“Feminist Epistemologies” – Identity Politics or Revolution?

As is well known, Karl Marx and his male successors largely ignored the gender-specific reproduction of the worker and the working class. It was only with the second wave of the women’s movement in the 1960s and 1970s that the theoretically underexposed domestic, child-rearing and care work, which was generally carried out by women, became the focus of attention. The broadening of perspectives towards the female-connoted reproduction of labor as a commodity was thanks to the rise of women’s studies – and its specific view of society. The reader “Feminist Epistemologies”, edited by Katharina Hoppe and Frieder Vogelmann, now presents a collection of basic texts in German for the first time.

The feminist point of view

With two exceptions, the essays in the volume are translations from the US debate from 1983 to the present. The common starting point of the different versions of feminist epistemologies collected in the Reader is the assumption that politics and science are inextricably linked. What is meant here is less the banal insight that knowledge is power, that is, every positive or empirical knowledge about the (social) world contains the possibility of its control. Rather, it is about the fact that the forms and practices of knowledge production, i.e. the ways in which knowledge is achieved, are an expression of power. Accordingly, the sociology Patricia Hill Collins says: »white Men have long been the predominant group in sociology and therefore the sociological worldview also reflects the concerns and interests of this group.” If, according to Nancy Hartsock, behind the objectivity of a science that pretends to be neutral, there is actually only the “one-sidedness of the masculinist view « of a »phallocentric society« then »the female experience and the worldview produced by female activity« enables an alternative, if not better, understanding of social relationships.

The crux of the argument lies in the question of why a feminist standpoint should produce “less biased and distorted representations of nature and social life” than “conventional androcentric thinking,” as the philosopher Sandra Harding suspects in the volume. Here the answer of feminist epistemology is: Because feminism is not interested in an ideological interpretation of the world. While the goal of maintaining male dominance is unavoidably inscribed in male-connoted thinking due to its specifically androcentric cognitive interests, the oppressed are interested in a non-ideological presentation of social relationships. Because only objective knowledge of society gives the oppressed the means to change it in their own way. In Elizabeth Anderson’s formulation: “It is not value neutrality, but justice that offers the right model for objectivity in science.”

Nonjudgmental science

The extent to which non-scientific (so-called non-epistemic or non-cognitive) values ​​establish the basis of a specifically feminist interest in knowledge or even a special feminist science was and is the subject of not only feminist epistemologies. What is particularly controversial is the question of whether feminism has “only” discovered new research objects (keyword: care work) or whether it has also developed an alternative research program that is based on specifically female knowledge and differs from male practices of knowledge production.

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However, the claim made by the editors in the introduction to “replicate the many-voiced debate about feminist epistemologies” is not entirely achieved given the great disparity of different positions on the topic. The reader certainly offers a well-founded insight and overview into “the broad spectrum of feminist epistemologies and their development paths”. But he sometimes suppresses radical, to a certain extent external variants of criticism that go beyond the internal self-criticism of feminist epistemologies. Of course, critical voices also have their say with Bat-Ami Bar On and Uma Narayan. Central objections to the project of a specifically feminist epistemology, such as those raised by Susan Hekman, Susan Haack, Noretta Koertge, Janet Radcliffe Richards and Cassandra L. Pinnick, are missing or only appear in the form of their opponents’ reconstructions or in footnotes.

It is also questionable whether, as claimed in the introduction, the “rejection of value-free science has now become commonplace” in the philosophy of science. In fact, current variants of the value-free ideal of the sciences in no way deny the influence of values ​​on the sciences (e.g. in the context of the discovery and application of scientific statements). The only discussion is whether non-scientific, political or social values ​​(should) play a role in the context of justification or justification, i.e. in the rational assessment of the validity claims of scientific hypotheses or not. And the answer to this question is by no means clearly decided in favor of those who – like feminist epistemology – want to abolish the separation between politics and science.

Identitarian politics

Feminist epistemology, however, is neither of only (scientific) historical nor exclusively epistemological interest, but also touches on a current debate. Because standpoint theories and epistemologies form the epistemological foundation of the identity politics that is currently being debated. Current representatives such as Karsten Schubert and Daniel Loick are currently drawing on arguments from the arsenal of feminist epistemology in order to equip political activism with scientific authority.

According to them, when it comes to discrimination, the perspective of those affected should not only be taken into account, but should be given preference over the perspective of the so-called majority society. Because the perspective and self-image of the (white, male, western, heteronormative) majority society, as Karsten Schubert says in his book “Praise of Identity Politics”, “is based on the limits of what can be thought and said, which are the basis of discrimination”, it is fundamentally impossible for the majority society to recognize, criticize and abolish the mechanisms of exclusion and oppression.

You have a social position, a critical point of view must be actively developed.

If the exclusion of social minorities is constitutive of the identity(s) of the majority society and the reproduction of the established social order, the idea goes, the majority society is subject to epistemic blockages and systematic distortions when it comes to questions of discrimination and oppression. Those affected by discrimination and marginalization, on the other hand, would have access to the very knowledge that must remain closed to members of the majority society. From this, according to Schubert, “an identity policy standpoint should be privileged over the majority social perspective because it is able to analyze discrimination more objectively.” The members of marginalized groups, including Daniel Loick in his current book “The Superiority of the Inferior,” have “insights into the operation of the repression techniques of dominant groups” and therefore have “a better understanding of the scope, mode of operation and effects of the power relations, to which they are exposed, that is, a better understanding of societywhere we live.«

From the proletariat to the oppressed

The claim that the oppressed and exploited have exclusive insights into the mechanisms of their domination and exploitation due to their subordinate position in the production process and their resulting emancipatory cognitive interests is based on the “cognitive privilege of the proletariat” postulated by Georg Lukács in 1923 in “History and Class Consciousness.” « back – and was already wrong back then. Lukács made a distinction between, on the one hand, the empirically detectable, reified or spontaneous consciousness of the working class, which by no means understands the circumstances but rather represents trade-unionist attitudes and is inclined towards social democracy. On the other hand, he assumed an “imputed class consciousness” that the working class was based on because of its objective position in the production process actually should have.

The same tension between is and ought – which Lukács resolved through the Communist Party’s claim to leadership – permeates feminist epistemology. Because the “social situatedness” of the marginalized does not automatically result in a critical, reflexive awareness of their own situation, some instance or a special procedure is required to remind the subaltern of their revolutionary mission. You have a social position, a critical point of view must be actively developed.

“Marginalized subjects can, through political efforts, achieve an epistemic standpoint that is fundamentally superior to the standpoint of those in power because it is not equally entangled with the government’s interest in concealing the reality of social conditions,” say the book’s editors. But if the cognitive advantage of the dominated depends on “political efforts,” why is there even a need for recourse to the subaltern social situation and its supposed epistemic advantages? For if, as feminist epistemology expressly emphasizes, social being does not determine consciousness, one cannot then save oneself the entire project of a special, feminist epistemology and move straight on to the analysis and criticism of the political programs and ideas that arise from mere subjects ( in themselves) make political actors (for themselves)? It is this problem, which has been carried along since Lukács, of how a superior knowledge of the social totality can arise from specific experience (of workers, women, the subaltern), for which even feminist epistemology cannot offer a convincing solution.

Katharina Hoppe and Frieder Vogelmann (eds.): Feminist epistemologies. A reader. Suhrkamp 2024, 576 pages, br., 29 €.