Uma Narayan
The Project of Feminist Epistemology: Perspectives from a Nonwestern Feminist (143-150)
Narayan, born in India.
Currently a professor at Vassar College in New York
Before we talk about her article:
Categories in contemporary epistemology
Positivism:
Approach of positivism in epistemology:
1) recognition that the natural (empirical) sciences to be the sole source of true knowledge
Rejects any kind of introspective philosophical study.
Key contention of positivism: that it is a value-free inquiry.
Just looking at what is, not influenced by what ought to be!
Positivism rejects problems of traditional philosophy that can’t be solved or verified by experience due to a high degree of abstract nature.
Positivism claims to be a non-metaphysical ("positive") philosophy, modeled on empirical sciences and providing them with a methodology.
Positivism is essentially empiricist: any knowledge is empirical knowledge in one form or another
No speculation can be knowledge.
Problem with positivism is that its own rejection of speculation, mental phenomena, requirements for verification turned out to be unverifiable by experience and, consequently, metaphysical.
Feminist epistemology
Feminist epistemology studies the ways in which gender influences our understanding of knowledge
Feminist epistemologists look at ways in which dominant conceptions and practices of knowledge acquisition and justification disadvantage women and other subordinated groups
For example: the dominant practice of scientific enquiry might:
(1) exclude women from participating in that inquiry–tell women that girls don’t become scientists
(2) deny women “epistemic authority,”–a woman couldn’t have discovered that.
(3) denigrating their “feminine” cognitive styles and modes of knowledge.
(4) producing theories of women that represent them as inferior, deviant, or significant only in the ways they serve male interests.
(5) producing theories of social phenomena that render women's activities and interests, or gendered power relations, invisible,
(6) producing knowledge (science and technology) that is not useful for people in subordinate positions, or that reinforces gender and other social hierarchies.
Feminist epistemologists want women in scientific disciplines like biology and the social sciences to generate new questions, theories, and methods
Basic Epistemology:
The central concept of feminist epistemology is that of a situated knower and situated knowledge: similar to Nietzsche’s perspectivism, except claiming a woman’s epistemic perspective.
Key interest in how gender situates knowing subjects.
Goal of re-evaluating ideals of objectivity and rationality, and reforming structures of epistemic authority.
Feminist Epistemology Critique of “Cartesian” epistemology
F. E. sees the scientific tradition that follows Descartes as doing two wrong things:
1. emphasizing greater and greater human control and dominance over nature, rather than any attempt to live with or accommodate nature.
2. Overemphasis on the mental rather than the physical. Denial that we humans are fundamentally embodied beings.
Uma Narayan
Pg. 143:
Narayan wants to present her analysis of elements of Feminist Epistemology
Goes over key claims of F. E.
Example: if women are excluded from certain fields, that makes those field “male.”
That leads to a flaw in those fields: leaving out a women’s perspective.
States the key thesis of feminist epistemology: 144
Integrating women’s contributions into the domain of science and knowledge will not constitute a mere adding of details; it will not merely widen the canvas but result in a shift of perspective enabling us to see a very different picture.
Question: what do you think she means here?
She sees as a key theme of F. E.: undermining the abstract, rationalistic, and universal image of the scientific enterprise.
Question: is that a good thing to undermine?
Cites Carol Gilligan: F. E. trying to reintegrate values and emotions into our account of cognitive activities.
Opposed to the value-free approach of positivism.
Arguing both for the inevitability of the presence and importance of the contributions values are capable of making to our knowledge.
Question: why would a value-free approach be good, why would it be bad?
Narayan supports the F. E. attack on dualisms:
reason versus emotion; culture versus nature; universal versus particular.
Also wants to join with the efforts of oppressed groups to claim for themselves the value of their own experience.
Just like: 144
attempts by third-world writers and historians to document the wealth and complexity of local economic and social structures that existed prior to colonialism.
F. E. involves re-evaluating what is means to be PROGRESSIVE
Progress not necessarily a western or male model.
In feminist epistemology:
Strong Notion of it’s own dualism of oppressed and oppressor.
Narayan: sympathetic to feminist epistemology, but doesn’t just want to accept it without question.
Worries that its important insights will become dogmas
Question: insights to dogmas–what does that mean?
Purpose of her essay:
She wants to raise questions from her own “nonwestern” point of view, but acknowledges that non-western feminists are not a homogenous group.
four sections
1. political problems feminist epistemology poses for nonwestern feminists that it might not pose for western feminists
2. Problems nonwestern feminists may have with FE critique of positivism
3. Political implications of the oppressed epistemic privilege
4. Problems created by epistemic privilege
First section:
Nonwestern Feminist Politics and Feminist Epistemology
Looks to a clash between Western feminism and a Non western feminist that has different preoccupations
Example: Western Feminism: overturning the “Happy Homemaker” stereotype.
The Stepford Wives–women living in a false sense of happiness running their lives according to the arbitrary dictates of consumer society
By contrast, not the same sense of disorder or meaninglessness in other cultures
She states:
145 In the cultures that have a pervasive religious element, like the Hindu culture with which I am familiar, everything seems assigned a place and value as long as it keeps to its place.
Point: there already is a real “value” to women’s experience here.
So Nonwestern women: face dilemma:
The imperative we experience as feminists to be critical of how our culture and traditions oppress women conflicts with our desire as members of once colonized cultures to affirm the value of the same culture and traditions.
Question: what do you think that means?
Narayan worries about this herself–if she criticizes life in India, is she just going to reinforce prejudices about the superiority of western cultures.
Gives example: arranged marriages in India v. romantic love marriages in the West.
Which is better?
Next section
The Nonprimacy of Positivism as a Problematic Perspective
Focus on positivism as a target of Feminist Epistemology
Narayan claims that Positivism is not our only enemy
There are lots of problems with Nonpositivist frameworks
Positivism supports the rejection of value-laden interpretation in favor of value free interpretation.
Feminist epistemology objects to the idea that inquiry can be value-free
Narayan responds: Many traditions are suffused through and through with values, that doesn’t make them less oppressive.
She ties positivism to liberalism
146 Positivism’s view of values as individual and subjective related to liberalism’s emphasis on individual rights that were supposed to protect an individual’s freedom to live according to the values she espoused.
Liberalism: in political theory terms: the freedom of the individual.
Open inquiry in society.
Question: does that support or oppose the liberation of women from traditional domination?
Concludes: The enemy of my enemy is my friend–not a good principle here
147: Example of German Philosopher Jürgen Habermas “ideal speech situation”
Habermas is a critic of positivism
However, his system is still very rational, still possibly discriminates against women.
Narayan says that instead of agreement based rationality, we may reach truth better with focus on agreement based on sympathy and solidarity
Question: what does that mean, do you agree with it?
Third section:
The Political Uses of “Epistemic Privilege”
Key to FE
147 Our concrete embodiments as members of a specific class, race, and gender as well as our concrete historical situations necessarily play significant roles in our perspective on the world; moreover, no point of view is “neutral” because no one exists unembedded in the world. Knowledge is seen as gained not by solitary individuals but by socially constituted groups that emerge and change through history.
Traditional view: our emotions get in the way of our having knowledge
New view: many emotions often help rather than hinder our understanding of a person or a situation.
Looks at this epistemic privilege–the privilege of being oppressed:
Possibility of critical insights generated by oppression.
Further comparison of Western v. non-Western feminists
Western feminists tend to be a part of the culture they live in.
They are members of the dominant [Western] group.
Nonwestern feminists have a double struggle:
They have to learn to articulate their differences, not only from their own traditional contexts but also from western feminism.
148 Narayan
I argue that it would be a mistake to move from the thesis that knowledge is constructed by human subjects who are socially constituted to the conclusion that those who are differently located socially can never attain some understanding of our experience or some sympathy with our cause.
Narayan rejects that view as an undefendable relativism.
She claims:
Our commitment to the contextual nature of knowledge does not require us to claim that those who do not inhabit these contexts can never have any knowledge of them.
But this commitment does permit us to argue that it is easier and more likely for the oppressed to have critical insights into the conditions of their own oppression than it is for those who live outside these structures.
Question: do you agree with that. Do oppressed people have more insight about the nature of oppression than non-oppressed people?
So, even the sympathetic members of a dominant group.
in a certain sense lack 149: “epistemic advantage” of dominated groups.
Question: what would be the epistemic advantage to being a member of a dominant group?
Final section:
The Dark Side of “Double Vision”
One thing Narayan notes is that:
149 The practices of the dominant groups govern a society; the dominated group must acquire some fluency with these practices in order to survive in that society.
She also claims:
There is no similar pressure on members of the dominant group to acquire knowledge of the practices of the dominated groups.
Question: do you agree with this?
The oppressed have an “epistemic advantage” because they can operate with two sets of practices in two different contexts.
But there are problems here.
Narayan looks at the “dark side” of this advantage:
Problems with trying to inhabit two mutually incompatible frameworks.
Mere access to two different and incompatible contexts is not a guarantee that a critical stance on the part of an individual will result.
People:
1) could just dichotomize: live one life in public, another in private
2) A person might just try to be like the dominant group as much as possible.
The epistemic advantage may have a price.
Give people feelings of: ambivalence, uncertainty, despair, even madness
150
Narayan recommends that feminist theory must be temperate in the use it makes of the doctrine of “double vision”
Can’t “reify this into a metaphysics” that serves as a substitute for concrete analysis.
Don’t idealize or romanticize real material and psychic deprivations.
