Questions of Feminist Epistemology and Gendered Cognitive Styles

Krsi Mrta MA Course in Gender Studies Gender Theory and Feminist Thought: Issues and Perspectives Instructor: Prof. Linda Fisher 24 January 2005

Introduction

As part of the grand feminist project to unveil, denaturalize and change the workings of patriarchal structures with a basic transformative intent to achieve equality between women and men, feminist scholars have also discussed epistemology, the meaning, acquisition and application of reason and knowledge. The postmodern turn has also reached philosophy, which resulted in the reconfiguration of the science as discourse, whereby different relations and subject positions are expressed within a specific context. Thus, the humanist idea that philosophy as such addresses universal issues and wants to find general truths has lost its ground in the postmodern tendencies of positioning the knowing subject and a focus on textuality and intertextuality, from which philosophy is not exempt either. In this essay I am addressing some key issues related to the gendered positioning of the subject as discussed in feminist scholarship on epistemology. I will show that although we can speak about gendered knowledge, its gendered character is the result of sexual difference only inasmuch as gendered roles, which define epistemological contents, are themselves conditioned by sexual difference.

Questions of Feminist Epistemology and Gendered Knowledge

Within the postmodern theoretical framework, various questions of feminist epistemology emerge, with the revision of issues related to rationality, reason, knowledge, and the knowing subject. As Elizabeth Anderson writes, the central concept of feminist epistemology is that of a situated knower, and hence of situated knowledge: knowledge that reflects the particular perspectives of the subject (1). The concept of the situated knower, however, would not necessarily be feminist, since poststructuralism generally gives way to

differential subject-positions that are socially, culturally and historically formulated by such parameters as race, class, age, gender, ethnicity, religion, etc. The feminist concern with gender as a category situating the knowing subject is, therefore, a specific focus with which feminist scholars approach epistemological questions. The research that has been done with this focus has unveiled how heavily gendered classical epistemology and claims about rationality and knowledge are. As Genevieve Lloyd points out, the 17th century saw a marked change in discussions about reason (152). The Enlightenment gave birth to a new Age of Reason, the paradigm of which was formulated by Descartes in his famous tenet Cogito ergo sum. The far-reaching implications of this turn were that reason became rational in that it became exclusively dependent on intuition and deduction, where emotions and other sensuous factors were ruled out in the process of acquiring knowledge (154). This resulted in the fundamental split between mind and matter, where the mind came to be seen as the unattached and pure (therefore true) thinking agency, superior to matter (the body) with its corrupting and distracting senses and sensuality. As Lloyd shows it, reason has always traditionally been associated with the masculine (149), which becomes even more emphasized in the Age of Reason, where the split between reason and emotion brings the down-grading of the sensuous (154). The knowing subject always entails a male subject, which also means that the mind becomes understood as masculine and the body as feminine, therefore, men become the sole possessors of reason in its most sublime sense. As rationalization comes to mean the domination over ones own senses and emotions by reason, the acquisition of knowledge and reasoning also presupposes a masculine terrain, from which women are excluded. Lloyd points out that this polarization appears in 17th-century education as well, where training is explicitly a matter of learning to leave ones emotions, imagination, etc., out of account (154), so there now emerges a new

dimension to the idea that women are more emotional or more impulsive, etc., than men (154). In turn, [t]his makes it true, in a way it need not have been before, that women are less rational than men (154). This rationalist turn has defined not only discussions about reason and knowledge, but the whole epistemology of the western world. Our knowledge about the world is traditionally regarded as structured by dichotomies, in which one of the pairs is always valued over the other: thus, we are supposed to learn the world and about the world within the constraints of oppositional structures. The oppositions between the male and the female, as well as the masculine and the feminine, are structures that define how we see ourselves as men and women, as gendered subjects in society. Feminist epistemology claims that gender situates the knowing subject in ways that traditional epistemological discussions have not seen before, since they always focused on universalities, presupposing that there is some universal knowledge independent of the knowers situation. The feminist knowing subject, however, is always embodied, which means that, unlike the Cartesian subject who achieves the highest intellectual status by discarding his mundane body and particular context, the feminist subject acquires situated knowledge in a given space and time, and his/her knowledge is shaped by a number of other factors inherent in her/his personality and situation. Therefore, while the Cartesian subject is general in that it entails a white male dominant viewpoint as universal, feminist epistemology puts an emphasis on differences between knowing subjects and situations. Embodiment in feminist scholarship in general, and feminist epistemology in particular, points toward a materialist approach to knowledge. As Anderson states, [p]eoples bodies are not just differently sexed; they are differently gendered (4). Therefore, in gender studies, and in the gendered account of epistemology, bodily difference plays an important

role, as well as serves as a vantage point from which the relationship between sexual difference and knowledge is explained. One of the salient questions in connection with sexual difference is whether men and women acquire knowledge differently, that is, whether there are different cognitive styles that characterize men and women respectively. The central problem in the discussion of gendered cognitive styles is to see whether the sexes acquire and process information about the world and themselves differently on the basis of their biological difference, or whether men and women are conditioned into different cognitive styles. As Phyllis Rooney argues in her comprehensive article Recent Work in Feminist Discussions of Reason, subscribing to notions of female and male cognitive styles would amount to essentializing differences of cognition between men and women (3). Moreover, if we differentiate between styles of cognition at the level of reasoning, we may presuppose that there is a reason that is somehow independent of the many institutional and theoretical forms and constructs that have regularly been taken to embody or express reason, constructs that do lend themselves to political critique (2). Thus, it is more fruitful to see first in what ways knowledge becomes gendered and how and why different epistemological spheres are associated with women and men. Helen E. Longino suggests that knowledge as such is a term of ratification claimed and ascribed, rather than a natural kind, or state of a subject that obtains independently of facts about the knowers community and relations with her or his community (336). Thus, knowledge itself becomes situated, just like the knowing subject, as well as an instrument to deal with life situations within a system of relationships. Nancy Hartsock explains how the social division of labour in western societies helps to explore the oppositions and differences between womens and mens activity and their consequences for epistemology (111). As women and not men become mothers and rear children (hence the social division of labour,

paid or unpaid), girls, because of female parenting, are less differentiated from others than boys, more continuous with and related to the external object world. They are differently oriented to their inner object world as well (117). Thus, the association of the abstract mind with men, and that of concrete matter (and body) with women is a result of the social division of labour in general, and womens mothering role in particular, which derives from sexual difference. As Hartsock puts it, the early experience of being brought up by a female parent forms an important ground for the female sense of self as connected to the world and the male sense of self as separate, distinct, and even disconnected (117). All further epistemological division comes from this early oedipal divide, where the female subjectivity is defined by its relation to the mother and the world, while the male subjectivity by its separation from her and it. Hartsock describes this epistemological division in order to work out a certain feminist standpoint as an alternative and ethically superior point of departure for analysis: [t]he female construction of self in relation to others leads [] toward opposition to dualisms of any sort, valuation of concrete, everyday life, sense of a variety of connectednesses and continuities both with other persons and with the natural world (120). This different world view, which emphasizes unity rather than separation, grows from the fact that womens bodies, unlike mens, can be themselves instruments of production: in pregnancy, giving birth or lactation, arguments about a division of mental from manual labor are fundamentally foreign (120). In my opinion here is the point where Hartsocks argument becomes essentialist in that it works out a unified feminist standpoint on the basis of an allegedly unanimous female experience that is derived from the female body. It not only disregards the differences in womens situatedness in such relational structures as race, class, ethnicity, nationality, age, education, material wealth, religion, etc., but it also presupposes that all women experience

motherhood in the same way, both physically and mentally. Although Hartsock states that the feminist standpoint she outlines is characterized by an achievement of both analysis and political struggle occurring in a particular historical space (124), the basis on which she builds this standpoint is still some universal concept of motherhood (and the different psychological development in boys and girls as its result), which downplays all particularities as far as historical or cultural space is concerned. Moreover, as feminist theorists dealing with gender performance have pointed out, men and women are disposed to enact both masculine and feminine behaviors in different contexts. The man who avoids tenderly comforting a crying baby in the presence of women may do so when alone (Anderson 4).

Conclusion

It seems that the knowledge that is needed for someone to become a good mother or even a good woman is neither universal, nor gender-specific. It is rather the norms of gendered behaviour socially assigned to men and women that define epistemological realms as masculine or feminine. What people know and how they acquire this knowledge is gender specific in that it correlates with the gender roles they perform in society. The fact that male roles and ways of behaviour are regarded as prefererred over female roles and ways of behaviour in a number of situations (and vice versa) conditions ways of cognition from early childhood. There are certain realms from which women are still excluded, several of which are highly prioritized masculine terrains of science, where knowledge and rationality are still traditionally seen as belonging to the Man of Reason. The degendering of these realms as well as the reevaluation of epistemological contents entailed in them may lead to different views on (scientific) knowledge and cognition and to womens equal inclusion in all kinds of

scientific activity. This, however, also necessitates the termination of the now existing division of labour and gender roles that come along with it.

Works Cited

Anderson, Elizabeth. Feminist Epistemology and Philosophy of Science. Edward N. Zalta ed. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2004). http://plato. stanford.edu/archives/sum2004/entries/feminism-epistemology. Hartsock, Nancy. The Feminist Standpoint: Developing the Ground for a Specifically Feminist Historical Materialism. The Feminist Standpoint Revisited and Other Essays. Bouder and Oxford: Westview Press, 1998, 105-132. Lloyd, Genevieve. The Man of Reason. Ann Garry and Marilyn Pearsall ed. Women, Knowledge, and Reality: Explorations in Feminist Philosophy. 2nd ed. London: Routledge, 1996, 149-165. Longino, Helen E. Feminist Epistemology. Jonathan Dancy and Ernest Sosa ed. A Companion to Epistemology. Oxford, UK and Malden, Mass: Blackwell, 1992, 138142. Rooney, Phyllis. Recent Work in Feminist Discussions of Reason. American Philosophical Quarterly 31.1 (January 1994): 1-21.