’s.