Feminist Standpoint and Postcolonial Theory

Shirin M Rai

Representation and Epistemic Authority

Provocation: how is what we know framed as knowledge through particular systems of representation and the practices of colonial governance based upon them?

The missing links

It was believed that ‘sexism and androcentrism are social biases correctable by stricter adherence to the existing methodological norms of scientific inquiry’ (Harding, Science Question, p24)

It was also believed that scientific inquiry was a tool for understanding all categories and all histories. Orientalists created the Orient, as a general category, and misrepresented what was observed (Said, 1978).

Absence as Presence

Said: “in discussions of the orient, the orient is all absence, whereas one feels the orientalist and what he [sic] says as presence”.

Although this orientalist discourse was largely constructed by men, and sexuality was central to this construction, Western women also contributed to it.

Although colonialism was central to this discourse, so was modernism – Marx thought the proletariat could not represent itself – it had to be represented.

Orientalist, postcolonial/decolonial representations

Edward W. Said’s Orientalism opened up the question of the production of knowledge from a global perspective

Arturo Escobar argued that ‘Development has been the primary mechanism through which the Third World has been imagined and imagined itself, thus marginalizing or precluding other ways of seeing and doing’ (1995, p.212)

Can the Subaltern Speak? Spivak brings together the

critique of androcentricism and of Orientalism by asking this question

She addresses current Western efforts to problematise the subject and questions how the Third-World subject is represented in Western discourse.

In this text she offers an analysis of the relationship between Western discourses and the possibility of speaking of (or for) the subaltern woman.

How is discursive power mobilised

Representation to speak for to re-present

The Archive – travel reports, documents, sale deeds

Aesthetics – novel, art, photography Governmentality – the technologies of

political power, the internalisation of power relations, the hegemony of the powerful

The Subject – the Other

Spivak addresses imperialism and the construction of the colonial subject as Other.

‘It is the slippage between rendering visible the mechanism and rendering vocal the subject’ (285).

The paradigm of the intellectual must involve a recognition of the fact that their privilege is their loss (287).

Deleuze and Foucault’s silences on the epistemic violence of imperialism would matter less if they did not choose to speak on third-world issues.

Under Western Eyes

Chandra Mohanty argues that orientalist power is exercised in discourse when the homogenised and monolithic representation of the Third World woman is contrasted with Western feminism’s self-representation. The impact is to rob Third World women of their historical and political agency, as Western feminists become “the true ‘subjects’ of this counter-history [while] third world women ... never rise above the debilitating generality oftheir ‘object’ status”.

Standpoint

Social scientific knowledge is produced in relation to values and value positions reflect social positions (Weber)

Feminism should be committed ‘not to truth, objectivity and neutrality, but to theoretical positions openly acknowledged as observer and context specific’ (Grosz, What is Feminist Theory?)

This raises the questions: which context specific positions, and why?

Two responses to this (1): standpoint theory can be grounded in the contexts of those who

are disadvantaged, or more specifically, oppressed – on grounds of identity, social position

(2): there is no objectivity or universalism and that claims to this disguise a real particularism [Can we also begin to undermine privileged standpoint by making this visible?]

Add in and Stir

‘The project of women’s equal inclusion meant that only women’s sameness to men, only women’s humanity and not their womanliness could be discussed’ (Grosz)

Similarly, the postcolonial worlds were incorporated into already existing worlds of capitalism dominated by the North and the white.

And ‘underdeveloped countries’ could only aspire to being allowed into the ‘developed’ world

Recognition and Authenticity

Spivak concludes her analysis by arguing • To render the thinking subject transparent is to efface the relentless recognition of the other by assimilation• that developing work on the mechanics of the constitution of the Other is more useful than invocations of the authenticity of the Other (294)

If the problem of 'male/universalism' is the false incorporation of 'different others', what is it that says that all women share the same interests? Might not standpoint theory be a form of 'essentialism' that

falsely incorporates all women under a single position, despite differences among women?

Why should we think that oppression is a source of epistemological privilege?

Which women should be listened to? Or is the standpoint of women just a disguised version of the 'privilege' of the theorist who speaks on behalf of others and, therefore, not really that different to the attitude attributed to male theorists?

If ‘men see the world in one way, women in another; on what possible grounds other than gender loyalties can we decide between these conflicting accounts?’ (Harding ‘Rethinking’, page 86)