Standpoint Theory

Standpoint Theory

Feminist Standpoint Theory

What is Standpoint Theory?

Strong Objectivity: Less Partial Views from the Standpoint of Women

Main Points

• Strong Objectivity: strategy of starting research from the lives of women and other marginalized groups, which upon critical reflection and resistance provides them with a false view of reality.
• 1st Explanation: "First, people with subordinate status have greater motivation to understand the perspective of more powerful groups than vise versa."
• 2nd Explanation: "Groups that are advantaged by the prevailing system have a vested interest in not perceiving social inequities that benefit them at the expense of others."
• It's the objective perspective from women's lives that provides a preferred starting place from which to generate research projects, hypotheses, and interpretations.

• Not all women share the same standpoint, nor do men.
• Economic condition, race, and sexual orientation also draw standpoints.
• Social location matters

• "What one knows is affected by where one stands in society." -Dorothy Smith
• We see the world around us through one lens that becomes our standpoint.
• Broken down to 3 parts:
• 1. There is no objective knowledge
• 2. No 2 people have the same exact view.
• 3. We should not take our personal standpoint for granted.

Teen Mom Standpoint

• Created by theorists Sandra Harding and Julia Wood.
• "A place from which to view the world around us."
• Also known as our viewpoint, perspective, outlook, or position.
• We can use the inequalities of gender, race, class, and sexual orientation to observe how different locations within the social hierarchy tend to generate distinctive accounts of nature and social relationships.
• All concentrate on relationship between power and knowledge

-Example of Standpoint Theory

- We see the life of a teen mom through our eyes.

-We have a different standpoint.

Difference in Men and Women's Standpoint

• Men tend to want more autonomy
• They use more speech to accomplish tasks, assert themselves, and gain power.
• Women want more connection.
• They use speech to build relationships, include others, and show responsiveness.

• Harding claims that "when people speak from the opposite sides of power relations, the perspective from the lives of the less powerful can provide a more objective view than the perspective from the lives of the more powerful."

• Some standpoints are "more partial than others since different locations within social hierarchies affect what is likely to be seen."

• Question: Do all women share a common standpoint?

Knowledge from Nowhere vs Local Knowledge

The Standpoint of Black Feminist Thought

• Knowledge situated in time, place, experience, and relative power, as opposed to knowledge from nowhere that's supposedly value-free.
• She writes, "each person can achieve only a partial view of reality from the perspective of his or her own position in the social hierarchy."
• Situated knowledge-the only kind there is-will always be partial.
• Standpoint theorists do maintain that, "the perspectives of subordinate groups are more complete and thus, better than those of privileged groups in a society."

• Patricia Hil Collins, an African American sociologist at University of Maryland says that what black women in the U.S. have experienced puts them in a different group than either white women or black men.
• These women become an "outsider within," seeing a privileged view of white society that the black women will never belong.

Theory To Practice: Communication Research Based On Women's Lives

• Julia Wood's- "Who Cares? Women, Care, and Culture"
• Wood discovered that gendered communication practices reinforce our social expectation that care giving is women's work.

The Connection?

• Wood suggests that standpoint approach is practical to critique the unjust practices.
• She believes that, "Our culture itself must be reformed in ways that dissociate caring from its historical affiliations with women & private relationships and redefine it as centrally important and integral part of our collective public life."

Critique: Do Standpoints on the Margins Give a Less False View?

One True Thing 1998

Ethical Reflection: Benhabib's Interactive Universalism

• As you might predict, many scientists and other objective theorists dismiss Harding and Wood's concept of strong objectivity.
• Feminist scholars such as Susan Hekman and Nancy Hirschmann are concerned that Harding's version of standpoint theory underestimates the role of language in expressing one's sense of self and view of the world.
• This critique of standpoint theory doesn't negate the importance of situated knowledge, but it complicates our reception of anyone's take on reality, whether it comes from the center or the margins of the social fabric.

Works Cited

http://soctheory.iheartsociology.com/2011/11/30/standpoint-theory/

• Seyla Benhabib, a professor of political science and philosophy at Yale University, says that she sets out to "defend the tradition of universalism in the face of this triple-pronged critique by engaging the claims of feminism, communitarianism, and postmodernism."
• Postmodern Critique
• Communitarian Critique
• Feminist Critique