The SAGE Handbook of Feminist Theory

Mary Evans, Clare Hemmings, Marsha Henry, Hazel Johnstone, Sumi Madhok, Ania Plomien, Sadie Wearing, Mary Evans, Clare Hemmings, Marsha Henry, Hazel Johnstone, Sumi Madhok, Ania Plomien, Sadie Wearing, Author

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781446252413
• eBook ISBN: 9781473907331
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

At no point in recorded history has there been an absence of intense, and heated, discussion about the subject of how to conduct relations between women and men. This Handbook provides a comprehensive guide to these omnipresent issues and debates, mapping the present and future of thinking about feminist theory.

The chapters gathered here present the state of the art in scholarship in the field, covering:

• Epistemology and marginality
• Literary, visual and cultural representations
• Sexuality
• Macro and microeconomics of gender
• Conflict and peace. 

The most important consensus in this volume is that a central organizing tenet of feminism is its willingness to examine the ways in which gender and relations between women and men have been (and are) organized. The authors bring a shared commitment to the critical appraisal of gender relations, as well as a recognition that to think 'theoretically' is not to detach concerns from lived experience but to extend the possibilities of understanding.

With this focus on theory and theorizing about the world in which we live, this Handbook asks us, across all disciplines and situations, to abandon our taken-for-granted assumptions about the world and interrogate both the origin and the implications of our ideas about gender relations and feminism.

It is an essential reference work for advanced students and academics not only of feminist theory, but of gender and sexuality across the humanities and social sciences.

Part 1 Epistemology and Marginality

Sumi Madhok

Mary Evans

For a ‘Handbook of Feminist Theory’, a section on epistemology is important for several reasons. Forms of epistemological enquiries, their resultant knowledges and the nature of sociality these uphold are central to feminist thinking not only because of their power to define who gets to be a ‘subject’ and a ‘knower’ but also which know-ledges and phenomena are deemed valid ‘objects’ of study and consequently worthy of recognition, authority and legitimacy. Epistemological enquiries and processes uphold a particular view of the world, endorse certain forms of gender relations and assume a specific set of hierarchical social and political relations as standard. Therefore, in insisting upon uncovering the identity of the ‘knower’ and the nature of ‘knowing’, feminist theory is committed to knowledge as linked both to power and to a certain politics.

In conceiving this section, we focus in particular on the links between epistemology and marginality. In emphasizing the question of epistemic marginality we encouraged the contributors to conceive their pieces in light of the associations that feminist scholars have drawn between the production of knowledge and continuing social injustices including those resulting from the setting up of epistemic hierarchies and the production of marginal statuses, identities and knowledges and from the societal impact of deep epistemic divides – between those who are designated as ‘knowers’ and those deemed to be bereft of the capacity to ‘know’ – on forms of epistemic violence and everyday modes of oppression. Feminist writing about epistemic marginality and exclusion is, of course, not new. In writing about marginality and knowledge-production feminist scholars have reflected on questions of who can be ‘Knowers’, what is regarded as ‘Knowing’ and what can be ‘Known’ (Hawkesworth, 1989), and drawn on their own institutional and epistemic marginality to note at least three things: the marginal status of feminist epistemology as a legitimate ‘field of enquiry’; the marginalization of feminist epistemologists as a group (not least in philosophy departments, where epistemology is a central field of enquiry and curriculum), and the marginal status of feminist and gender studies as knowledge-producing or a ‘discipline’. To be sure, while the above can be seen as empirical ‘evidence’ of the way in which epistemic processes and relations work in the ‘academy’, feminist scholars use this empirical fact to ask broader questions about marginality that are political, structural and ethical. But why does it matter that the connection between knowledge and marginality – the processes of knowledge-production and legitimation, who produces it, for whom and to what end – be opened up for critical and democratic scrutiny? It matters because feminist epistemology not only concerns itself with critique and producing new forms of knowledge; it is also deeply invested in the transformation of existing inequitable societal relations. And, therefore, it follows that, if theory is both a way of seeing the world and providing a blueprint for political action, then the world it illuminates, acknowledges and seeks to define cannot simply replicate the one that is the already normative, the always already privileged, the powerful and the authoritative. Furthermore, in order for theory to be transformative, including implicitly engaged in the transformation of unequal gender relations, then it must serve up a toolbox for challenging existing exploitative structural logics of the normative order in order to reorient it explicitly towards social justice and an ethical politics.

Overall, the intellectual oeuvre of feminist epistemology includes both modes as well as the processes of knowledge-production, but it is in its continual insistence on ‘knowing’ the ‘knower’, on making ‘subjectivity’ count (Code, 1993 and in this volume) and on unmasking and assessing the epistemic impact of the ‘sex of the knower’ (Code, 1993; this volume) on the nature of knowing that feminist epistemology has made important interventions, not least in uncovering the ‘politics of epistemic practice’ (Fricker, 2007: 2). Consequently, feminist epistemologists have brought under their epistemic scanner processes of knowledge-production such as the ‘scientific method’ and its accompanying values of objectivity, universality, scientificity and ‘value freeness’, examined the politics of ‘epistemic relations’ and ‘epistemic conduct’ and insisted on discussing ‘the political nature of epistemology’ (Fricker, 2007; Alcoff, 1993) itself. The essays in this section reflect the concern with both the content and the processes of knowledge-production. The papers also reflect a multi-disciplinary interest in epistemological questions among scholars working in feminist and gender studies. However, they neither provide an exhaustive ‘coverage’ of the field of feminist epistemology nor do they present reviews of all the important interventions; but they do build on the latter and put forward new directions for feminist epistemological work to consider. In this we do not attempt to replicate those important anthologies edited by Helen Crowley and Susan Himmelweit (1992) and Alcoff and Potter (1993) but, rather, suggest ways of taking forward and developing various debates.

Over the years, feminists have become accustomed to invoking epistemic harms and to reading and writing about ‘epistemic injustice’ (Fricker, 2007), ‘epistemic violence’ (Spivak, 1988) and ‘epistemic scandal’ (Chow, 2006). The intellectual potency of this language derives its poignancy and urgency from the structural injustices that order the organization of everyday life. As we write the introduction to this section, aspects of ‘epistemic and testimonial injustice’ (Fricker, 2007), ‘politics of testimony’ (Code, this volume), the withholding of ‘epistemic agency’ and the reinforcing of epistemic marginality, are in operation across the globe in now all-too-familiar revealing and sinister ways, and not least in a courtroom in Sanford, Florida, where the trial of the murdered US black teenager Trayvon Martin has just concluded. We cannot afford to ignore formations of marginality and the epistemic questions they raise; these have, as feminist scholars have powerfully argued and reminded us, a strong and enduring material basis.

The emergence of the language of epistemic harm, of course, is itself an outcome of a long struggle not only against prevalent epistemological practices and dogmas but also against the reproduction of existing hierarchies and of coloniality within feminist theory itself. The critique of feminism’s and of feminist theories’ ‘internal colonialism’ is now strongly registered (Mohanty, 1991; hooks, 2000; Collins, 2000; Lorde, 2001; Rich, 1986; Spivak, 1988; Crenshaw, 1989; Lugones, 2010; Bhavnani, 1993; Chow, 2006), and, as bell hooks notes (2000), the feminist movement is ‘the most self-critical’ among all movements of social justice, but despite this self-criticism and even self-reflexivity within epistemic practices, it is hardly short of a ‘persisting epistemic scandal’ that much of feminist epistemology continues to be ‘self-referential’ and to exhibit a ‘strange complacency of its provincial contents’ (Chow, 2006: 13), only ‘telling feminist stories’ (Hemmings, 2005) about particular epistemic histories, cultures and practices. In this respect we acknowledge the limitations of this section – nearly all the essays here focus upon ongoing epistemic debates within feminist epistemology from metropolitan locations and engage epistemic questions and scholarship that are rooted firmly within the ‘western canonical’ tradition. While this shortcoming of feminist epistemological investigations cannot be understood in isolation from present geopolitical, historical and economic contexts – in fact, knowledge-production, pedagogical, research and institutional priorities and are conditioned by these – an acknowledgement of one’s complicity in reproducing and keeping in place intellectual hierarchies, however, can be an important first step. Many essays in this section are deeply troubled by questions of coloniality and critical of ‘othering’ practices in knowledge-production while also accepting their own structural implication within these. They are in the best tradition of feminist scholarship – not only reflexive but also concerned with questions of accountability and responsibility. But the difficulty remains nevertheless: how to resolve this ‘epistemic scandal’? The reader will, we hope, understand if we refrain from providing simple and ready-to-use solutions here. For we doubt that these exist. One thing we’re certain of, though, is that simply resorting to what Sandra Harding referred to in another context as ‘add and stir’ is not going to do. In other words, to provide spaces for ‘other’ forms or modes of knowledge-production in a mechanical way, without attempting to show how these either effectively query or even displace the epistemic premises upon which questions of knowledge-production occur, hardly constitutes a ‘solution’. In this section, contributors re-examine existing epistemic arguments and recalibrate epistemic questions and materials not by seeking to displace their own privilege (as if they could!) but through acknowledging their epistemic provincialism, their geopolitical and institutional location as also the raced and classed identities of their readings.

By acknowledging that epistemology is political (Alcoff, 1993) and that knowledge is not ‘value free’ but is always a product of certain forms of political investments, these essays build on what is now a basic building block of feminist epistemological analysis – namely, that gender is not a unitary category of analysis but one that is mediated through the intersection of race, class, sexualities and other forms of marginality (Crenshaw, 1989; Collins, 2000). This epistemic insight, that gender intersects with other forms of marginality, has been heralded as the most ‘significant’ conceptual contribution of the last twenty years, since it not only uncovered (feminist) epistemology’s ‘irrepressible connection with social power’ (Fricker, 2007: 2) but also dealt a blow to the ‘theoretical framework of individualism and compulsory rational idealization’ predominantly favoured in epistemic arguments (see also Code in this section). Thinking seriously about marginality has challenged the methodological individualism as well as the assumptions of ‘human homogeneity’ that underpin epistemological enquiry and unmasked the processes through which subordinate groups are denied subjectivity and status as ‘knowers’. Gayatri Spivak (1988) has written powerfully about the ‘epistemic violence’ that accompanies the silencing of marginalized groups and Patricia Collins writes evocatively about the denial of subjectivity and the cognitive competence of Black women (Collins, 2000). bell hooks (2000) writes of the need ‘to develop feminist theory that emerges from ‘individuals who have knowledge of both margin and center’ (2000: xvii) and for ‘understanding marginality’ as a ‘position and place of resistance’ that is ‘crucial for oppressed, exploited, colonised people’ (1990: 150–51). Standpoint theorists such as Sandra Harding, for instance, write in favour of a methodology that involves ‘starting thought from the lives of marginalised peoples’, arguing that this will reveal more of the unexamined assumptions influencing science and generate not only more critical questions but also a ‘strong objectivity’ that would both recognize the social situatedness of knowledge and also critically evaluate it in order ‘to determine which social situations tend to generate the most objective claims’. For standpoint theorists, the key questions that are asked, investigated and indeed addressed by academic disciplines are those which affect the privileged and the powerful. And therefore, by implication, the intellectual investments are those which seek to entrench privilege in place and not displace it. As a corrective, standpoint theorists propose that if we are to challenge privileged views of the world then we will have to start producing knowledg...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Notes on the Editors and Contributors
• Introduction
• Part 1 Epistemology and Marginality
• 1 Feminist Epistemology and the Politics of Knowledge: Questions of Marginality
• 2 Natural Others? On Nature, Culture and Knowledge
• 3 Feminist Auto/Biography
• 4 Power in Feminist Research Processes1
• 5 Women’s ‘Lived Experience’: Feminism and Phenomenology from Simone de Beauvoir to the Present
• 6 What do Women Want? Feminist Epistemology and Psychoanalytic Theory
• 7 Entangled Subjects: Feminism, Religion and the Obligation to Alterity
• 8 Religion, Feminist Theory and Epistemology
• Part 2 Literary, Visual and Cultural Representation
• 9 What Stories Make Worlds, What Worlds Make Stories: Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake
• 10 On Maternal Listening: Experiments in Sound and the Mother–Daughter Relation in Todd Haynes’ Mildred Pierce
• 11 The Space of a Movement: Life-Writing Against Racism
• 12 Making Memory Work for Feminist Theory
• 13 Feminism and Pornography
• 14 Representing Women in Popular Culture
• 15 ‘It’s All About Shopping’: The Role of Consumption in the Feminization of Journalism
• Part 3 Sexuality
• 16 (It’s Not All) Kylie Concerts, Exotic Cocktails and Gossip: The Appearance of Sexuality Through ‘Gay’ Asylum in the UK
• 17 Globalization and Feminism: Changing Taxonomies of Sex, Gender and Sexuality
• 18 Thinking Sex Materially: Marxist, Socialist, and Related Feminist Approaches
• 19 Transnational Black Feminisms, Womanisms and Queer of Color Critiques
• 20 States’ Sexualities: Theorizing Sexuality, Gender and Governance
• 21 The Figure of the Trafficked Victim: Gender, Rights and Representation
• 22 Sexuality, Subjectivity … and Political Economy?
• Part 4 Economy
• 23 ‘Homo Economicus’ and ‘His’ Impact on Gendered Societies1
• 24 Integrating Gender in Economic Analysis1
• 25 Essentially Quantified? Towards a More Feminist Modeling Strategy
• 26 Feminist Perspectives on Care: Theory, Practice and Policy
• 27 Power, Privilege and Precarity: The Gendered Dynamics of Contemporary Inequality
• 28 Feminist Perspectives on Macroeconomics: Reconfiguration of Power Structures and Erosion of Gender Equality Through the New Economic Governance Regime in the European Union
• 29 Gender, Class and Location in the Global Economy
• 30 Social Protection
• Part 5 War, Violence and Militarization
• 31 Female Combatants, Feminism, and Just War
• 32 Soldiering On: Pushing Militarized Masculinities into New Territory
• 33 Gender, Genocide and Gendercide
• 34 Understanding Sexual Violence in Conflict and Post-Conflict Settings
• 35 (En)Gendered Terror: Feminist Approaches to Political Violence
• Index