Feminist Epistemology Research Paper

That hot debate among the scholars and activists of the women’s movement, which gave birth to the claims for feminist epistemology, took rather little notice of disciplinary boundaries. The new field they were in the process of creating, ‘Women’s Studies,’ was self-consciously not only highly innovative but was also transgressive. Having found that the academic gaze was blind to the bodies and lives of women, to say nothing of sex–gender relations, there seemed little purpose in deferring to the canon of the old exclusionary disciplines. Thus the new epistemology drew in theorists whose disciplinary formation lay in philosophy, psychoanalysis, biology, history, physics, and sociology, but whose cultural products often showed little trace of their formation. These feminist epistemology debates, without quite ever settling down and forging an unequivocal consensus, have entered and helped foster profound changes in many academic disciplines, particularly where the mode of production of knowledge requires rather modest capitalization. The so-called ‘Little Sciences’ have proved much more susceptible to change than the ‘Big Sciences.’ Thus the most power charged techno-sciences of molecular biology and informatics are proving to be remarkably resistant to the kinds of internal changes that primatology or sociology have experienced.

1. The Birth Of Academic Feminism

Despite the power of late twentieth century feminism to touch women worldwide, the development of academic feminist theorizing required financial support. During this key early period support given to Women’s Studies by both the Ford and Rockefeller foundations enabled US academic feminism to develop more strongly than its counterpart within Europe, not least in the development of feminist approaches to the theory of knowledge. By contrast, although Scandinavian research policy was swift to support Women’s Studies, it did so as part of policyoriented, rather than as basic research, while in Western Europe, with the exception of The Netherlands, support from either the state or from foundations was slow to arrive. Thus, while there was a rich outpouring of articles and books published by feminists from many countries criticizing existing theories of knowledge and proposing alternatives, the confident assertion that there were distinctively feminist perspectives on epistemology had to wait until the publication of DiscOvering Reality (Harding and Hintikka 1983). The editors, the US philosophers of science, Sandra Harding and Merrill Hintikka, described their theoretical project.

During the 1990s, feminist thinkers provided brilliant critiques of the political and social beliefs and practices of patriarchal cultures. But less attention has been given to the underlying theories of knowledge, and to the metaphysics which mirror and support patriarchal belief and practice. Are there—can there be ‘distinctive feminist perspectives on epistemology, metaphysic, methodology, and philosophy of science’ (p. 9)?

The US contributors, divided between deconstructionist accounts of the values embedded within organized knowledge or scientia, and those which try to set out the conditions for rebuilding these as feminist knowledges. A key target was the natural sciences, which had, with immense success, claimed to be above culture. In setting the natural sciences as their target, the feminist critics of science shared more than a little in common with the new, post-Mertonian, sociology of science, although there was little visible connection between the two. However, the very title of the book indicates that these were daughters, albeit dissident daughters, of the enlightenment. As feminist critics of science, they sought to replace what they saw as flawed accounts of reality with more reliable accounts free from ideologies and relations of domination. For this generation of theorists, the fact that reality was both real and knowable was not significantly at issue; the nominalism which was to sweep the 1980s and 1990s, was not, at that moment, a powerful current. Recognizing the power of foundationalist thought, the authors set out to analyze the patriarchal constructions of those cultural giants who had deeply shaped Western culture from antiquity, to the early theorists of modernity to the late modern figures of Darwin, Marx, and Freud. Within the natural sciences it was not by chance that the focus was Darwin and the life sciences, and not, say Einstein and physics, for biology was the discourse which claimed cultural authority to define women’s nature.

The definition of women’s nature was an old battleground, with pioneer nineteenth century feminists arguing that in Darwinian theory, only men evolved. Unquestionably, scientific sexism along with scientific racism demanded critical attention; clearing away the culture of biology-as-destiny would help create a political space in which new human subjects could claim agency. Where in the past such detailed critiques had been mounted predominantly by progressive men biologists, as women entered the laboratories, their consciousness raised by the second women’s movement, they too had the skills to enter the lists in their own right. The pioneers among these feminist biologists include Ruth Hubbard, Marian Lowe, Ethel Tobach, Betty Roscoff, Anne Fausto Stirling, Ruth Bleier, and Lynda Birke. These insisted that the androcentricity which produced and reflected a patriarchal culture also produced poor biology, and that a more faithful, more reliable account of women’s nature could only be produced through feminist science resisting the relations of domination. It was the pioneering work of Carolyn Merchant (1980) as a historian of science that linked the problem of gender domination with the domination of nature. While this link by the feminist historians opened a continuing connection with the burgeoning environmentalist movement, the feminist life scientists made a powerful connection with the women’s health movement. Both had, and have, epistemological and political implications.

Their deconstructionist critiques (without Derrida) constituted an immense methodological challenge to contemporary biomedical research. They charged successfully that biomedicine had taken the body of the male of European bio-geographic ancestry, or ‘race,’ and fetishized it as the universal human body. They demonstrated forcefully the ways through which women’s bodies, apart from their problematic reproductive systems and their troublesome psyches, along with the bodies and minds of other Others, were subsumed within a demonstrably false universalism. Under the impact of this epistemological questioning, together with the increasing presence of historically excluded groups within the laboratories, the discourse of biomedical research has gradually but dramatically changed, above all in the study of the pre-eminent lethal diseases of the West. Thus, heart research now routinely explores difference without hierarchy, where previously the study of the heart of the pale male was equated with some universal human organ. Researching cancer also underwent a sea change. It was not simply the immense pressure to address breast cancer seriously but, almost ironically, this attention to sex–gender difference has led to greater attention being paid to the specific problems of men, not least prostate cancer. Even mental health began to address gender and ‘race’ difference without automatic notions of domination. This was feminist epistemology in action.

2. The New Feminist Epistemology

This successful critique of biomedical science as skewed and inadequate, bad for women and bad for science, fostered an initial comfortable solidarity between the pioneer feminist science critics, embracing both the feminist biologists and those, typically from the social sciences and humanities, engaged in setting out the theoretical project of a distinctively feminist epistemology. One of the most influential theorists of the new feminist epistemology was political scientist Nancy Hartsock (1983), who formulated and named feminist standpoint theory. Her socialist feminist project revisioned Marx’s theory of knowledge. Taking the project of a proletarian science, she runs it through the sieve of feminist analyses of the specificities of women’s reproductive labor. She argues that it is a feminist consciousness that gives rise to the distinctively feminist standpoint. This approach was shared by Harding in the same volume, and by sociologist Hilary Rose in her Signs article (1978). In the important earlier natural science issue of Signs, the historian Donna Haraway (1978) had already spelled out the need to rebuild the life sciences outside the relations of dominance. In this project of a successor science these feminists reflected the strong Hegelian and Marxist influences in their work. The heretical claim that nature and not just society could be more reliably ‘seen from below’ challenged the hegemony of the claims of the natural sciences to be a culture of no culture.

Feminist standpoint theory, particularly when it was directed to the study of nature, represented a theoretical development from the ‘two sciences thesis,’ articulated initially as the struggle between proletarian and bourgeois science by the social relations of the science movement of the 1930s and 1940s, lost in the Stalinist period, but subsequently re-articulated as a rainbow politics of ‘science for the people’ by the radical science movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Other influential feminist science theorists came at the epistemology question from very different theoretical and political trajectories. Thus, philosopher Helen Longino, while concerned to define a feminist science, did so by specifically repudiating the Hegelian master slave argument; for her the view from below carried no epistemic privilege. Evelyn Fox Keller, by contrast, took a psycho-historical approach, focusing on the gendered origin stories of science. She saw masculinity as embedded in that mechanical philosophy which had triumphed in those founding years of both modern science and capitalism.

Not only did early feminist epistemology theorizing show little deference to the existing canon, initially it paid little formal attention to the paradigm-breakers emerging from the crisis of French social thought in the wake of the defeat of 1968. Few of these early feminist epistemological texts paid attention to the theorists of post-structuralism and post-modernism. As noted above, self-proclaimed feminist deconstructionists paid little attention to Derrida or to the discourse analysis of Foucault, or to Lyotard’s postmodernistic project, even though debates were raging around these in the mainstream disciplinary discourses. Despite the parallels which have led to some over facile assertions such as ‘feminism is part of postmodernism,’ these new currents were relatively slowly taken into feminist theoretical production. They first entered the humanities and then, with continuing resistance, the social sciences.

3. Disciplining Feminism?

Feminism’s successful arrival within the academy by the end of the 1980s brought with it substantial epistemological implications, not least the restoration of disciplinarity within feminist discourse. Feminists began to address the specific canon and current debates of their own disciplines; the ethical and political commitment to address the feminist movement both in and out of the academy increasingly weakened. The language of feminist theorizing soon changed. The early commitment to transparency and accessibility ceded to a new complexity, even obscurantism. There was a sudden interest in postmodern theorists, whom an early, more politicized, generation of feminists had set aside for their antifeminism; earlier theorists such as Nietzsche became widely discussed despite an evident anti-semitism and misogyny. While disciplinary boundaries appeared, the claims of theorists became grandiose. Feminists in the humanities often spoke of ‘feminist theory,’ by which they meant more precisely feminist humanities theory, but tacitly let the term carry with it the aggrandizing claim that this had universal power over the diversity of fields. Even feminist sociology, something of a bastion of critical realism, entered a period of self-questioning. When the differences between women, whether of class, ethnicity, and bio-geographic ancestry were so very visible, how did it make sense to speak of a single feminist standpoint? Theoretical developments responding to these challenges by feminist sociologists such as Canadian Dorothy Smith, German Frigga Haug, and African American Patricia Hill Collins gave standpoint theory a new and enriched life.

4. Feminist Science Wars?

Among feminist science studies scholars it was the historian Donna Haraway who embraced post-structuralism decisively, simultaneously throwing into question the possibility of universal reliable knowledge. In a key paper (which echoed silently philosopher David Bloor’s methodological stance of refusing to privilege the truth claims of the natural sciences), Haraway, despite her respect for Hubbard as a pioneering feminist biologist, pointed to her uneven treatment of truth claims. She argues that for Hubbard, good science remained privileged; only bad science was to be deconstructed. This epistemological difference between the feminist scientist and the feminist historian foreshadowed, with some strained courtesy, the divisions among the feminist approaches to science theory which were to develop.

However, the tensions between feminists science theorists were never characterized by the savagery of those within mainstream epistemological fights, above all those of the Science Wars. Science theory feminists, despite their theoretical differences, frequently shared a desire to build solidarity between those in science studies and those in science. Thus it was matter of common recognition that natural scientists, particularly biologists, had to be realists. It was equally clear that, for science theorists, more relativistic positions were entirely possible, whether they were historicized as by materialism or full-blown as by nominalism. Feminist science theorists routinely drew back from stark ‘either/or’ choices, not least those dichotomously opposing relativism to realism. Thus, where the early Harding had shared Rose’s concern at the hyperreflexivity of the strong program of science, and the reduction of science just to social relations proposed by Robert Young and the Radical Science Journal, her subsequent publication suggested a new theoretical ambiguity. Certainly reviewers who were outside science theory of The Science Question in Feminism (Harding 1986) diversely claimed the book both for standpoint theory and as support for the more relativistic approach of post-structuralism. The ambiguity was not accidental but typical of the feminist science theorists as they fought to avoid an unwelcome dichotomy.

Later, Haraway made a sophisticated attempt to spring the ‘either or’ trap: unwilling to lose all claim to objectivity she proposes a feminist objectivity built from ‘partial critical knowledge located in multiple embodied sites sharing a web of connections called solidarity in politics.’ Harding too made an attempt to go beyond the ‘either/or’ dichotomy in her advocacy of ‘strong objectivity,’ an argument which has much in common with the earlier externalist analysis of Marxism.

5. Global Technoscience And Global Feminisms

In a quite extraordinary way, the feminist epistemology debates have paralleled and offered an entirely different face to the widespread demands for equal opportunities within the labor market, including that of science. This, whether claimed for reasons of justice or for economic efficiency, has become subtly linked to arguments about changing the character of cultural production, typically side-stepping whether the claim entails an appeal to social, cultural, or essentialist difference. Today, innovative corporations concerned for their global markets sound remarkably like dedicated multiculturalists in their arguments that products aimed at a socially diverse market are better if designed and produced by a matching diversity of producers. That the former tend to equate better with ‘sells more’ and the latter equate better with ‘is more democratic’ and ‘will produce a more sustainable science and technology’ is almost incidental. Both are responding to the feminist epistemological challenge that who gets to produce knowledge, and who is excluded, matters.

But it has been the advent of what social theorists have termed the risk society, that is, where the development of science and technology have become associated intrinsically with major environmental risks, which has also fostered an immense turn towards democratic control to protect the entire socio-ecosystem. This immense cultural and political move has paralleled the struggle within the sciences. Working from outside science, a mixture of NGOs and mass popular movements from both the North and the South have confronted the techno sciences and the corporations. As we have seen with the fate of the Kyoto agreement, individual governments and global corporations continue to mobilize the old constructions of science as outside culture and capable of producing certainty, in order defend themselves against the need to take socio-ecological risk seriously. Nonetheless, although it would be a mistake to announce the environmentalist cause won, it has become less and less easy for the corporations and supportive governments to pursue their commercial and technological objectives without any sense of global responsibility and concern for either human or green nature. Where they display such indifference they find themselves confronted by new alliances capable of mobilizing immense popular criticism. The more sophisticated recognize the need for sustainable development and are more open to new more socially inclusive forms of governance. How far these are serious or tokenistic is too soon to judge.

It is only possible in a brief article to do little other than hint at the links between the feminist epistemology debates and these huge cultural and political developments. Sometimes, as with the mass people’s science movement in India and the work of the feminist science theorist and activist Vandana Shiva, the links are more evident. But it will be historians looking back at this extraordinary shift in the cultural status of science and technology at the cusp of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, who will have the pleasure of disentangling the cultural and political contribution of the feminist epistemology debate to these sea changes.

Bibliography:

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