5 Standpoint Theory

Debjani Chakravarthy

Introduction

Standpoint theory—just as the name sounds— attempts to preserve, promote, and protect knowledge production from the standpoint of social actors embedded in various systems and structures. These social actors are not historically considered as knowledge producers or scholars; but they are the wage-workers, slave-laborers, patients, deviants, and other under-privileged, silenced people who are systemically marginalized fitting the profile of political, economic, and social “minorities.” This theoretical framework considers not just the content but the purpose of knowledge, and questions notions such as objectivity, neutrality, and detachment of knowledge producers—qualities considered as crucial to produce not just scientific knowledge but other forms of scholarship; even good journalism. Standpoint theory questions the possibility and implication of this neutrality and objectivity in a world where racism, sexism, classism, ethnocentrism, ableism, ageism and other discriminatory ideologies are pervasive.

The objective of this chapter is to introduce the idea of Standpoint Theory, its history, theoretical trajectory, and basic concepts. Throughout the chapter you will also find questions raised that will act as mental exercises for you to aid understanding and application of the theory.

Standpoint Theory represents the feminist response to and reworking of Marxian ideas of historical materialism and class consciousness. It recognizes that knowledge has a socio-economic basis, and should not be dissociated from its historical context. Knowledge, this theory argues, is political, social, and community-based; and that scholarly curiosity, research and exploration are rarely ever neutral and innocent.

Consider this: if science, medicine and pharmacy are benevolent sciences concerned with control and eradication of diseases and with health and well-being of all, why are human beings in the third world used as Guinea pigs for drug trials? Why were phrenology and social biology considered sciences when their chief objective seemed to be gathering “evidence” about the physical, intellectual, and ethical inferiority of non-White races and women? Why is Ada Lovelace, the mother of scientific computing, not a household name but Thomas Edison, is? Edison is famous as much for his inventions as he is for his unethical business practices. Why do we never hear about women artists and authors of the renaissance? In India, why do many uncritically accept the colonial categories of “scheduled tribes,” and sexual acts “against the order of nature?” Who decides what “nature” is, or what is natural? Who studies it?

If you have ever taken a step back in the process of mastering a knowledge or skill such as mathematics, literature, sociology, or computer programming, and wondered about the “masters” of that knowledge—visible and famous scholars and researchers that wrote canonical texts, or credited with creating a field of study—you might have wondered about standpoints. Chances are you were asking yourself some questions Standpoint Theory asks as well, without knowing about this theoretical tradition. To expand your knowledge about this theory, let us start by understanding its own history and context.

Section 1: History, Development, and Some Major Theoreticians

Standpoint Theory was developed during and after the civil rights, feminist, and other self-determination and anti-establishment movementsof the 1970s United States. These movements pushed, among other things, to acknowledge the relationship of knowledge, power, and experience. Standpoint Theory was developed in recognition of how identity shapes knowledge. Normative analysis of knowledge and the study of the knowledge-production involve taking a step back from the content of knowledge to examine its contexts, norms, and practices, and interrogating the basis of justification of knowledge claims. This study of knowledge production is named “epistemology,” which is essentially a philosophy of knowledge.

Standpoint theory started to come on its own with the writings of authors who challenged the androcentric, Eurocentric, and heterosexist notion of what is knowledge and what is “normal.” In western epistemology, there is a pivotal understanding that it is possible to provide a universal, objective, and abstract account of knowledge and scientific enquiry. This epistemology does not recognize the socially situated nature of knowledge and science. It pretends that scientists are unbiased, unprejudiced, and detached from any social or political context –that they are knowledgeable, hardworking individuals trying to discover, invent, solve problems, and answer questions about what IS.

For conventional epistemology, epistemic sovereignty rests in the figure of the modern scientist, the empiricist, positivist, realist, objectivist Western male who produces scientific knowledge— the highest form of knowledge in a hierarchical system of scholarly production. The content of this science may be reexamined, modified and built upon over time, but the nature of science remains indefensible , and the scientific method, infallible.

Conventional epistemology raises many questions: What is knowledge? What is justification? What are the necessary, sufficient and ideal conditions of knowledge production? What makes knowledge consistent, reliable and valid? Thus it is a normative and analytical project. The answers to the aforementioned questions often point at a subject (here, we mean subject as a conscious actor embedded in a symbolic systems of knowledge and language, not subject of grammar or your favorite subject in school) that is neutral, normal, standard, recognized. This subject is a product of the European Renaissances germinated modernity: unified and autonomous. In the words of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (1988, 271), this subject is “narrativized by the law, political economy, and the ideology of the West, this concealed Subject pretends it has no ‘geo-political determinations.’” She calls this subject “concealed” because nobody raises questions about his geo-political motivations and affects, his colonizing tendencies or his methodology. This subject is concealed because his culture and history are recognized by all, so apparently do not merit further discussion. In any case, because the knowledge this subject produces is considered as universal and objective, the social context of production as well as his social location is understood as irrelevant.

Even authors, who question the meaning, nature, and source of knowledge, such as Foucault with his archeology of knowledge, do not reflect back and question their own subjectivity and authority. From the perspective of Standpoint theory, this reflection is very important. Foucault (1972, 6)) believes that “…the history of thought, of knowledge, of philosophy, of literature seems to be seeking, and discovering, more and more discontinuities, whereas history itself appears to be abandoning the irruption of events in favor of stable structures.” Conventional epistemology too, tends towards stable structures.

Let us go back to the aforementioned questions raised by conventional epistemology about justification and objectivity. These are important questions. However, note how this epistemology does not seem to question the meaning of what is objective, what is real, and for whom. The conventional philosophers of knowledge do not seem to be fazed by the idea that knowledge creators seem to always be Western males. They are interested in the source of knowledge, but not so much by the effects. Even in investigating the source, they follow a certain logocentric assumption, the primacy of written words and speech, and language, without asking why some languages are primarily considered as languages of knowledge and scholarship. What about the social groups that have no access, no intellectual capital, no say in the knowledge production that directly affects their lives? What about the social context of knowledge? What about the empirically tested fact that knowledge production is often a result of collaboration between many people?

Enter social epistemology. This form of epistemology relies on social model of knowers, rather than an individual unified subject model. It questions why science is the focus of epistemology or the scientific method is THE choicest method of knowledge production. Feminist philosophers of science and epistemology, feminist scientists and political scientists and feminist scholars from varied fields such as sociology and economics have questioned, confronted and re-created epistemology so that it embodies transparency, honesty, and social justice. Feminist standpoint theory is a result of this radical reconfiguration of what knowledge is, and also what it can be. The idea is to minimize harm and maximize social justice. Social epistemology is more inclusive, embodying a recognition of oppression including epistemic oppression of hitherto marginalized social groups whose contributions to knowledge are unrecognized, who have been often barred from knowledge production, and often used as “objects” of study.

Who are these social groups? Do they still exist in India? In the world? Who comes to mind? Whose standpoints are recognized and who aren’t?

While you ponder on these questions, let us turn the discussion to Karl Marx, who you have likely studied in your classical sociological traditions course. Remember how Marx roots social reality in production relations, theorizes about the material/economic base/structure of society and the bourgeoisie-proletariat divide. Marx argues that “Modern Industry has converted the little workshop of the patriarchal master into the great factory of the industrial capitalist. Masses of labourers, crowded into the factory, are organised like soldiers. As privates of the industrial army they are placed under the command of a perfect hierarchy of officers and sergeants. Not only are they slaves of the bourgeois class, and of the bourgeois State; they are daily and hourly enslaved by the machine, by the overlooker, and, above all, by the individual bourgeois manufacturer himself. The more openly this despotism proclaims gain to be its end and aim, the more petty, the more hateful and the more embittering it is.” (https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch01.htm#007)

The social position of the proletariat radically influences its knowledge of the world and itself. Proletariat—the working class— views capitalism from the standpoint of its oppression, and attempts to organize on the basis of this shared consciousness, this shared subjectivity of class struggle. Thus class consciousness is a unique standpoint. Marx’s theory of class consciousness differentiates between “class in itself” and “class for itself.”

Nancy Hartsock, a feminist philosopher, derived some important lessons about standpoint from Marxist discussions of the same. She delineates that material life of laborers structures their understanding of reality which is a kind of dialectic epistemology, an interactive unity between self/other, social/natural, mind/body etc. The bourgeoisie controls not just the means of materials’ production, but also cultural and epistemic production. Within the proletariat’s standpoint and class consciousness lies inherent the possibility of a classless society. Hartsock took these arguments further to critique androcentric and phallocentric ideologies and institutions—an acute critique of capitalist heteropatriarchy. Hartsock called this critique a “feminist standpoint.”

Hartsock’s work is among the pioneering feminist critiques of Marxism (note that critique does not mean rejection, but re-reading, and radical re-visioning): critique that points out that Marxist ideology understands laborers as naturally male and while discussing patriarchy does not forward a strong critique of it. Hartsock discusses women’s work in terms of the sexual division of labor, and well as dual labor of contribution to subsistence and childbearing. Women’s reproductive labor is very different from the labor of male workers, and this points at the possibility of a unique standpoint.

“Thus, the male worker in the process of production is involved in contact with necessity, and interchange with nature as well as with other human beings but the process of production or work does not consume his whole life. The activity of a woman in the home as well as the work she does for wages keeps her continually in contact with a world of qualities and change. Her immersion in the world of use – in concrete, many-qualitied, changing material processes – is more complete than his. And if life itself consists of sensuous activity, the vantage point available to women on the basis of their contribution to subsistence represents an intensification and deepening of the materialist world view and consciousness available to the producers of commodities in capitalism, an intensification of class consciousness (Hartsock1983, 292).”

This is a radical re-visioning of what class-consciousness can be.

An application of this unique standpoint could be in the way Canadian sociologist Dorothy E. Smith argued that women sociologists have a different and valuable standpoint, one which is ignored within the discipline. This is because “the profession of sociology is predicated on a universe which is occupied by men and it is itself still largely appropriated by men as their ‘territory.’ Sociology is part of the practice by which we are all governed and that practice establishes its relevance. Thus the institutions which lock sociology into the structures occupied by men are the same institutions which lock women into the situations in which they find themselves oppressed (Smith 1974, 8).” She is thus arguing that sociology could study a patriarchal society while operating within that patriarchy. That the way the profession is organized is not much different from the way any scholarly profession is organized, and indeed the way the labor market is organized. It follows a certain male logic, and privileges the male viewpoint, and work. The way sociologists understand capitalism or patriarchy is largely determined by their gender and class.

Dorothy Smith wrote this essay in 1974. How much has sociology changed since then? Or has it? How does gender, class and geo-political location influence sociological, and indeed, all knowledge production? What do you think?

Race is an important factor in understanding the world, as well as researching and writing about it. Patricia Hill Collins, in her book Black Feminist Thought, argues that Black women as agents of knowledge, or epistemic agents hold a unique standpoint. This standpoint, she says is unique given the history of African Americans in the United States. This standpoint, she says, is often the one that is silenced by philosophers, sociologists and policymakers. “Black feminist thought is a specialized knowledge created by African American women which clarifies a standpoint of and for Black women (Collins 1990, 22).” Black women’s consciousness is created using alternative ways of producing and validating knowledge. This knowledge puts forth new versions of truth, and aid in principled coalition building within a community silenced and marginalized by very social institution—academia included.

She also points out that knowledge is a community-based project: a collaborative, coalitional one. To demonstrate this, she states:

“I deliberately include numerous quotations from a range of African-American Women thinkers, some well-known and others rarely heard from. Explicitly grounding my analysis in multiple voices highlights the diversity, richness, and power of Black women’s ideas as part of a long-standing African America women’s intellectual community. Moreover, this approach counteracts the tendency of mainstream scholarship to canonize a few Black Women as spokespersons for the group and then refuse to listen to any but these select few (Collins 1990, xiii).”

Race has been central to not just how social theory is developed and organized, but how the sciences operate. Remember how study of science was a central project in conventional epistemology? The emergence of feminist standpoint theory and feminist science studies created theories of social epistemology and revealed how scientific knowledge, under the guise of objective neutrality has been often been racist and sexist. Again, this critique of science from a feminist standpoint is not a call to do away with the sciences, but to hold it responsible, and hold it to its own objective standards. Hence the notion of strong objectivity, something we explore in our next section on feminist standpoint theory.

Section 2: Feminist Social Epistemology and Standpoint Theory

As you may have realized, feminist philosophers made significant contributions towards the development of not just a social epistemology but also standpoint theory. Social epistemology is the study of the social and political dimensions of knowledge or information, a field that gained currency with the development of sociology of knowledge and critical theory.

Feminist epistemology including Standpoint Theory was a political mission that aimed to include women in the traditional epistemological project, emerged a sophisticated critique of the traditional epistemological project, a critique that deconstructed and reconfigured scientific knowledge, reason and authority.Feminist epistemology recognizes the myth of “value-free” “detached” “universalistic” “apolitical” “gender neutral” knowledge.

Feminisms often embody uneasy tensions between institutionalization and radical liberation, accommodation and rejection, tradition and modernity, discipline and interdiscipline, politics of alliance and politics of difference, and activism and academia. Feminist epistemology too has to negotiate between appropriation and rejection of traditional epistemologies, abstraction and groundedness/materiality, and a whole gamut of binaries instituted by a male-centric modernity. It has to negotiate questions such as: Does epistemology address concrete concerns? Is woman or women a single referent? What happens when knowledgemakers become their own subjects? Should feminist epistemology limit itself to gender issues?

Feminist philosophy of science incorporated postcolonial and subaltern standpoints, using intersectionality as a lens of inquiry and further claimed that modernity and the sciences that made modernity possible were decidedly masculinist and misogynist, which failed to include and integrate the woman and the colonized as legitimate stakeholders in civilization, or sometimes even as human. Scholars such as Anne Fausto-Sterling, LondaSchiebinger, Lynn  Hankinson-Nelson, Sandra Harding, and Donna Haraway suggest that colonial knowledge systems of statistics, biology, conservation, medicine and anthropology effectively created and sustained subject positions. This systematic marginalization and erasure have generated multiple feminist and post-colonial sites of protest and resistance.For example, Vandana Shivaidentifies women’s seed-keeping and ecofeminism as such a site that upholds traditional knowledge systems where women have been producers and carriers of such knowledge.

Within feminist philosophy of science, Sandra Harding and Donna Harawaydeserve special mention. Harding approached the issue of standpoint from the perspective of feminist science studies and future research methodology. Like many feminist scholars, Harding wanted to preserve a critical Marxian theoretical legacy that can be reinterpreted to make sense of gender and intersectional social relationships. In 1983, Sandra Harding along with Merrill Hintikka published a collection of critical essays on Standpoint Theory; this anthology was titled Discovering Reality: Feminist Perspectives on Epistemology, Metaphysics, Methodology and Philosophy of Science, and it established a tradition of feminist standpoint theory by bringing in scholars from feminist science studies, feminist/social epistemology, as well as researchers from sociology and other social sciences.

In this book, Harding (1983, 311) avers why a standpoint epistemology has become necessary.Sex/gender is a system of male-dominance made possible by men’s control of women’s productive and reproductive labor, where “reproduction” is broadly construed to include sexuality, family life, and kinship formations, as well as the birthing which biologically reproduces the species. However, the “discovery” of the sex/gender system has implications beyond the need for revisions in our scientific understandings. While many feminists have argued that this discovery calls for new morals and new politics, I intend to show why its discovery at this particular moment in history also calls for a revolution in epistemology. The new epistemology must be one which is not fettered by the self-imposed limitations of empiricist, functionalist/relativist, or marxist epistemologies. We shall see, within the all too brief limits of so short a paper, what the main limitations of these existing epistemologies are, and distinguish the pre-conditions for an adequate theory of belief production from the epistemological goals of feminist inquirers which lean too heavily on these inadequate epistemological programs.

Thus a new epistemology is needed because the old epistemology does not raise questions or offers answers about the absence and invisibility of women as knowledge-producers, and powerlessness and lack of agency of women as “objects” of knowledge. We are not just talking about living women who were used and described by scientists such as Freud and Darwin to prove their theories but also dead women, literally whose bodies were used to create a whole field of forensic science. The practices of sociobiology, phrenology, scientific racism, and eugenics validated and furthered racial and gender discrimination. Women’s practices of knowledge production that have helped communities historically understand nature, agriculture, health and healing were sidetracked, devalued and categorized as witchcraft and unscientific feminine intuition.

Donna Haraway is a trained biologist and feminist theorist, who studies the fields of primatology, museum studies and natural sciences to provide critical accounts of how imperialistic, racist, and sometimes misogynist these fields are. Looking into conceptual practices of taxidermy and dioramas in museums, she shows how these projects were organized to provide evidence of the superiority of whites over other races and men over women.

In Haraway’s “Teddy Bear patriarchy: Taxidermy in The Garden of Eden, New York City, 1908-1936” she presents a study of the African Hall in the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. She historicizes the taxidermy of the museum and its dioramas, focusing on the taxidermist Carl Akeley who is, indeed, the representative of “the great white father, the white hunter in the heart of Africa (Haraway 1989, 58).” She reads the museum as a creator, preserver and promulgator of knowledge of “sciences” and “natural history” through conservation, exhibition and eugenics. In exposing the elitist, racist and sexist creation and circulation of knowledge Haraway’s work embodies a strong feminist denigration of a science in a different “social womb” that has historically propped up capitalist patriarchy, racism and varied forms of social control and subjugation of the “other”.

Haraway calls the notion of objective, complete, technologically sophisticated science a “God trick,” that operates on the basis of binaries, yet fails to account for oppositions or alternative and “native” local knowledges. Yet, or most knowledge is indeed gathered from a partial, contextual perspective, not from the kind of all-knowing infinite vision that scientific knowledge claims. For Haraway, the logic of the standpoint is a way to conceptualize“situated knowledge” that embraces “politics and epistemologies of location, positioning and situating where partiality and not universality is the condition of being heard (2004, 92).” Science and conventional epistemology excommunicates all values that emanate from situatedness— politics, epistemological community and coalition, subjective interpretation of data, to name a few— for the purpose of its own invulnerability and perpetual validation. Yet, even without studying Standpoint Theory, you probably know that knowledge, including scientific knowledge is political. The next section will expand this idea.

Section 3: Basic Concepts

At this stage we can delineate some basic concepts of Standpoint Theory.

1.  Strong Objectivity: Objectivity is a knowledge claim that denotes that the knowledge under consideration is true, reliable, and proven; that there is supporting evidence for the claims made and that empirical inquiry has been conducted to gather this knowledge. We often colloquially or philosophically discuss “objective” facts, reality, or positions. Science is considered by many philosophers to be the highest form of objective knowledge.

However, you might have also heard people say something biased or prejudiced but they preface their statement with “objectively speaking…” their statements might reveal confirmation bias, deep seated beliefs/faith, and a tendency to ignore social construction of reality. Are they really objective? If objectivity is understood from a positivist perspective as epistemic truth claims, value free, establishing a cause and effect relationship, if it is the unmediated approach to bare facts and reality, is science always objective? A study of the effects of science and technology has revealed that this is not the case.

Sandra Harding points out that the sciences often incorporate “weak objectivity.” The scientific enterprise’s endless quest to exploit nature and extract resources without caring for long-term effects, its exclusion of women and people of color directly or indirectly due to deep-seated sociobiological beliefs about the intellectual inferiority of these groups, its unethical use of research subjects and its empiricist arrogance of not investigating its own methods shows that this enterprise might not practice the same objectivity that it claims.

Harding argues for a stronger and embodied objectivity. In fact, Standpoint theory’s principle epistemic claim seems to be in its incorporation of strong objectivity and that acknowledgement of social situatedness allows for greater objectivity. Conventional sciences (and philosophy of science) in their endless arrogance have claimed to understand everything about the world, accounts that feminist scholarship have exposed to be one sided, misogynistic, completely ignoring the perspectives/experiences/subjectivity of women and other marginalized social groups. Standpoint theory does not lay claim on value free objectivity, neither does it embrace judgmental/cultural relativism. It strengthens standards of objectivity, by making it reflexive, requiring “causal analyses not just of the micro processes in the laboratory but also of the macro tendencies in the social order which shape scientific practices (Harding 1991, 149).” It acknowledges the historicity and politics of knowledge creation, making knowledge contextual, impartial and inclusive.

Harding (1991, 156) further states that: “Some scientists and philosophers of science may protest that I am attempting to specify standards of objectivity for all the sciences.” Response–seemingly objectivity is a problematic area for not just feminist scholarship but also for other social sciences, natural sciences and humanities (e.g. history). Thus a claim for less partiality or less distortion is a valid one, and definitely requires committed analyses from various fields of knowledge.

Thus standpoint theory requires that the agent of knowledge be put in the same critical causal plane as the objects of enquiry. “Standpoint theory opens the way to stronger standards of both objectivity and reflexivity. These standards require that research projects use their historical location as a resource for obtaining greater objectivity (Harding 1991, 163).”

2.   Social Location: Recognition of social location of knowers and agents of knowledge is a central concept in Standpoint Theory. Harding (1991) states that conventional objectivism, aimed at “value-free” research turns away from the task of critically identifying broad historical social desires, interests and values that shape the agendas, contents and results of the sciences as much as they shape the rest of human affairs. She names reflexivity as a resource for strong objectivity. She also differentiates between subjects of conventional knowledge and subjects of feminist standpoint enquiry. The latter subjects:

–          are embodied and visible.

–          are not fundamentally different from objects of knowledge.

–          produce communal/cultural and not detached individual knowledge.

–          are multiple, heterogeneous, and contradictory/incoherent as opposed to unitary, homogeneous and coherent empirical epistemological subjects.

The social location of knowledge-makers and their relationship with others heavily impact and constitute their intellectual production. Sometimes an “outsider within” status within a system or structure can yield rich and specialized knowledge rather than the “insider” status.“A careful review of the emerging Black feminist literature reveals that many Black intellectuals, especially those in touch with their marginality in academic settings, tap this standpoint in producing distinctive analyses of race, class, and gender (Hill Collins 2004, 104).”

3.  Communities as Knowers: Within Standpoint Theory as well as feminist social epistemology, the notion of communities as knowers and epistemic communities is a crucial focus, which is very different from the individualistic techno-scientific idea of a few scholars working in isolation and creating knowledge from theoretical and experimental methods. You have probably heard Thomas Edison’s quote on genius being ninety-nine percent perspiration and one percent inspiration; given Edison’s widely known unethical business practices related to his own and other’s (such as Nikola Tesla’s) inventions we should probably re-read the meaning of this quote. Whose perspiration? Many scientists and inventors could not have achieved what they are most visible for without help from a lot of collaborators inside and outside their laboratories, but they have rarely mentioned these collaborators, especially female collaborators while being recognized and honored. The idea of path breaking individual contributions and the individual genius is therefore historically suspect. Having epistemic privilege, or the ability to be heard and be visible for one’s work is rarely if ever just a function of one’s unusual genius.

Feminist standpoint theorists understand the process of knowledge production as collective and community based. They tie the idea of epistemic privilege to epistemic communities. Feminist theorists such as Lynn Hankinson Nelson and Elizabeth Potter endorse the view of communities as knowledge producers; communities are the primary generators, repositories holders and acquirers of knowledge. Knowledge can only be validated or legitimized in the context and standards or systems adopted by a community as right. In revealing the communal, historical and contingent nature of knowledge, standpoint epistemology analyzes the process of micronegotiations that give rise to epistemic decisions, on physical and social sciences.

Helen Longino (1993, 112) also discusses the social nature of knowledge production, and she makes a case for socially constituted objectivity. How can this be achieved? Longino makes the following suggestions:

• publicly recognized forums for criticism of evidence, methods, assumptions and reasoning
• Dissent and critique are not merely elements to be tolerated, but should be resources for critical transformation 
• There must be publicly recognized standards by reference to which theories, hypotheses and observational practices are evaluated, these standards may vary across communities
• Epistemic communities must be authorized by equality of intellectual authority. Consensus must be a result of critical dialogue and deliberations and not the result of the exercise of political/economic power.

Dalmiya and Alcoff (1993) interrogated the symbolism of “old wives’ tales” to reveal erasure of women, empathy and subjectivity from knowledge. They conclude that epistemology needs to incorporate “accounts of knowing how” and “experiential knowledge” along with propositional knowledge. Standpoint theory recognizes the fact that women- not to assume too much homogeneity in that category- create and transmit knowledge and often protect community based multigenerational knowledge that’s arrogantly termed unscientific until science “discovers” it and capitalism finds it profitable. Patenting of native seeds and herbs, and well as various community-based practices of healing including yoga that are sold commercially as “packages” are examples of how community knowledge is devalued until it can be exploited and owned and sold. Vandana Shiva’s work on biopiracy sheds light on this exploitation.

Notice that this concept of “communities as knowers” recognizes the situated nature of knowledge and opts for an explanation of knowledge production that is strongly objective. An individual opinion may be subjective and may not be considered as knowledge, but speaking about a community’s experiential knowledge which is a relational process featuring checks and balances, points at the possibility of a democratic and complex production.

Conclusion (Summary): Whose Standpoint?

Having its roots in new social movements of the 1960s, 70s and 80s the ‘logic of a standpoint’ was applied to knowledge creation to imagine scientific and political resources from episteme of oppression, difference, and divergence of women and other marginalized groups. The knowledge generated is thus less distorted, more inclusive and more objective by re-imagining objectivity as rigorous and just. Standpoint Theory pays heed to sociological, cultural and historical relativism and avoids the trap of value-free knowledge.

Standpoint theory values women’s lives as starting points of knowledge thus putting an end to devaluation, trivialization, glossing over and erasure of women’s experiences across class, race, ethnicity, caste, religion and nationalities. While it focuses on gender, it does so in an intersectional manner: being mindful of how identities overlap in the matrix of domination/privilege. This theoretical tradition follows the Marxian legacy of recognizing the epistemic privilege of the proletarian standpoint. Standpoint Theory recognizes that oppression leads to a distancing from the social order, which can generate critical analysis of that order. This kind of theorizing can mediate between ideological dualisms, and feminist politics and scholarship. It also has to remain mindful of how the category of “women” or indeed any identity category can quickly become homogenized and essentialized leading to reductionist and exclusionary identity politics.

When you are thinking about Standpoint Theory, think about some of these basic questions: Who speaks? Who writes? Who edits? Who reviews? Who gate-keeps? Who creates and consumes knowledge? Who has epistemic privilege?

You have probably heard about how school textbooks are revised, censored, and sometimes banned as a form of ideological domination. You probably know more about history from above (from the perspective of rulers, dominant political and intellectual classes and upper caste, formally educated people) than history from below (perspective of dalits, subalterns, marginalized people who have been historically denied access to knowledge production as well as consumption). You are more likely to understand the action of freedom fighters for India’s independence as nationalist and selflessly courageous—based on your previous knowledge— and the actions of people demanding autonomous or separate states in India as anti-national terrorism or insurgency. You probably know that knowledge is often influenced by the perspective of the speaker. Standpoint Theory recognizes that certain perspectives have been louder and more visible throughout history. Consequently our knowledge systems including historical knowledge might have been skewed in a particular direction. Our knowledge of science with its claims of objectivity might not have been as objective after all. Standpoint Theory advocates for a strong objectivity by recognizing the complexity of knowledge creation.

If you type “knowledges” into a word-processing software such as MS Word, you will notice a squiggly red line under it. This means that “knowledges” is a typo, an error; the plural of “knowledge” is not a recognized English word. Why do you think that is? Why is society so invested in a unitary, unified model of knowledge?

You might have heard about the British scientist Tim Hunt’s recent sexist remarks about how women can be a distraction in the laboratories due to their actions of being romantically attached to colleagues and crying when they are criticized. And what about Outlook magazine’s recent sexist cartoon and write-up on a hardworking IAS officer, calling her “eye candy?” Considering the uphill task many women face in scientific and bureaucratic careers, such statements can be especially damaging. How does a scientist or a journalist— practitioners within fields that claim validity based on objectivity –choose the path of strengthening a misogynist patriarchal system that considers women to be objects? Once you begin to see how intimately knowledge and power are connected, it is easy to appreciate the methodological and epistemic alternative Standpoint Theory provides.

This is perhaps the right historical moment for the standpoint epistemology because the contemporary participation of women in public spaces, in democracies, labor markets, and in political and civil societies is more than in any other juncture in history.

Bibliography

• Collins, Patricia, H. 1990. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment, New York: Routledge.-2004. “Learning from the Outsider Within: The Sociological Significance of Black Feminist Thought.”The Feminist Standpoint Reader, Sandra Harding (ed.), New York: Routledge.
• Dalmiya, Vrinda and Linda Alcoff. 1993. “Are ‘Old Wives Tales’ Justified?” Feminist Epistemologies, Linda Alcoff and Elizabeth Potter (eds.), New York: Routledge, 217-244.
• Foucault, Michel. The Archaeology of Knowledge. 1972. New York: Pantheon Books.
• Haraway, Donna. 1989.“Teddy Bear Patriarchy: Taxidermy in the Garden of Eden, New York City, 1908-36.” Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science. New York: Routledge, 26-58. -2004. “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective.” The Feminist Standpoint Reader, Sandra Harding (ed.), New York: Routledge.
• Harding, Sandra. 1983. “Why has the Sex/Gender System Become Visible Only Now?” Discovering Reality: Feminist Perspectives on Epistemology, Metaphysics, Methodology, and the Philosophy of Science, Sandra Harding and Merrill Hintikka (eds.), Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 311– 324. -1991. Whose Science? Whose Knowledge? Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
• Hartsock, Nancy. 1983. “The Feminist Standpoint: Developing the Ground for a Specifically Feminist Historical Materialism,” Discovering Reality: Feminist Perspectives on Epistemology, Metaphysics, Methodology, and the Philosophy of Science, Sandra Harding and Merrill Hintikka (eds.), Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 283–310.
• Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. 1969. Manifesto of the Communist Party. Marx/Engels Selected Works, Vol. One, Progress Publishers, Moscow.https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist- manifesto/ch01.htm#007
• Shiva, Vandana. Biopiracy: The Plunder of Nature and Knowledge. 1997. Boston: South End Press Collective.
• Smith, Dorothy, 1974. “Women’s Perspective as a Radical Critique of Sociology,” Sociological Inquiry, 44: 7–13.
• Spivak, Gayatri, C. 1988. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” In Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (ed.) Cary Nelson Lawrence Grossberg. Urbana: University of Illinois Press 271-313.