Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective

The article presents a critical analysis of the theories and practices of scientific objectivity and outlines a promising feminist concept of objectivity. The author begins by criticizing two mainstream approaches to a feminist evaluation of scientific objectivity: a social constructionism combining the techniques of semiology and deconstruction, and a feminist empiricism. The former insists on the rhetorical nature of truth existing in the power field of a textualized world, while the latter legitimizes scientific objectivity adjusted for the results of gender analysis to yield a “successor science.” Rehabilitating the metaphor of vision resolves the dichotomy between the historical contingency of knowledge…

• JH
  Johns Hopkins University