Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective

tags
Donna Haraway Standpoint Theory

Notes

what we might mean by the curious and inescapable term "objectivity."

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The imagined "they" constitute a kind of invisible conspiracy of masculinist scientists and philosophers replete with grants and laboratories. The imagined "we" are the embodied others

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We, the feminists in the debates about science and technology, are the Reagan era's ”special-interest groups” in the rarified realm of epistemology

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feminists have both selectively and flexibly used and been trapped by two poles of a tempting dichotomy on the question of objectivity.

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strong social constructionist argument for all forms of knowledge claims, most certainly and especially scientific ones.

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Just as for the rest of us, what scientists believe or say they do and what they really do have a very loose fit.

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Who wouldn’t grow up warped? Gender, race, the world itself—all seem the effects of warp speeds in the play of signifiers in a cosmic force field.

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science—the real game in town— is rhetoric,

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History is a story Western culture buffs tell each other; science is a contestable text and a power field; the content is the form. Period. So much for those of us who would still like to talk about reality

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abstract masculinity

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We unmasked the doctrines of objectivity because they threatened our budding sense of collective historical subjectivity and agency and our “embodied" accounts of the truth, and we end- ed up with one more excuse for not learning any post-Newtonian physics and one more reason to drop the old feminist self-help practices of repairing our own cars. They're just texts anyway, so let the boys have them back.

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feminist version of objectivity

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“our" problem, is how to have simul- taneously an account of radical historical contingency for all knowledge claims and knowing subjects, a critical practice for recognizing our own “semiotic technologies" for making meanings, and a no-nonsense commitment to faithful accounts of a “real" world

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THE PERSISTENCE OF VISION

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scientific and tech- nological, late-industrial, militarized, racist, and male-dominant societies, that is, here, in the belly of the monster, in the United States in the late 1980s

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Vision in this technological feast becomes unregulated gluttony

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only partial perspective promises objec- tive vision.

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maybe the less generality we reach for, the more objectivity we can grasp, a sort of uncertainty principle

Feminist objectivity is about limited location and situated knowledge, not about trans- cendence and splitting of subject and object.

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these pictures of the world should not be allegories of infinite mobility and interchangeability but of elaborate specificity and difference and the loving care people might take to learn how to see faithfully from another's point of view, even when the other is our own machine.

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danger of romanticizing and/or appropriating the vision of the less powerful while claiming to see from their positions

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But the alternative to relativism is not totalization and single vision, which is always finally the unmarked category whose power depends on systematic narrowing and obscuring. The alternative to relativism is partial, locatable, critical knowl- edges sustaining the possibility of webs of connections called solidarity in politics and shared conversations in epistemology.

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The "equality" of positioning is a denial of respon- sibility and critical inquiry.

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Relativism is the perfect mirror twin of totalization in the ideologies of objectivity; both deny the stakes in location, embodiment, and partial perspective; both make it im- possible to see well.

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we must be hostile to easy rela- tivisms and holisms built out of summing and subsuming parts.

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The imaginary and the rational—the visionary and objective vision—hover close together.

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Science has been utopian and visionary from the start; that is one reason “we” need it.

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With whose blood were my eyes crafted?

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metal

heterogeneous multiplicities that are simulta- neously salient and incapable of being squashed into isomorphic slots or cumulative lists.

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A map of tensions and reasonances

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Gender is a field of structured and structuring difference, in which the tones of extreme localization, of the intimately personal and individualized body, vibrate in the same field with global high-tension emissions. Feminist embodi- ment, then, is not about fixed location in a reified body, female or otherwise, but about nodes in fields, inflections in orientations, and responsibility for difference in material-semiotic fields of meaning.

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OBJECTS AS ACTORS: THE APPARATUS OF BODILY PRODUCTION

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the faithfulness of our ac- counts to a “real world,” no matter how mediated for us

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suspi- cion that an “object" of knowledge is a passive and inert thing

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And yet, to lose authoritative biological accounts of sex, which set up productive tensions with gender, seems to be to lose too much; it seems to be to lose not just analytic power within a particular Western tradition but also the body itself as anything but a blank page for social inscriptions, including those of biological discourse.

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"White Capitalist Patriarchy (how may we name this scandalous Thing?)

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Nature is only the raw material of culture, appropriated, preserved, enslaved, ex- alted, or otherwise made flexible for disposal by culture in the logic of capitalist colonialism. Similarly, sex is only matter to the act of gender; the productionist logic seems inescapable in tradi- tions of Western binary oppositions.

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appropria- tionist logic of domination built into the nature/culture opposition and its generative lineage, including the sex/gender distinction.

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Accounts of a “real" world do not, then, depend on a logic of "discovery" but on a power-charged social relation of “conversation."

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The codes of the world are not still, waiting only to be read. The world is not raw material for humanization

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some unsettling possibilities, in- cluding a sense of the world’s independent sense of humor.

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The Coyote or Trickster, as embodied in Southwest native American accounts, suggests the si- tuation we are in when we give up mastery but keep searching for fidelity, knowing all the while that we will be hoodwinked.

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Perhaps our hopes for accountability, for politics, for ecofemi- nism, turn on revisioning the world as coding trickster with whom we must learn to converse.

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