CHAPTER 3 4

Standpoint A place from which to critically view the world around us.

Critical tradition

Standpoint Theory of Sandra Harding & Julia T. Wood

As you've seen throughout the book, many communication theories raise ques­tions about knowledge-for example,

Can cognitive complexity help us craft person-centered messages?

What's the best way to reduce uncertainty about someone you've just met?

Does the "bottom line" in an annual report reflect corporate reality?

How can we find out whether television has a powerful effect?

Are men and women from different cultures?

If you're interested in communication, you'll want to find the answers. ("Inquiring minds want to know.") Standpoint theorists Sandra Harding and Julia Wood claim that one of the best ways to discover how the world works is to start the inquiry from the standpoint of women and other groups on the margins of society.

A standpoint is a place from which to view the world around us. Whatever our vantage point, its location tends to focus our attention on some features of the natural and social landscape while obscuring others. Synonyms for standpoint include viewpoint, perspective, outlook, and position. Note that each of these words suggests a specific location in time and space where observation takes place, while referring to values or attitudes. Sandra Harding and Julia Wood think the connection is no accident. As standpoint theorists, they claim that "the social groups within which we are located powerfully shape what we experience and know as well as how we understand and communicate with ourselves, others, and the world."1 Our standpoint affects our worldview.

Harding is a philosopher of science who holds joint appointments in wom­en's studies, education, and philosophy at the University of California, Los Angeles. To illustrate the effect of standpoint, she asks us to imagine looking into a pond and seeing a stick that appears to be bent.2 But is it really? If we walk around to a different location, the stick seems to be straight-which it actually is. Of course, physicists have developed a theory of light refraction that explains why this visual distortion occurs. In like manner, standpoint theorists suggest that 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. Specifically, Harding claims

441

Griffin, Emory A. A First Look at Communication Theory. Boston: McGraw-Hill Higher Education, 2009. Print.

442 CULTURAL CONTEXT

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."3 Her main focus is the standpoint of women who are marginalized.

Just as Harding is recognized as the philosopher who has most advanced the standpoint theory of knowledge among feminist scholars,4 Julia Wood, a professor of communication at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, has championed and consistently applied standpoint logic within the field of communication. She regards all perspectives as partial, but she insists that some standpoints are "more partial than others since different locations within social hierarchies affect what is likely to be seen."5 Although Wood believes that social location definitely shapes women's lives as distinct from men's, she emphasizes that a woman's location on the margin of society doesn't necessarily confer a feminist standpoint. It is only through critical reflection on unjust power rela­tions and working to resist this oppression that a feminist standpoint is formed. In that sense a feminist standpoint is achievement rather than a piece of territory automatically inherited by being a woman.6

For communication researchers, taking women's location seriously means heeding Wood's call to choose research topics that are responsive to women's concerns:

Abiding concern with oppression leads many feminist scholars to criticize some of the topics that dominate research on relationships. When four women are battered to death by intimate partners every day in North America, study of how abusive relationships are created and sustained seems more compelling than research on heterosexual college students' romances. Is it more significant to study friendships among economically comfortable adolescents or social practices that normalize sex­ual harassment and rape?7

As a male researcher who has already studied romance and friendship on a private college campus, I am compelled to explore the logic of Harding and Wood's standpoint agenda. But their standpoint epistemology raises other ques­tions. Do all women share a common standpoint? Why do Harding and Wood believe a feminist standpoint is more objective or less partial than other starting points for inquiry? Would grounding future research in the lives of women com­pel me to regard every report of feminine experience as equally true? Should we disregard what men have to say? The rest of this chapter will explore these issues and other questions raised by standpoint theory. The answers to these questions will make more sense if we understand the varied intellectual resources stand­point theorists have drawn upon to inform their analyses.

A FEMINIST STANDPOINT ROOTED IN PHILOSOPHY AND LITERATURE

In 1807, German philosopher Georg Hegel analyzed the master-slave relation­ship to show that what people "know" about themselves, others, and society depends on which group they are in.8 For example, those in captivity have a decidedly different perspective on the meaning of chains, laws, childbirth, and punishment than do their captors who participate in the same "reality." But since masters are backed by the established structure of their society, it is they who have the power to make their view of the world stick. They are the ones who write the history books.

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Following Hegel's lead, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels referred to the pro­letarian standpoint. They suggested that the impoverished poor who provide sweat equity are society's ideal knowers, as long as they understand the class struggle in which they are involved.9 Harding notes that standpoint theory "was a project 'straining at the bit' to emerPce from feminist social theorists who were familiar with Marxian epistemology." 0 By substituting women for proletariat, and gender discrimination for class struggle, early feminist standpoint theorists had a ready-made framework for advocating women's way of knowing.

As opposed to the economic determinism of Marx, George Herbert Mead claims that culture "gets into individuals" through communication (see Chapter 5). Drawing on this key principle of symbolic interactionism, Wood maintains that gender is a cultural construction rather than a biological characteristic. "More than a variable, gender is a system of meanings that sculpts individuals' stand­points by positioning most males and females in disparate material, social and symbolic circumstances." 11

Strains of postmodernism also weave throughout standpoint theory. When Jean-Francois Lyotard announced an "incredulity toward metanarratives," he included Enlightenment rationality and Western science.12 Since many feminists regard these two enterprises as dominated by men who refuse to acknowledge their male-centered bias, they embrace a postmodern critique. In reciprocal fash­ion, postmodernists applaud the standpoint emphasis on knowledge as locally situated, though they push the idea to the point where there is no basis for favor­ing one perspective over another. As we shall see, Harding and Wood reject that kind of absolute relativism.

Harding and Wood have drawn upon these somewhat conflicting intellectual traditions without letting any one of them dictate the shape or substance of their standpoint approach. The resulting theory might seem a bewildering crosshatch of ideas were it not for their repeated emphasis on starting all scholarly inquiry from the lives of women and others who are marginalized. In order to honor this central tenet of standpoint theory and to illustrate the way of knowing that Harding and Wood propose, I've excerpted events and dialogue from Toni Morrison's novel Beloved. Morrison won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993 and won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for this book about Sethe, an African-American woman who escaped from slavery.

Sethe was raised and married on a Kentucky farm belonging to a compara­tively benign man who owned six slaves. When the owner died, an in-law known as "schoolteacher" arrived to "put things in order." Besides overseeing the farm, he worked on a book about the lives of slaves. In a grim caricature of ethno­graphic analysis, schoolteacher asked slaves many questions and wrote down what they said in the notebook he always carried. He also tutored his two teen­age nephews on the way to whip Sethe without breaking her spirit, instructed them to keep a detailed record of her animal characteristics, and referred to Sethe's value in terms of breeding potential-property that reproduces itself without cost.

The pivotal event in the novel occurs a month after Sethe and her children have escaped to her mother-in-law's home in Ohio. While working in the garden she sees four men in the distance riding toward the house-schoolteacher, a nephew, a slave catcher, and the sheriff. Sethe frantically scoops up her kids and runs to the woodshed behind the house. When schoolteacher opens the door a minute later, he sees a grizzly scene of death-two boys lying open-eyed in

444 CULTURAL CONTEXT

sawdust, a girl pumping the last of her blood from a throat slit by a crosscut saw, and Sethe trying to bash in the head of her baby girl. Speaking for the four men, the nephew asks in bewilderment, "What she want to go and do that for?" Much of the book is an answer to that question as Toni Morrison describes the oppositional standpoints of a male slaveowner (schoolteacher) and a female slave (Sethe).

WOMEN AS A MARGINALIZED GROUP

Standpoint theorists see important differences between men and women. Wood uses the relational dialectic of autonomy-connectedness as a case in point (see Chapter 12): "While all humans seem to seek both autonomy and connectedness, the relative amount of each that is preferred appears to differ rather consistently between genders."13 Men tend to want more autonomy; women tend to want more connectedness. This difference is evident in each group's communication. The masculine community uses speech to accomplish tasks, assert self, and gain power. The feminine communitl uses speech to build relationships, include oth­ers, and show responsiveness.1

Wood does not attribute gender differences to biology, maternal instinct, or women's intuition. To the extent that women are distinct from men, she sees the difference largely as a result of cultural expectations and the treatment that each group receives from the other. For example, Sethe would get "blood in her eye" whenever she heard a slur against any woman of color. When Paul D, the only living black male from her slave past, tells Sethe that he has a "bad feeling" about a homeless young woman she's taken in, Sethe retorts:

"Well feel this, why don't you? Feel how it feels to have a bed to sleep in and somebody there not worrying you to death about what you got to do each day to deserve it. Feel how that feels. And if you don't get it, feel how it feels to be a coloredwoman roaming the roads with anything God made liable to jump on you. Feel that."15

Paul D protests that he never mistreated a woman in his whole life. Sethe snaps back, "That makes one in the world."

Sethe' s words illustrate how otherness is engendered in women by the way men respond to them. The reality she describes also reflects the power dis­crepancies that Harding and Wood say are found in all societies: "A culture is not experienced identically by all members. Cultures are hierarchically ordered so that different groups within them have positions that offer dis­similar power, opportunities, and experiences to members."16 Along these lines, feminist standpoint theorists suggest that women are underadvantaged, and thus men are overadvantaged-a gender difference that makes a huge difference.

Harding and Wood are quick to warn against thinking of women as a monolithic group. They point out that not all women share the same stand­point, nor for that matter do all men. Besides the issue of gender, Harding stresses economic condition, race, and sexual orientation as additional cultural identities that can either draw people to the center of society or push them out to the fringes. Thus, an intersection of minority positions creates a highly looked-down-upon location in the social hierarchy. Impoverished African­American lesbian women are almost always marginalized. On the other hand,

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"Actually, Lou, I think it was more than just my being in the right place at the right time. I think it was my being the right race, the right religion, the right sex, the right socioeconomic group,

having the right accent, the right clothes, going to the right schools ... "

©The New Yorker Collection 1992 Warren Miller from cartoonbank.com. All Rights Reserved.

positions of high status and power are overwhelmingly "manned" by wealthy, white, heterosexual males.

Even more than Harding, Wood is troubled by the tendency of some femi­nists to talk as if there were an "essence of women," then to "valorize" that quality. She believes that Carol Gilligan made this mistake by claiming that women, as opposed to men, speak in an ethical voice of care (see Chapter 33). For Wood, biology is not destiny. She fears that "championing any singular model of womanhood creates a mold into which not all women may comfort­ably fit." 17 Yet as an unapologetic feminist committed to the equal value of all human life, Wood understands that a sense of solidarity is politically necessary if women are to effectively critique an androcentric world.

Standpoint theorists emphasize the importance of social location because they are convinced that people at the top of the societal hierarchy are the ones privileged to define what it means to be female, male, or anything else in a given culture. We can see this power when Sethe recalls a time when schoolteacher accuses a slave named Sixo of stealing a young pig. When Sixo denies stealing the animal, schoolteacher takes on the role of Grand Inter­preter:

"You telling me you didn't steal it, and I'm looking right at you?" "No, sir." Schoolteacher smiled. "Did you kill it?" "Yes, sir." "Did you butcher it?"

446 CULTURAL CONTEXT

"Yes, sir." "Did you cook it?" "Yes, sir." "Well, then. Did you eat it?" "Yes, sir. I sure did." "And you telling me that's not stealing?" "No, sir. It ain't." "What is it then?" "Improving your property, sir." "What?" " ... Sixo take and feed the soil, give you more crop. Sixo take and feed Sixo give you more work." Clever, but schoolteacher beat him anyway to show him that definitions belonged to the definers-not the defined.18

KNOWLEDGE FROM NOWHERE VERSUS LOCAL KNOWLEDGE

Local knowledge Knowledge situated in time, place, experience, and relative power, as opposed to knowledge from nowhere that's sup­posedly value-free.

Why is standpoint so important? Because, Harding argues, "the social group that gets the chance to define the important problematics, concepts, assump­tions, and hypotheses in a field will end up leaving its social fingerprints on the picture of the world that emerges from the results of that field's research process."19 Imagine how different a book by schoolteacher entitled Slaves would be from one of the same title written by Sethe (as told to Toni Morrison). The texts would surely differ in starting point, method, and conclusion.

Harding's insistence on local knowledge contrasts sharply with the claim of traditional Western science that it discovers "Truth" that is value-free and acces­sible to any objective observer. In her book Whose Science? Whose Knowledge? Harding refers to empiricism's claims of disembodied truths as "views from nowhere," or in the words of feminist writer Donna Haraway, "the God trick."20

As for the notion of value-free science, Harding characterizes the claim as pro­moting "a fast gun for hire" and chides detached scientists that "it cannot be value-free to describe such social events as poverty, misery, torture, or cruelty in a value-free way."21 Even Galileo's democratic ideal of interchangeable know­ers is open to question. His statement Anyone can see through my telescope has been interpreted by empirical scientists as dismissing concern for any relation­ship between the knower and the known.

Harding and other standpoint theorists insist that there is no possibility of an unbiased perspective that is disinterested, impartial, value-free, or detached from a particular historical situation. Both the physical and the social sciences are always situated in time and place. She writes that "each person can achieve only a partial view of reality from the perspective of his or her own position in the social hierarchy."22 Unlike postmodernists, however, she is unwilling to abandon the search for reality. She simply thinks that the search for it should begin from the lives of those in the underclass.

Suppose you were to do research on the topic of family values. Rather than analyzing current political rhetoric or exploring the genesis of the growing home­school movement, Harding would suggest that you frame your research ques­tions and hypotheses starting with the family values of people like Baby Suggs, Sethe's mother-in-law. For example, Morrison explains why this freed slave val­ues a son more than a man:

CHAPTER 34: STANDPOINT THEORY 447

It made sense for a lot of reasons because in all of Baby's life, as well as Sethe's own, men and women were moved around like checkers. Anybody Baby Suggs knew, let alone loved, who hadn't run off or been hanged, got rented out, loaned out, bought up, brought back, stored up, mortgaged, won, stolen or seized. So Baby's eight children had six fathers. What she called the nastiness of life was the shock she received upon learning that nobody stopped playing checkers just because the pieces included her children.23

Neither Harding nor Wood claims that the standpoint of women or any other marginalized group gives them a clear view of the way things are. Situated knowl­edge-the only kind there is-will always be partial. Standpoint theorists do maintain, however, that "the perspectives of subordinate groups are more com­plete and thus, better than those of privileged groups in a society."24

STRONG OBJECTIVITY: LESS PARTIAL VIEWS FROM THE STANDPOINT OF WOMEN

Strong objectivity The strategy of starting research from the lives of women and other mar­ginalized groups, thus providing a less false view of reality.

Harding uses the term strong objectivity to refer to the strategy of starting research from the lives of women and other marginalized groups whose concerns and experience are usually ignored.25 Her choice of label not only suggests the wis­dom of taking all perspectives into account but also suggests that knowledge generated from the standpoint of dominant groups offers, by contrast, only a weak objectivity. To illustrate this claim, she speaks directly of the oppositional standpoints of the kind described in Toni Morrison's Beloved: "It is absurd to imagine that U.S. slaveowners' views of Africans' and African Americans' lives could outweigh in impartiality, disinterestedness, impersonality, and objectivity their slaves' view of their own and slaveowners' lives."26

Why should the standpoints of women and other marginalized groups be less partial, less distorted, or less false than the perspectives of men who are in dominant positions? Wood offers two explanations: "First, people with subordi­nate status have greater motivation to understand the perspective of more pow­erful groups than vice versa." 27 Even if the meek don't inherit the earth, they have a special interest in figuring out what makes it turn, and so taking the role of the other is a survival skill for those who have little control over their own lives. Lacking this motivation, those who wield power seem to have less reason to wonder how the /1 other half" views the world.

Wood's second reason for favoring the standpoint of groups that are con­stantly put down is that they have little reason to defend the status quo. Not so for those who have power. She asserts that "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."28 For the overprivileged, ignorance of the other's perspective is bliss, so it's folly to be wise. Certainly the men who come to take Sethe and her children back into slavery could be assigned to that clue­less category. "What she want to go and do that for?" they ask in real bewilder­ment. If they or anyone else really wanted to know why a runaway slave would slit her daughter's throat, they'd need to begin their inquiry from the standpoint of slaves-women slaves-not from the perspective of masters, or even that of black men. They would discover Sethe's utter desperation:

She saw them coming and recognized schoolteacher's hat. ... And if she thought anything, it was No. No. Nonono. Simple. She just flew. Collected every bit of life she had made, all the parts of her that were precious and fine and beautiful and

448 CULTURAL CONTEXT

carried, pushed dragged them through the veil, out, away, over there where no one could hurt them. Over there. Outside this place, where they would be safe ....

When she got back from the jail house, she was glad the fence was gone. That's where they had hitched their horses-where she saw, floating above the railing as she squatted in the garden, schoolteacher's hat. By the time she faced him, looked him dead in the eye, she had something in her arms that stopped him in his tracks. He took a backward step with each jump of the baby heart until finally there were none.

"I stopped him," she said, staring at the place where the fence used to be. "I took and put my babies where they'd be safe."29

As gripping as these words are, Harding would not ask us to automatically accept Sethe's explanation or approve her drastic response just because they are the words and actions of a marginalized woman. After all, many of the free African-American women in Morrison's novel condemn Sethe's drastic way of keeping her daughter Beloved safe from schoolteacher's hands. But Sethe's wrenching fear for her children's welfare is the stark reality of enslaved women everywhere (see the book/film Sophie's Choice). Harding emphasizes that it's the "objective perspective from women's lives" that provides a preferred stand­point from which to generate research projects, hypotheses, and interpreta­tions.30 Perhaps such research could seriously explore perceptions of "a fate worse than death."

THEORY TO PRACTICE: COMMUNICATION RESEARCH BASED ON WOMEN'S LIVES

If we want to see a model of communication research that starts from the lives of women, a good place to begin is Julia Wood's in-depth study of caregiving in the United States. Consistent with standpoint theory's insistence that all knowl­edge is situated in a time and place, the first chapter of Wood's Who Cares? Women, Care, and Culture describes her own situation as a white, heterosexual, professional woman who for nine years took on the consuming responsibility of caring for her infirm parents until they died. Her experience squared with her subsequent research findings:

First, it seems that caring can be healthy and enriching when it is informed, freely chosen, and practiced within a context that recognizes and values caring and those who do it. On the other hand, existing studies also suggest that caring can be quite damaging to caregivers if they are unaware of dangers to their identities, if they have unrealistic expectations of themselves, and/ or if caring occurs within contexts that fail to recognize its importance and value.31

Wood discovered that gendered communication practices reflect and rein­force our societal expectation that caregiving is women's work. After rejecting his daughter's proposal to hire a part-time nurse, her father mused, "It's funny, Julia. I used to wish I had sons, but now I'm glad I have daughters, because I couldn't ask a son to take this kind of time away from his own work just to take care of me."32 She heard similar messages that devalued caregiving from male colleagues at her university. While praising Wood for her sacrifice, they reassured a fellow professor that he had taken the proper action by placing his mother in a nursing home: "Well, she surely understood that as busy as you are with your work you couldn't be expected to take on that responsibility."33 Wood

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says these comments reveal the opposing, gender-based privileges and restraints in our society. As illustrated in the book/ film One True Thing, women are given the freedom to make caregiving a priority but are denied the right to put their work first and still be a "good woman." Men are given the freedom to make their work a priority but are deprived of the right to focus on caregiving and still be a "good man."

Wood suggests that a standpoint approach is practical to the extent that it generates an effective critique of unjust practices. She believes that "our culture itself must be reformed in ways that dissociate caring from its his­torical affiliations with women and private relationships and redefine it as a centrally important and integral part of our collective public life."34 Perhaps a proposal in President Clinton's 1999 State of the Union address was a first step. He endorsed a $1,000 tax write-off for families taking care of an inca­pacitated relative in their homes. A male network news commentator dis­missed the idea as "more symbolic than significant." The female cohost chided that the symbolic recognition of worth was quite significant. She shared Wood's standpoint.

THE STANDPOINT Of BLACK FEMINIST THOUGHT

Patricia Hill Collins, an African-American sociologist at Brandeis University, claims that the patterns of "intersecting oppressions" that black women in the United States have experienced puts them in a different marginalized place in society than either white women or black men. In her book Black Feminist Thought, Collins says that "the heavy concentration of U.S. black women in domestic work coupled with racial segregation in housing and schools" enabled them to construct a common body of wisdom about how to survive in the world.35 She agrees with other black feminists that "we have to see clearly that we are a unique group set undeniably apart because of race and sex with a unique set of challenges."36 That different social location means that black women's way of knowing is different from Harding and Wood's standpoint epistemology.

I'll use Collins' words to describe the four ways that she says black women validate knowledge claims:37

1. Lived experience as a criterion of meaning. For most African-American women, those individuals who have lived through the experience about which they claim to be experts are more believable and credible than those who have merely read or thought about such experiences.

2. The use of dialogue in assessing knowledge claims. For ideas to be tested and validated, everyone in the group must participate. To refuse to join in, especially if one really disagrees with what has been said, is seen as "cheating."

3. The ethic of caring. Emotion indicates that a speaker believes in the valid­ity of an argument. The sound of what is being said is as important as the words themselves, in what is, in a sense, a dialogue of reason and emotion.

4. The ethic of personal accountability. Assessments of an individual's knowl­edge claims simultaneously evaluate an individual's character, values, and ethics.

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Collins doesn't claim that a black feminist standpoint epistemology provides African-American women with the best view of how the social world works. She rejects an additive model of oppression that would claim that poor, black, lesbian women are more oppressed than any other marginalized group. But when the same ideas are validated as true through black feminist thought, and from the standpoints of other oppressed groups as well, then those ideas become the least partial, most "objective" truths available.

ETHICAL REFLECTION: BENHABIB'S INTERACTIVE UNIVERSALISM

Seyla Benhabib has undertaken a formidable task. Recall that Enlightenment thinkers such as Kant, Locke, and Habermas have always believed "that reason is a natural disposition of the human mind, which when governed by proper education can discover certain truths."38 Benhabib, who is a professor of govern­ment at Harvard University, wants to maintain that a universal ethical standard is a viable possibility. But she also feels the force of three major attacks on Enlightenment rationality in general, and Habermas' discourse ethics in particu­lar (see pages 231-232). Thus, 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."39 At the same time, she wants to learn from them and incorporate their insights into her interactive universalism. I'll discuss them in reverse order.

Postmodern critique. Recall that in his widely discussed 1984 treatise The Postmodern Condition, Jean-Francois Lyotard declares that there are no longer any grand narratives on which to base a universal version of truth.40 Postmodern­ists dismiss any a priori assumptions, or givens, that attempt to legitimate the moral ideals of the Enlightenment and Western liberal democracy. They are suspicious of consensus and Habermas' attempt to legislate rationality. Ben­habib sums up the postmodern critique: "transcendental guarantees of truth are dead; ... there is only the endless struggle of local narratives vying with one another for legitimization."41 She appreciates the postmodern insistence that a moral point of view is an accomplishment rather than a discovery, but she is not "content with singing the swan-song of normative thinking in general."42

Benhabib holds out the possibility that instead of reaching a consensus on how everyone should act, interacting individuals can align themselves with a common good.

Communitarian critique. If there is one commitment that draws commu­nitarians and postmodernists together, it is the "critique of Western rationality as seen from the perspective of the margins, from the standpoint of what and whom it excludes, suppresses, delegitimatizes, renders mad, imbecilic or child­ish."43 Benhabib realizes the danger of pressing a global moral template onto a local situation. If we regard people as disembodied moral agents who are devoid of history, relationships, or obligations, we'll be unable to deal with the messiness of real-life contexts. To avoid this error, Benhabib insists that any panhuman ethic be achieved through interaction with collective concrete others-ordinary people who live in community-rather than imposed on them by a rational elite.

Feminist critique. Carol Gilligan, Deborah Tannen, Sandra Harding, Julia Wood, and Cheris Kramarae (see Chapter 35) all agree that women's experi­ences and the way they talk about them are different from men's. Yet typical

CHAPTER 34: STANDPOINT THEORY 451

of rationalistic approaches, Habermas virtually ignores gender distinctions. His conception of discourse ethics speaks to issues of political and economic justice in the masculine-dominated public sphere. But he relegates the activities to which women have historically been confined-rearing children, housekeep­ing, satisfying the emotional and sexual needs of the male, tending to the sick and the elderly-to a private sphere where norms of freedom, equality, and reciprocity don't seem to apply.44 Because of its emphasis on open dialogue in which no topics are regarded as trivial, interactive universalism would avoid privatizing women's experiences.

Despite these three critiques, Benhabib believes that a new breed of universal ethic is still possible. "Such a universalism would be interactive not legislative, cognizant of gender differences, not gender blind, contextually sensitive and not situation indifferent."45 It would be a moral framework that values the diversi~ of human beliefs without thinking that every difference is ethically significant. 6

Perhaps it would include a commitment to help all people survive and thrive.

CRITIQUE: DO STANDPOINTS ON THE MARGINS GIVE A LESS FALSE VIEW?

Patricia Collins warns that "if African-American women's experiences are more different than similar, then Black feminist thought does not exist."47 As stated in a previous section, she claims the similarities are greater than the differences. Can the same be said for all women? Julia Wood says that the concept of women as a single social group is politically useful to bring about needed reforms, but is this reality or just needed fiction? As proponents become more and more specific about the standpoints from which particular women communicate, the concept of group solidarity that is at the heart of standpoint theory becomes questionable.

Feminist scholars such as Susan Hekman and Nancy Hirschmann are con­cerned that Harding's version of standpoint theory underestimates the role that language plays in expressing one's sense of self and view of the world.48 As theorists throughout this book have maintained, people's communication choices are never neutral or value-free, so people can't separate their standpoint from the language they use to describe it. The words they choose inevitably are influ­enced by their cultural and societal filters. 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. In fact, voices from the edge may be particularly difficult to express, since linguistic conventions traditionally are controlled by the privileged. This point is developed in the context of muted group theory in the next chapter.

Other critics of Harding and Wood's position regard the concept of strong objectivity as inherently contradictory.49 In postmodern fashion, standpoint theo­riests argue that standpoints are relative and can't be evaluated by any absolute criteria. Yet they propose that the oppressed are less biased or more impartial than the privileged. This appears to bring universal standards of judgment back into play. Thus, on the matter of transcendental truths, the theory seems to want to have it both ways.

Despite these difficulties, I find the logic of standpoint theory appealing. If all knowledge is tainted by the social location of the knower, then we would do well to start our search for truth from the perspective of people who are most sensitive to inequities of power. They will have the least to lose if findings challenge the

452 CULTURAL CONTEXT

status quo. Wood acknowledges that we may have trouble figuring out which social groups are more marginalized than others. As a white, professional woman, is Wood lower on the social hierarchy than her African-American male colleague who has attained the same faculty rank at the university? Standpoint theory doesn't say, but it clearly suggests that we should question much of the received wisdom that comes from a male-dominated, Western European research establish­ment and replace it when a strong objectivity provides a more complete picture of the world. The idea energizes University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee sociologist Lynn Worsham and others who believe that minority standpoints can be a partial corrective to the biased knowledge that now passes for truth:

In what I consider, in all sincerity, to be a heroic and marvelous conception, Harding turns the tables on philosophy and the sciences and constructs a sort of feminist alchemy in which the idea of standpoint, revamped by postmodern phi­losophy, becomes the philosophers' stone capable of transforming the West's base materials into resources for producing a more "generally useful account of the world."50

QUESTIONS TO SHARPEN YOUR FOCUS

1. What is common to the standpoints of women, African Americans, the poor, and homosexuals that may provide them with a less false view of the way society works?

2. How could we test the claim that strong objectivity from women's lives provides a more accurate view of the world than knowledge generated by a predomi­nantly male research establishment?

3. I am a privileged white male who decided which theories would be covered in this book. Suppose I were a disadvantaged African-American woman. What theories might I drop and which might I keep? Why might this be a ridiculous question?

4. Standpoint epistemology draws on insights from Marxism, symbolic interaction­ism, and postmodernism. Based on what you've read in this chapter, which of these intellectual influences do you see as strongest? Why?

A SECOND LOOK Recommended resource: Julia T. Wood, Communication Theories in Action, 3rd ed., Wadsworth, Belmont, CA, 2004, pp. 212-220.

Comprehensive statement: Sandra Harding, Whose Science? Whose Knowledge? Thinking from Women's Lives, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY, 1991.

Reconstruction of scientific objectivity: Sandra Harding, Is Science Multicultural? Postco­lonialisms, Feminisms and Epistemologies, Indiana University, Bloomington, 1998.

Standpoint critique of science: Sandra Harding, Science and Social Inequality: Feminist and Postcolonial Issues, University of Illinois, Urbana, 2006, pp. 80-97.

Avoiding essentialism: Julia T. Wood, "Gender and Moral Voice: Moving from Woman's Nature to Standpoint Epistemology," Women's Studies in Communication, Vol. 15, 1993, pp. 1-24.

Women and care: Julia T. Wood, Who Cares? Women, Care, and Culture, Southern Illinois University Press, Carbondale, 1994.

CHAPTER 34: STANDPOINT THEORY 453

Standpoint of women in communication discipline: Lynn O'Brien Hallstein (ed.), Women's Studies in Communication, Vol. 23, Spring 2000, special issue on standpoint theories.

Diverse forms of standpoint theory: Sandra Harding (ed.), The Feminist Standpoint Theory Reader: Intellectual and Political Controversies, Routledge, New York, 2004.

Black feminist thought: Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Con­sciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment, 2nd ed., Routledge, New York, 2000.

Collins' stand on standpoint theory: Patricia Hill Collins, Fighting Words: Black Women and the Search for Justice, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, 1998, pp. 201-228.

Comparing two feminist theories: Julia T. Wood, "Feminist Standpoint Theory and Muted Group Theory: Commonalities and Divergences," Women and Language, Vol. 28, 2005, pp. 61-64.

Interactive universalism: Seyla Benhabib, Situating the Self: Gender, Community and Post­modernism in Contemporary Ethics, Routledge, New York, 1992.

Feminist critique: Lynn Worsham, "Romancing the Stones: My Movie Date with Sandra Harding," Journal of Advanced Composition, Vol. 15, 1995, pp. 565-571.

To access Web sites linked to specific theories or theorists, click on Links at www.afirstlook.com.