Reflective journal

individual psychology of the creative person. Thinking of creative aspects of standpoint theory reminds us of the social aspects of creativity. This paper is one of the most intriguing of the collection in part because of the self-reflexive creativity with which Solomon approaches the topic.

The papers are brief, but provocative. They offer paths for further exploration, and they outline problems still in need of solutions. They do not resolve the controversies that surround standpoint theory, but they offer new ways to think about these controversies. By offering these suggestions, this cluster of papers provides ample motivation for continuing the research both on and using standpoint theory. They collectively make the case that there are many avenues still to be explored when considering how standpoint theory may serve feminist goals.

NOTES

1. The session was a Society for Analytical Feminism group session panel at the 2006 Eastern Division meeting of the American Philosophical Association in Washington, D.C. The original panel included a paper by Alison Wylie and did not include Sandra Harding’s paper, though she was present at the session.

2. So, for instance, Alison Wylie’s work on standpoint theory suggests that standpoint may provide one means by which decisions about the traditional epistemic virtues of theories may be weighted when they come into conflict with one another. See, for instance, Wylie (2004).

REFERENCES

Fricker, Miranda. 2006. Powerlessness and social interpretation. Episteme 3 (1–2): 96–108. Harding, Sandra. 1986. The science question in feminism. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press. Harding, Sandra, ed. 2004. The feminist standpoint theory reader. New York: Routledge. Pinnick, Cassandra. 1994. Feminist epistemology: Implications for philosophy of science. Philosophy

of Science 61: 646–57. ———. 2005. The failed feminist challenge to ‘‘fundamental epistemology’’. Science and Education

14 (2): 103–16. Wylie, Alison. 2004. Why standpoint matters. In The feminist standpoint theory reader, ed. Sandra

Harding. New York: Routledge, pp. 339–52.

Standpoint Theories: Productively Controversial

SANDRA HARDING

It would be hard to find a theory within almost four decades of feminist re- search and scholarship that has remained as controversial as has standpoint theory.1 At the same time, however, as a methodology it has been disseminated

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across many research disciplines and is today often used to frame research projects. Indeed, it was initially formulated as a methodology intended to explain how effective feminist research had been, and should be, organized, first in sociology and then in political philosophy and biology (Harding 2004). Moreover, as a more general ‘‘logic of inquiry’’—a trans-disciplinary, regulative ideal—standpoint theory is widely used in research projects focused on race, class, sexuality, and studies in postcolonial research, though in these contexts the logic is only occasionally labeled as being in the standpoint tradition.2

Thus, a standpoint logic of research, howsoever named, seems destined to have an active and productive life in research disciplines regardless of what professional philosophers of science, epistemologists, or science-studies scholars make of it. It is reflection on its uses in feminist research (at that point not yet named as a standpoint approach) that informed its initial formulations as an epistemology and philosophy of science. In this respect it arrived in philosophy as a naturalized epistemology and philosophy of science; its ‘‘naturalization’’ to research practice was not a project needing still to be initiated.3

Many philosophers and scientists find this combination of research productivity and persisting controversiality troublesome. In my opinion these features are two sides of a coin that can best be explicated in terms of the politics of standpoint research. Such research is committed to the production of information women want and need in their struggles to survive and to flourish—information about our bodies and our children’s bodies; our environments; economic, governmental, and legal institutions and practices; international relations; and so forth. And it is thereby directed by commitment to the high value of women, their activities, needs, and desires. The scientific/ epistemological and ethical/political are inseparable in standpoint approaches to research. To be sure, both of the commitments mentioned can seem innocuous and uncontroversial in many contemporary research contexts. But such an appearance is deceiving. For that very inseparability points to the matching inseparability of commitments to male supremacy and the conventional regulative ideals of scientific research. To be ‘‘for women’’ is one thing; to be overtly against male supremacy and regulative ideals that, critics claim, are in fact defined against whatever is associated with ‘‘the feminine’’ is quite another matter. Whose experience is to count in formulating ideals of objectivity, rationality, and good method?4

The same question can be asked of research still framed by the West’s commitments to bourgeois values, to white-supremacist, colonial, and imperial ways of thinking and acting in the world today, and to discriminatory standards for physical normality.5 It is one thing to gesture toward ‘‘including the excluded’’ in our thinking and social projects. It is quite another to engage seriously not only with their ways of understanding themselves and their social relations, but also with their ways of understanding us and our social relations. Moreover, women and men are always also positioned in such other

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functioning social hierarchies, just as the agents in those other hierarchies are locatable on the maps of gender relations. Standpoint work must always be ‘‘intersectional,’’ in the phrase of the critical race theorists (Crenshaw et al. 1995).

This kind of understanding of how standpoint theory is politically engaged, as we have often politely put the point, explains why and how it remains untamed by the persistent attempts one can find to sanitize it, assign its importance to the past, or trim off its unwieldy or discomfiting elements so as to incorporate it into more conservative philosophies or methodo- logies. Its intellectual and political force strikes not just at some fusty, now archaic, epistemological dogmas, but rather at some of the still most deeply held assumptions of modern Western societies, and even of many progressive scientific and social projects around the globe today. Everywhere, seemingly every day, another under-advantaged group steps on the stage of history and says ‘‘from the standpoint of our lives, what you over-advantaged people think and do looks different . . . and wrong and harmful.’’ It is the ‘‘and wrong and harmful’’ that is morally and intellectually the most disturbing force of standpoint thinking, because this judgment challenges the presumed reasonableness and progressiveness of dominant institutional assumptions and practices. Moreover, it refuses to settle for only a tolerable ontological, epistemological, methodological, and ethical relativism.

Here I intend first briefly to restate standpoint theory’s most untamable commitments in the terms indicated above, because these can slip from view during attempts to sanitize, incorporate, or otherwise domesticate it. Then I identify two sources of its controversiality within the politics of contemporary feminisms. Of course, there are plenty of phobic and hysterical responses to it from outside today’s feminisms.6 But my focus here is on why it is that within feminisms it remains so controversial.

POLITICAL COMMITMENTS

First, what one does both enables and limits what one can know. In hierarchically organized societies, the daily activities and experiences of oppressed groups enable insights about how the society functions that are not available—or at least not easily available—from the perspective of dominant- group activity. One has to either live as a member of an oppressed group, or do the necessary work to gain a rich and nuanced understanding of what such life- worlds are like, in order to think within that group’s standpoint. Thus, standpoint projects do not start off from conceptual frameworks of research disciplines, which have become servants to the dominant social institutions’ material as well as ‘‘conceptual practices of power,’’ in Dorothy Smith’s phrase (Smith 1990). They do not start off from today’s ‘‘problems of philosophy,’’

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sociology, economics, biology, or some other discipline. Rather they start off from the daily lives of oppressed, exploited, or dominated groups.

Second, the goal of standpoint projects is to ‘‘study up.’’ They start out from the daily lives of oppressed groups, but do not settle for merely conventional ethnographies, valuable as these can be in standpoint projects.7 Rather, they set out to explain what oppressed groups need and want to know about why and how so much poverty and misery accumulate in their daily lives while riches and pleasures accumulate in the daily lives of dominant groups. Significant causes of that poverty and misery are to be found in the ways that the most powerful social institutions, such as the economy, the law, and health, education, and welfare systems, are administered and managed so as to distribute their benefits primarily to the already socially advantaged and their costs primarily to the already socially disadvantaged. Standpoint research projects are focused on critically examining what’s wrong and what’s still useful or otherwise valuable in the dominant institutions of society, their cultures and practices.

Third, a standpoint is an achievement, not an ascription. Moreover, it is a collective one, not an individual one. The term ‘‘standpoint’’ is colloquially synonymous with ‘‘perspective.’’ But it is a technical term in standpoint theory. Achieving a standpoint requires scientific work in order to see beneath the ideological surface of social relations that we all come to accept as natural. And it requires political organization to do that work because the perceived naturalness of the dominant groups’ power depends upon obscuring how social relations actually work (Hartsock 2004).

Finally, standpoint projects are not cognitively or politically relativist. They do not aspire to be value-neutral, ‘‘handmaidens’’ to supposedly culturally transcendent sciences. Yet they are not relativist in the sense that they accept the equal validity of any and all knowledge claims or any and all standards for assessing the reliability of such claims. Rather, they have consistently redefined epistemic standards for more accurate, comprehensive, objective, and rational production of knowledge. The adequacy of standpoint projects is to be judged by the success of the practices they legitimate rather than the truth or verisimilitude of representations of nature and social relations. (Recollect that the success of practices has always been the ultimate test of the adequacy of scientific claims.) Do they in fact produce more accurate, comprehensive, rationally justifiable, and politically useful knowledge for the exploited group to which they are accountable?

There are many other interesting features of standpoint projects that have generated controversy,8 but I will not pursue them here.

TWO SITES OF STANDPOINT POLITICS

Presumably all feminist researchers and scholars would say that they do value women’s activities, needs, and desires, and want to produce the kinds of information women want and need to survive and flourish. Yet these projects can

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look very different depending on how their politics are understood. Such differences have created significant controversies within feminist work. Consider just two such kinds of variable politics: explicit or implicit commitments to different ‘‘public agenda’’ feminist political philosophies, and different disciplinary commitments. Politics is not just something bad, unfortunately needing to be countered by an opposing politics. Rather a group’s politics is always grounded in distinctive assumptions about human nature and how best to organize social relations. Moreover, standpoint theory’s political engagement is not just with the general view that knowledge creates social power, and social power enables the production of the kind of knowledge that such powers need. It is also engagement with the particular ways such knowledge/power relations work out in public agenda and disciplinary contexts, among other sites.

DYNAMIC PUBLIC AGENDA FEMINIST POLITICS

The ontology, epistemology, ethics, and political commitments of standpoint theory were transformed in feminists’ appropriation of earlier class analyses in the context of the women’s movements of the 1970s (Jaggar 1983; Jameson 1988; Hartsock 2004). Today similar transformations are occurring in the context of contemporary race relations in the United States and of global relations of postcoloniality. African-American and other women of color in the United States and women in and from the former European colonies cannot just be added to the feminist standpoint theory developed initially by Western feminists in the context of Western women’s movements. Quite apart from the political commitments of the early feminist standpoint theorists (which were mostly visibly anti-racist), standpoint work looks different in the hands of race and postcolonial theorists who emerged in the context of anti- racist and postcolonial social movements (for example, Collins 1986; Narayan 1989; Sandoval 1991; Crenshaw et al. 1995; Visvanathan et al. 1997; Smith 1999; Mignolo 2003). They start off by thinking about dominant social institutions from different everyday lives than was characteristic of the first feminist standpoint theorists of the 1970s and early 1980s.

This work, which has changed how the rest of us think about standpoint projects, is just one important indication of the dynamic quality of standpoint theory. Yet it has also left controversies within feminist work. Of course one can still find self-proclaimed feminists who insist that class, racial, and colonial oppression are not as important as gender oppression in thinking about women’s lives. However, there are other, more progressively controversial questions. Because so much of the history of critical studies of colonial discourses ignores and even overtly distances itself from gender issues, what are the specific tensions between the two kinds of studies? (See Harding 2010.) What should be preserved in liberal democratic theory’s feminist empiricisms if one is concerned about race, colonialism, and imperialism issues? There are many other progressively controversial issues for feminists in the focus on race, coloniality, and imperialism.

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DIVERSE RELATIONS TO DISCIPLINARITY AND THEIR CONSEQUENCES 9

Some of the disputes between standpoint theorists originate in their different disciplinary locations, the distinctive discursive histories and contemporary concerns of their disciplines, and the particular projects they adopt for transforming their own disciplines. First, standpoint theory is multidisciplinary. It incorporates insights from several disciplines in its core commitments. Sociology of knowledge, sociology of science, political philosophy, epistemol- ogy, philosophy of science, and natural and social-science methodology are among the obvious contributors to standpoint theory and practice in general. Yet philosophers, sociologists, and political theorists who use or criticize standpoint theory often fail to recognize its histories and uses in other disciplines. Second, standpoint theory is also trans-disciplinary in that it provides a distinctive model of research that has been used in virtually all research disciplines. In this context it is a general ‘‘logic of inquiry.’’ Under- standing it as a ‘‘logic’’ generalizable to research in any and all hierarchical social contexts conflicts with the tendency among feminist philosophers to think of it as relevant only to feminist concerns.

Third, its particular directive to ‘‘study up’’ makes it anti-disciplinary. Dorothy Smith has argued that ruling—governing—in our kinds of modern societies takes the form of administration and management of social relations (Smith 1990). For example, sociology works up the chaotic and confusing perceptions of everyday experience into the social categories and the causal relations between those categories that permit corporations, admirals, prison directors, and health-care systems (among others) to manage the populations under their control, and banks and international agencies to manage clients such as fiscally needy individuals and nations. It ‘‘discovers’’ categories of people such as emotional women, mothers with instincts for childcare, welfare cheats, juvenile delinquents, black matriarchs, absent fathers, bad mortgage risks, and the causal relations among such categories, that enable the few to govern the many. Or medical research on fetal disorders ‘‘discovers’’ pregnant addicts, and other culpable lifestyle ‘‘choices’’ of mothers, and the innocent ‘‘littlest ones’’ (sperm), which are affected only by environmental factors but never by male lifestyle choices. This occurs in spite of masses of research pointing to environmental effects on women and to male culpability in lifestyle choices, both of which also influence fetal conditions (Daniels 1990). Thus, standpoint projects directly challenge the way research disciplines’ activities tend to be complicit with social power.

This is one way in which standpoint theory’s anti-disciplinary stance is controversial. The other is that some observers fail to recognize the goal of reforming disciplinary projects that motivates the critiques of disciplines’ complicity with social power. Disciplines are powerful epistemologically and politically. Oppressed groups cannot afford to simply ignore them just because they have become aligned with regressive scientific and political practices any

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more than they can afford to ignore regressive legal or economic practices. Disciplinary assumptions and practices must be reappropriated and directed to emancipatory ends. Such projects require careful critical examination of just how they effect their regressive alignments.

This is my final point. In the kind of project indicated above, standpoint projects can be deeply disciplinary insofar as they intend also to transform a particular kind of disciplinary research on behalf of the usual epistemological regulative ideals as well as of social justice projects. An example here can be found in Dorothy Smith’s insistence on talking about women’s experiences as the starting point for research projects in sociology (Smith 1987), and not the feminist organization of women’s experiences that are the concern of political philosophers such as Nancy Hartsock (2004). As Smith points out, she intends her work on ‘‘women’s standpoint’’ to enter the ongoing discussions in sociology on the role of experience in the construction of knowledge. Hartsock, on the other hand, is interested in political philosophy’s discussions of the role of progressive social movements in transformations of political philosophy and social theory. Thus, her discussion is of a ‘‘feminist standpoint.’’10 Clearly, philosophers’ interests in standpoint theory differ from those of researchers and scholars in other disciplines, as well as between philosophical subdisciplines such as epistemology and philosophy of science. Such disputes are not ‘‘merely academic.’’ How research disciplines conceptu- alize the world they study changes those worlds—in the natural as well as the social sciences, we now know. The activities of sociologists and political philosophers are complicit with different activities of the dominant institu- tions; thus changing conceptual frameworks in those disciplines can affect how women are served by, say, a welfare system and a legal system.

My point is that the abstract standpoint model becomes contextualized in its uses in diverse disciplinary contexts. Thus, it would be useful to think in terms of standpoint theories or approaches, in the plural, and to regard this plurality—these differences—as providing resources, not liabilities.

CONCLUSION

I have been arguing that the continual renewal of the controversiality of standpoint theory is organically linked to its ever-expanding uses in actual research projects. Standpoint theory provides a logic of research that focuses attention on problems that are deeply disturbing to anyone reflecting on contemporary challenges to Western thought and practice, and yet insoluble within the philosophical, political, and theoretical legacies that they provide. Engaging with the needs and desires arising from the daily lives of less advantaged citizens of the globe, and learning how our projects impact on their lives—these projects cannot cease to be controversial as long as social injustices exist.

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NOTES

Earlier versions of this essay were presented at the Feminist Epistemology, Metaphysics, Methodology, and Science Studies conference at the University of Arizona at Tempe in February 2007, and at the Eastern Division American Philosophical Association Annual Meeting (Baltimore) session on ‘‘Standpoint Theory: From Different Standpoints,’’ December 2007, arranged by the APA Committee on the Status of Women and the APA Committee on Inclusiveness.

1. Compare the similar assessment in Wylie (2004). 2. Recollect that its logic originated in class analyses. For this history, see, for example, Jaggar

(1983), Jameson (1988), and Pels (2001). For an interesting example of its unlabeled use in a postcolonial text, see Mignolo (2003). In ‘‘Second Thoughts,’’ this afterword to the second edition, Mignolo begins to describe the ‘‘locus of enunciation’’ of a distinctive Latin American postcoloniality that he had been developing in the 1995 first edition as an ‘‘‘epistemic standpoint’ . . .’’ (432). On page 437 he uses the term seven times! See also Harding (2008).

3. That is, by ‘‘naturalized’’ here is meant that it was from its beginnings grounded in analysis of existing feminist research practices.

4. Compare the similar assessment in Jameson (1988). 5. Anita Silvers has produced powerful arguments for starting off research from physically

anomalous ways of producing knowledge that can be found in, for example, those born blind, hearing- impaired practices of echolocation, and Down’s syndrome hyper-awareness of details. Her standpoint arguments use these socially disvalued ways of knowing to identify the epistemological imperialism of familiar social standards of normality. (This argument is from her presentation in the December 2007 American Philosophical Association session cited above. See also Silvers and Stein 2003.)

6. As I correct copyedit, standpoint theory is being publicly debated. Judge Sonia Sotomayor, the President’s nominee for a seat on the Supreme Court, is accused of racism by influential right- wing commentators. She has several times stated that her experiences as a Latina woman would enable her in some cases to make better judgments than would a white man who hadn’t had such experiences. In addition to these zealots’ confusion about what can constitute racism, they assume that white men’s share of human experience, through which the law has been constituted and interpreted, has had no deleterious effects on the objectivity of legal doctrine or decisions. That is, as Catherine MacKinnon pointed out decades ago, that objectivity is simply whatever men (or dominant groups) decide it is.

7. Critical institutional ethnographies—critical studies of institutional ‘‘ways of life’’— have been articulated as distinctively standpoint projects. See Smith (2005).

8. See the essays in Harding (2004). 9. See the introduction to Harding (2004, 12–13) for discussion of the multiple relations to

disciplinarity that standpoint projects can claim. 10. This is not to say that each has no interest in the other’s kind of project, but only that

each is focused on contributing to a specific disciplinary discourse. The students of each, and their disciplinary colleagues, tend to ignore the standpoint work done in the other discipline (compare Campbell and Manicom 1995; Kenney and Kinsella 1997).

REFERENCES

Campbell, Marie, and Ann Manicom, eds. 1995. Experience, knowledge, and ruling relations. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Collins, Patricia Hill. 1986. Learning from the outsider within: The sociological significance of black feminist thought. Social Problems 33 (6): S14–S32. (Reprinted in Harding 2004.).

Crenshaw, Kimberlé, Neil Golanda, Garry Peller, and Kendall Thomas, eds. 1995. Critical race theory. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

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Daniels, Cynthia R. 1990. Between fathers and fetuses: The social construction of male reproduction and the politics of fetal harm. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 22 (3): 580–616.

Harding, Sandra. ed. 2004. The feminist standpoint theory reader. New York: Routledge. Harding, Sandra. ed. 2008. Sciences from below: Feminisms, postcolonialities, and modernities.

Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. ———. 2010. Postcolonial and feminist philosophies of science and technology: Convergences and

dissonances. In Science, colonialism, and postcoloniality. Post-Colonial Studies 12 (4, Special Issue).

Hartsock, Nancy. 2004. The feminist standpoint. In The feminist standpoint theory reader, ed. Sandra Harding. New York: Routledge, pp. 35–53.

Jaggar, Alison. 1983. Feminist politics and epistemology. In Feminist politics and human nature. Totowa, N.J.: Rowman and Allenheld, pp. 353–93.

Jameson, Fredric. 1988. History and class consciousness as an ‘‘unfinished project.’’ Rethinking Marxism 1 (1): 49–72.

Kenney, Sally J., and Helen Kinsella, eds. 1997. Politics and feminist standpoint theories. New York: The Haworth Press.

Mignolo, Walter D. 2003. The darker side of the Renaissance: Literacy, territoriality, and colonization. 2nd ed. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Narayan, Uma. 1989. The project of a feminist epistemology: Perspectives from a non-western feminist. In Gender/body/knowledge, ed. Susan Bordo and Alison Jaggar. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press.

Pels, Dick. 2001. Strange standpoints, or how to define the situation for situated knowledge. In The intellectual as stranger. New York: Routledge.

Sandoval, Chela. 1991. U.S. third world feminism: The theory and method of oppositional consciousness in the postmodern world. Genders 10:1–24. (Excerpted in Harding 2004.).

Silvers, Anita, and Michael Ashley Stein. 2003. Essentially empirical: The roles of biological and legal classification in effectively prohibiting genetic discrimination. In Science and other cultures: Issues in philosophies of science and technology, ed. Robert Figueroa and Sandra Harding. New York: Routledge, pp. 129–53.

Smith, Dorothy. 1987. The everyday world as problematic. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. ———. 1990. The conceptual practices of power. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. ———. 2005. Institutional ethnography: A sociology for people. Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield. Smith, Linda Tuhiwai. 1999. Decolonizing methodology: Research and indigenous peoples. New York:

St. Martin’s Press. Visvanathan, Nalini, Lynn Duggan, Laurie Nisonoff, and Nan Wiegersma, eds. 1997. The women,

gender and development reader. London: Zed Books. Wylie, Alison. 2004. Why standpoint matters. In The feminist standpoint theory reader, ed. Sandra

Harding. New York: Routledge, pp. 339–51.

Standpoint Theories Reconsidered

JOSEPH ROUSE

Friedrich Nietzsche once remarked that ‘‘only that which has no history is definable’’ (1998, II, sect. 13). Standpoint theories do have a history, at least

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