The Resilient Relevancy of Feminist Standpoint Theory
Nancy Hartstock’s (1983) Feminist Standpoint Theory possesses resilience worth noting. Published in the early 1980’s, it emerged from a volatile intersection of politics and culture and economics, the era of Reagan and Thatcher and The Invasion of Grenada, Reaganomics, the rise of laissez-faire neoliberalism and trickle-down economics, Star Wars SDI Program and the outbreak of AIDS, the failure to pass an Equal Rights Amendment and the Sex Wars. During this time Hartstock turned to a Marxist definition of class and proletarian standpoint theory to fashion a gender-specific political analysis that sought to understand patriarchal power dynamics and impacts from the vantage point of the marginalized …show more content…
But what is standpoint theory that connects the two? Standpoint, Hartstock argues, is the endorsement of the claim that “there are some perspectives on society from which, however well-intentioned one may be, the real relations of human with each other and the natural world are not visible…” by “posit(ing) a duality of levels of reality, of which the deeper level of essence both includes and explains the ‘surface’ or appearance, and indicates the logic by means of which the appearance inverts and distorts the deeper reality” (285). This is a bottom-up vantage-point that is unique to the oppressed class and cannot be held (or imagined) by those higher up on socio-economic tiers. So in Poland (and in many other countries where women are a devalued second-class citizen) a Feminist Standpoint can effectively reveal the differential between the state’s imagining of women as reproductive machines so not trusted with the responsibility of bearing future generations that they need to be legally regulated (inverted and distorted deeper reality) and women as human beings intrinsically invested with agency and autonomy to individually decide what is best for their own bodies (the deeper reality). Standpoint underscores the politics of individual’s social, historical and genealogical experiences, therefore locating them politically. In this way Standpoint theory correlates with situated knowledges (Haraway 1988) in that there are certain knowledges born of particular experiences that offer specific analyses of overarching social conditions that are unavailable through other
Nancy Hartstock’s (1983) Feminist Standpoint Theory possesses resilience worth noting. Published in the early 1980’s, it emerged from a volatile intersection of politics and culture and economics, the era of Reagan and Thatcher and The Invasion of Grenada, Reaganomics, the rise of laissez-faire neoliberalism and trickle-down economics, Star Wars SDI Program and the outbreak of AIDS, the failure to pass an Equal Rights Amendment and the Sex Wars. During this time Hartstock turned to a Marxist definition of class and proletarian standpoint theory to fashion a gender-specific political analysis that sought to understand patriarchal power dynamics and impacts from the vantage point of the marginalized …show more content…
But what is standpoint theory that connects the two? Standpoint, Hartstock argues, is the endorsement of the claim that “there are some perspectives on society from which, however well-intentioned one may be, the real relations of human with each other and the natural world are not visible…” by “posit(ing) a duality of levels of reality, of which the deeper level of essence both includes and explains the ‘surface’ or appearance, and indicates the logic by means of which the appearance inverts and distorts the deeper reality” (285). This is a bottom-up vantage-point that is unique to the oppressed class and cannot be held (or imagined) by those higher up on socio-economic tiers. So in Poland (and in many other countries where women are a devalued second-class citizen) a Feminist Standpoint can effectively reveal the differential between the state’s imagining of women as reproductive machines so not trusted with the responsibility of bearing future generations that they need to be legally regulated (inverted and distorted deeper reality) and women as human beings intrinsically invested with agency and autonomy to individually decide what is best for their own bodies (the deeper reality). Standpoint underscores the politics of individual’s social, historical and genealogical experiences, therefore locating them politically. In this way Standpoint theory correlates with situated knowledges (Haraway 1988) in that there are certain knowledges born of particular experiences that offer specific analyses of overarching social conditions that are unavailable through other