This chapter is going to shed light on two distinctive feminist standpoint theorists: Dorothy E. Smith and Patricia Hill Collins. Among other feminist standpoint theorists, the feminist critiques of these two women stand out for me as applicable when analyzing Umm Zakiyyah's trilogy If I Should Speak. The mutuality Smith and Collins have is that they have sought a sociology which takes women's experience as a vantage point where they could see the full picture of society. They are empiricists who experienced marginalization in the patriarchal or racist society whether as housewives or professional and academic women, and of course for Collins as an African-American woman. They composed their theories depending on their own experiences and their case studies. In her thesis entitled
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Gender roles and relations are not tucked away in those zones called sexuality, the family, interpersonal relations, and the like, which are defined residually by the organization of paid work and the institutions of ruling. Gender is socially constructed in precisely the relations that de Beauvoir first identified as those wherein men could claim to represent at once the masculine and neutral principles. Women were confined to the subjective. The patriarchy of our time has this form. (4)
Smith problematizes the world that women live in. She exposes them to the fact that sexuality has led to gender division. The outcome of this division is the existence of a male dominant and a female dominated. In her book The Everyday World as problematic (1987), Smith has shaped her own sociology. Smith argues that sociology has ignored and objectified women, making them the “Other.” She claims that women’s experiences are fertile grounds for feminist knowledge (O'Brien 807). She offers a new feminist methodology which she builds on two important bases: bifurcation of consciousness and relations of
Gender roles and relations are not tucked away in those zones called sexuality, the family, interpersonal relations, and the like, which are defined residually by the organization of paid work and the institutions of ruling. Gender is socially constructed in precisely the relations that de Beauvoir first identified as those wherein men could claim to represent at once the masculine and neutral principles. Women were confined to the subjective. The patriarchy of our time has this form. (4)
Smith problematizes the world that women live in. She exposes them to the fact that sexuality has led to gender division. The outcome of this division is the existence of a male dominant and a female dominated. In her book The Everyday World as problematic (1987), Smith has shaped her own sociology. Smith argues that sociology has ignored and objectified women, making them the “Other.” She claims that women’s experiences are fertile grounds for feminist knowledge (O'Brien 807). She offers a new feminist methodology which she builds on two important bases: bifurcation of consciousness and relations of