Feminist knowledge politics in situated zones

A different hi/story of knowledge construction

Maria Puig de la Bellacasa

 

This paper is an attempt to stress some political issues at stake in feminist interventions in science and knowledge. I would like to give some elements to debate on the use of epistemology as a theoretical tool.

I mean to stress the original way in which feminism has constructed a knowledge tradition and specially the singularity of the hi/stories told about this knowledge construction - what is usually called, in academic circles, epistemologies. The “sophisticated” title of my paper intends to expose my preference to speak of “knowledge politics” instead of “epistemology” to refer to hi/stories told about feminist interventions on knowledge and science. Working in an academic context which largely ignores this hi/story I have spent the two last years celebrating my “discovery” of feminist texts - a new political, affective and theoretical world for me – and trying to prolong the pertinence of feminist propositions for knowledge politics, insisting on the “different” project they belong to. My concern to prolong this difference, leads me to be reluctant to use “epistemology”.

Creating new concepts is a practice which comes out of necessity. We want to say something but we don’t have the word. I find it difficult to empty epistemology from its scientistic, normative connotations, and I don't feel smart enough to invent a new concept that doesn't mask, under an academic label, the originality of feminist propositions. So, for the moment, I content myself on avoiding the word, shifting to its limits. And the limits of epistemology as they have been illuminated by feminists with their  transgressive moves are marked by the use of politics : situated transversal politics of knowledge, that challenge disembodied “generalising” theories typical of epistemological accounts. I take as a figure of this politics the idea of “situated knowledges”  as it has been developed by Donna Haraway[1].

The idea that feminists have changed epistemology is not new. Lorraine Code stresses the radical transformation of epistemological frameworks in feminism which is giving place to “inter-disciplinary, cross-disciplinary projects where the knowledge at issue has to be worked at, unearthed, and analysed not just in standard’s epistemologists “S knows that P” propositions but in its workings at the heart of local, specific inquiry and action” [2]. Lorraine Code is not alone, other feminists are advocating for “situated”  epistemologies in many different ways[3]. With this paper I intend to follow this path advocating for “non-epistemological” hi/stories of knowledge construction.

Three main arguments motivate this paper.

-            Accounts of feminist “successful knowledge projects” have been pushed to accomplish a “move out of epistemology” by the very different hi/story they where committed to tell, hi/story-telling that belongs to an original tradition of knowledge politics.

-           Situated accounts of this “different hi/story” deviate from epistemological linear hi/stories which stress how present theorists have gone past the “mistakes” of the naïve times (for instance :  when feminists believed in sisterhood and other “illusions“ as such). An advocacy for feminists situated theoretical practices is continuation and constant interaction with feminist constructions and politics from the “past”. In this sense I will argue, following Bruno Latour, that this different situated hi/stories are not modern and not necessarily post-modern. Maybe amodern?[4] Still following Latour, I will argue that the  amodernity of feminist situated accounts on knowledge construction is linked to the specificity of feminist “objects to think“, complicated webs of nature, society and discourse.

-           I don’t take situatedness as the new “paradigm” for feminist knowledges marking an “epistemological break” - to speak the canonical epistemological jargon - but as a beautiful concept for the description and transmission of feminist practices. It seems to me that its pertinence and strength are more rooted in a political move that in an epistemological one. This concept enacts a political gesture born in a complex hi/story of knowledge construction embedded in politics; in struggle to learn to recognise the situated value of different propositions. A hi/story that appeals for different hi/story-tellings which are not necessarily epistemological.

This is no original argument and maybe you find the issue a repetition of debates on …“is this politics or knowledge?“.  Nevertheless, this open issue and the very fact that it remains open, is one of the most fascinating singularities of feminist knowledge. This paper is en effort to stress some elements for a different hi/story-telling, being myself confronted to the difficult challenge of telling it differently. This difficulty touches a more general concern : what am I doing when doing theory and how?

Writing hi/stories instead of histories or stories is an small attempt to deviate from the truth  or  fiction alternative. The accounts we make on our knowledge constructions are rooted on reality and representations. They are not mere illusionary fictions nor mere real truths, they are collective fabulations[5] building the past in a way that challenges the future.

 

Let me say two things so to avoid misunderstandings :

First : that what its often called “feminist epistemologies” is one of my central fields of interest and a heritage I claim. So I am far from dismissing them, even if I concentrate myself on the paths they show to get “out of epistemology”.

Second : that while I will speak of “feminist knowledge politics” without specifying to which feminist “tendency” I refer to, I am aware that what I call feminist can’t be a definition of feminism as a whole. I am therefore consciously transgressing the academic principle of clear taxonomy because my aim is to propose a position, to witness, from my specific location, of what feminist knowledge politics mean to me. A meaning drawing a zigzag path through multiple feminist positions.

 

1                     To be or not to be…epistemologist

2                     

Let’s start with some cultural clarifications.

I have studied philosophy in a French speaking culture. In this tradition, epistemology fundamentally represents the search for the “scientific core” which grants to science its status. Once found, this scientific core endows the role of a “foundational” origin myth. Epistemologies tell the heroic hi/stories of how sciences became sciences. Often, this hi/stories, if you change the names of disciplines and specialisations, into those of countries and regions, can be confounded with a war hi/story between nationalistic countries, where the victors erase the defeated under new truths. In any case, epistemology concentrates mainly on “scientific” practices, aiming to define the scientific “logos” (rationality) underlying the progress of science towards more adequate (read true)  foundational accounts of the natural (read real) world.

We also find philosophers in this hi/stories, as are Hume, Descartes, Locke and Kant, who are retrospectively called epistemologists, and whose theories are used to justify the hierarchy of sciences and the submission of human knowledge to  “scientistic” models[6].  Probably, my reluctance to use this word is informed by this hi/story.

 In the meantime, I have met feminist approaches embedded in Anglo-American traditions which address a larger version of epistemology, considering knowledge as a whole, distinguishing it’s approach from the one reserved to “philosophy of science”. In this context the fundamental issues of epistemology are : what counts as knowledge worthy of that name, and how this knowledge gets to be worthy of that name. Historical epistemologies address the process of legitimisation of knowledge. We also find, in Anglo-American hi/stories, the philosophers quoted above as the founders of the discipline and notions and concepts, inspired by models often built to account of scientific modern practices.

 

I will rely on etymology to deepen the insight of my “allergy“ to epistemology

Episteme means science. It comes from isteme which refers to what holds in itself. When you add epi it refers to what is able to stand up straight. Science is what “stands up“ by itself and logos is the rational discourse which expresses the underlying meaning and shows its rules. Thus, Epistemology refers to the rational discourse on a science (or knowledge) capable of holding by itself, a valid knowledge. The rational discourse of the logos – as it has been theorised by dominant western philosophical traditions - designs a passage to generalities, averages, rules[7]. Abstracting meanings from concrete specific situations so to find their reliable, general foundations. The concrete situations from which epistemology aims to extract the generalities are those where knowledge is constructed[8].

It is of course a quite well known human practice to try to extract from a situation elements to speak of/with other situations, to propose shareable meanings; but it is also true that the way this is done can take multiple forms. Epistemological discourses tend to “transcend” the situation bringing its located singularities to endow normative looks and methodological ambitions. It is this tendency, encrusted in epistemology, which makes me feel uncomfortable[9].

Being informed by this mixture of theoretical frameworks, epistemology makes me think of the generalising power of theory, what some theorists call “meta-theories”. It makes me think of  a constructed relation of knowers (rational subjects) to an “objectivised” inanimate  world.

Another of my fears to espouse epistemological narratives to give accounts of feminist knowledge is to import methods and terminology from approaches linked basically to scientific practices.This analogical importation moves often carry positivistic hierarchical tendencies and universalistic drives.

 

So here I am, interested in the construction of knowledge but allergic to epistemology. What tools are left to me? Fortunately, feminists, among other interesting people, have moved away from epistemology and showed the path. From a perspective of critical resistance, feminism has challenged the existing delimiting frameworks of knowledge. The move to valorise knowledges which had been historically left out of the game produced a shift which reformulated great number of the game’s rules. Women’s knowledge was at bottom of a pyramid constructed with academic, scientific and, as feminists have shown, political standard bricks. Bringing politics into epistemological scenes means quite a radical shift[10].

What I mean by politics here is not the politics of a radical sociology of sciences[11] approach which tends to reduce science’s politics to mere power relations, and whose political approach of scientific practices consists in unveiling this “real” face of power games and interests. What I mean by “politics” is the delicate process of negotiations involved in all human constructions and representations. A relational process, which includes of course hegemonic power games, but not only. A political approach to knowledge means a delicate and implicated re-construction of its processes, the search of the links and relations between many different elements often irreducible one to another. In feminism, this gaze into knowledge, is informed by confidence on collective re-constructions, not only on theoretical deconstructions. Far from limiting themselves to a suspicious move, which sees power effects everywhere and unveils the “true being” of science, the feminism which I would like to follow has searched for attentive accounts on knowledge constructions which reconsider histories of knowledge in a double constructivist move of critique and affirmation[12].  

Is this still epistemology? At least not in the sense I have portrayed above. I will try to dress two problematising scenarios to illustrate this point of view.

 

The definition of feminism.

The delimiting aims of epistemological theorisation often go hand in hand with generalising definitions. As such, they have been largely reconsidered within feminism. Delimiting, defining, is a necessity which feminism has not left unexamined. See, for instance, the problems encountered by the very definition of feminism and feminist theory. The review “Feminist Theory” addresses in its first issue the question “what counts as feminist theory?” (which could be of course addressed as an “epistemological” question). In this issue Bronwyn Winter stresses a feminist reluctance to define feminism based in the fear for closure. She fears two consequences from this reluctance : one, the abandon to malestream of the task of defining our movement;  two, the undermining of the possibility of debate[13].

This two points can be approached politically, by formulating the problem in this well known way : how are we going to ground a strong feminist standpoint which will be respected and taken into account while avoiding simplistic and insulting definitions? The dimension of the problem which preoccupies Winter is that, in this delicate process, we may forget to take positions - as it is necessary in contexts of political struggle so to negotiate from a particular stance. 

As one who encountered feminist theories in the late nineties, I have been confronted myself to this challenge which marks contemporary feminist propositions : I don’t want to give the definition of feminism, I still want to say myself a feminist[14].

Moreover, while I am not interested in searching general epistemological groundings for feminist knowledges (more true than) I still want to defend the importance of this knowledge (more pertinent than).

So let me suggest a non-epistemological way out of this infertile “definitional” alternative : If feminists cannot possibly avoid to situate themselves politically they may don’t need to found this situated position in epistemological frameworks[15]. The confusing between foundations and positions, or the belief that one can’t exist without the other, can be paralysing, specially in times when foundational pretensions still wear the modernist dress which inspires suspicion due to its oppressive past.

This question is linked to present feminist struggles and deeply rooted in practical political difficulties and conflicts within the Women’s Movement. Feminism has been confronted to the difficulty of defining “women” and “feminism” [16]. The fear for closure which Winter points is a proof of political honesty : the desire to avoid general accounts of women's experience comes from the experience of the historical insult of being victims of definitions made by others… for our own good. So there is a legitimate resistance to definitions which I advocate, but does this entail that we don’t take positions? The answers to the question of what it means to “speak as a woman” have given birth to many different standpoints and positions in feminism. Tensions between this standpoints have been the terrain for political creativity[17]. The idea that “feminism doesn't reflect the voice of a naturalized essentialised speaker” doesn't dissolve feminism “as a fundamental part of our political identity“[18].

Theoretical accounts produced by feminists are deeply rooted in feminist political experiences (including politics of knowledge). This cultivated link between theory and politics is one of the elements which marks the “different hi/story” to tell which I am advocating here because feminist knowledge resists to be described as the result of pure theoretical evolution. To say that feminist knowledge is rooted in successful politics its different that to root it in teleological epistemologies.

The different hi/story of knowledge construction that I feel committed to tell as a feminist stresses the originality of feminist knowledge in its resistance to ground its propositions - accounts of the world linked to multiple political positions and alliances - in general knowledge theories as they are typical of epistemological accounts.

 

Objectivity

I could limit myself to say that telling this different hi/story, feminists have transformed epistemology, but I still think that the word tends to mask the originality of feminist projects and that epistemology remains a reductionist approach to account of the construction of reliable knowledge and scientific practices. The logos is not all, but pretends to cover all.

Let me give an illustration of what I try to stress here. Epistemological accounts on objectivity have developed hegemonic generalising tendencies. The objective relationship between subjects and objects that modern experimental sciences have produced in laboratories could be seen as a “success”.  An event, a located success (and sure not the “only“ successful object/subject relationship possible in experimental sciences). Nevertheless, problems appear when we try to extend the power of this local success out of its soil of origin (for example social scientists who tend to treat the social as a group of electrons). Epistemologists have helped to accomplish this move, translating a located sense of objectivity into methodological projections. The logos is at work here, building general rules from a situated success. If we could say that progress means the creation of something new and interesting epistemology tends to translate the new into positive methodological foundations that say why and how a success can pretend to be better[19].

Feminists have questioned this version of objectivity in many interesting ways. Sandra Harding has stressed that the “objectivity” of a science depends on the “self-conscious and critical examination of the relationship between the social experience of its creators and the kinds of cognitive structures favoured in its inquiry ”[20].This idea of objectivity moves out of epistemological ambitions for methodological, abstract and general frameworks. Harding proposes a reliable principle but based on a concrete, always located, political gesture. In this context, shareable meanings are built through transversal knowledge politics rather that through generalising  theoretical frameworks.

 

Moving further out from epistemology, it is important to remind that objectivity has served as an alibi for imposing one’s “scientific” knowledge onto others. So while we must question objectivity, challenge its meanings and uses by producing different versions[21], we couldn’t possibly avoid the other important movement which is to ask : why should objectivity (be it scientific or academic) have the last word? Knowledge has been imposed onto others by means of objectivity : can we really lead a battle against this hegemonic and homogenising tendencies (often at stake out of laboratories and disciplines) by offering a “more objective” point of view?

One of the tasks of epistemology may be, in the French meaning, to define (or redefine) what is objective in a particular scientific context; in the Anglo-American meaning it may be to define (or redefine) what is objective in a particular knowledge construct. Nevertheless, re-examining this practice doesn't spare us a crucial question : how are we going to deal with gestures, belonging to politics and power games, which consist in imposing our “objective” legitimate knowledge onto others? Again, why should objectivity (the authority of science) have the last word? This struggle seems to me a matter of politics of knowledge particularly important today. An example of this non-epistemological zones where our knowledges and sciences are situated today could be human cloning : how are we to address this issue within arguments grounded on “objectivity”? Or, in another order of things, aren't we dealing with a dismissed problem? In my particular case, the frequently asked question I am confronted to is not, are you objective or epistemologically founded but are you efficient and socially pertinent? (read economically). 

 

Let me quote Michel Foucault, a thinker often classed as an epistemologist but who tried to account of his practice in other ways. He leaves apart the epistemological concern of searching “which is the irreducible core of scientificity in a science?” to search instead “which is the force of a science, how, in our society, the truth effects of a science are power effects?”. This proposition expresses quite well the perspective I privilege in feminist knowledge politics. It seems to me that even in the work of feminists who are attempting to produce epistemological accounts on science and knowledge this is the political engine that motivates and assures their originality. They have attained the limitations of epistemological realms and normative pretensions to build reliable, shareable accounts on our realities.

But, am I reproducing the delimiting epistemological aim which I intend to criticise? Am I being tempted by definiology? Maybe not. What I am attempting is not an epistemological definition of what counts as epistemology and what does not, I am trying to account of a political position which is the one where I find my feminist force. As I stressed before, proposing a position is different from grounding it in a definition. My position is situated in the cultural context that I have exposed earlier so it is possible that you don’t recognise yourselves in my concerns and I hope we can discuss it.

·         

Now that I have exposed my “allergy” to epistemology. I would like to get nearer from this “move out of epistemology” I have tracked in feminism. 

My favourite figure is the version conceptualised by Donna Haraway as “situated knowledges”. I have argued that the different hi/stories told by feminists on their own knowledge construction are embedded in a different hi/story. Our visions on this hi/story are probably different. The conceptual personage of situated knowledges is for Haraway’s the “modest witness”, let me try to embody it and modestly account of what I have seen, as a located and implicated witness.

 

3                    Feminist knowledge politics : the challenge of situatedness

As a witness my vision is partial.

From my partial vision I fear the “epistemological” temptation to tell the hi/story of the feminist empiricist, who became a standpoint theorist when she realised she had been duped by Enlightment ideals, but then, realising the essentialising limits of this position becomes post-modern or deconstructionist. This hi/story (a resumed and commodified version of the much more subtle and illuminating version by Harding[22]),  is very useful when we have to adapt ourselves, as our academic circles or founding institutions demand, to the vertiginous speed of communicating. As a vulgarising model it has proved very important. I have used it myself, (even without using the words of post-modernist or deconstructionist), tempted by this easy comprehensible progressist model in the occasions I have to speak far from feminist environments. Nevertheless, as a situated account of a “different hi/story” it seems too rapid, quite weak[23].

Fortunately, many feminists have found the subtlety lacking to most of their disciplined epistemological fathers and have insisted in the fact that this theories/positions do not replace each other as paradigmatic moments in a progressist, linear and teleological hi/story, but that they are deeply linked one to another and that they still coexist nowadays[24]. More, that this is not uniquely a theoretical hi/story. This is an important detail for the commitment for situated accounts of feminist knowledge politics.

Different feminist approaches are born in different contexts. In the first place they respond to problems that are probably posed differently on different historical moments, which doesn’t mean that we can dismiss their importance. In addition, this problems are often far of being solved, and feminists have stressed the necessity to combine this different strategies.

 

A different  hi/story telling : standpoints vs. situatedness[25]

The idea of situated knowledges doesn’t easily fit an evolutionary  hi/story. It can be told as the response of one theorist (Haraway) to another's (Harding) account. It may be told as what comes after “standpoint feminism”, in the search for a feminist position which can acknowledge “the death of the modern subject”; and therefore can better account of the complicated identity webs at stake in feminist standpoints. Another version could say that while situatedness is difficult to class as uniquely post-modernist or deconstructionist, it is informed by this tendencies.

Neither of this views expresses fully what I see here : that point where I bump against the irreducible character of feminist hi/story to a epistemological account of teleological theoretical progress.

As an example : the situated approach theorised by Haraway integrates elements of standpoint theories, for instance by acknowledging the importance of taking into account the standpoint of women in “marked“ positions when we produce our theories[26].  But differences between “standpoint” and “situatedness” exists though. And  not (only) epistemological differences, but political.

What I mean by standpoint positions is basicaly the idea that women have a different point of view on reality which can give place to different knowledge. Standpoint feminism has been accused of essentialism, but the standpoint feminism I am exposing here stresses that standpoint is constructed in struggle, in collective depersonalising politics, and not in woman’s essence[27]. 

This position, which stresses the active dimension of political positioning, is linked to situatedness in that the latter expresses also the production of an account on reality based on our passive/active role as witness. As witness we are passive because observing a situation in which we are more or less implicated in spite of ourselves. But the witness is active because it produces a position, an account, out of this existence.

Haraway took the modest witness figure out of the hi/story of modern science. The modest witness which accompanies the “invention of modern sciences”[28] is the one which doesn’t add any external considerations to the account of the object, the one which is at the origins of our modern notion of “objectivity”. This witness literally “represents” the object, he speaks in its behalf : “It is not I who say this; it is the machine“[29]. Haraway’s modest witness is, on the contrary, “suspicious, implicated, knowing, ignorant, worried and hopeful“[30], and doesn’t ambition to speak in other’s behalf. She can nevertheless speak (among others) as a woman" a possibility created collectively by women.

So what is the difference between standpoints and situated positions if both are trying to produce accountable positions? A feminist standpoint is a necessary mobilising political strategy whose pertinence is alive, as a necessary move in a situation of struggle. We still “speak as a woman”, even if we know this is a complicated stance. On the contrary of situatedness, a standpoint is not a “modest” position and it is not meant to be one. Feminism has created the possibility of the coexistence of standpoints with situated positions. I would say that feminism needs the “closure” of standpoints as it needs the open situations of witnesses. Something happens to us in a particular situation and we produce an account, we enter a becoming-witness when we keep our eyes wide open to the webs that link our witnessing to others. A situation is never closed while a standpoint expresses the political need for strategic closures[31]. At that point modesty remains at the rearguard.

Situatedness is not an alternative deconstructive theory against essentialist standpoints but a different position which doesn’t erase the latter. I don’t think the point is to find if one is more “true” than the other, more “adequate” to reality as an epistemological jargon would express. What interests me here is to stress that different approaches in feminism, often theorised within a progressive process (equality/empiricism, difference/standpoint, postmodernism/deconstructionism) obey to different historical situations, specific struggle fronts on knowledge territories, which inform different contemporary ways of conceiving feminist politics. The same feminists may use them at different moments, because they may be strategically better. There is no epistemological definite foundation for this use, only strategic and politically positioned.

·         

The situatedness figure seems to me an attempt to draw a "political line" present through different feminist approaches. A beautiful tool for mapping the successful knowledge project of feminism. Not because it would be the theoretical accomplishment, the “final” concept, copyrighted Donna Haraway. I see, it - as Haraway recognises it herself - as rendered possible by this original hi/story of women in movement attentive not to reproduce the insults that they have suffered themselves. A “political line“ grounded on a position which was born the very day where women stood up and claimed “stop speaking in our behalf!”. Since that moment, trying not to speak in others behalf has been a political aim for feminism, the move that made possible for feminist black women to say as feminists to other feminists (specially white occidental women) : “don’t speak in our behalf”.

Of course this beautiful hi/story is not “naturally born beautiful”. It carries a painful hi/story of conflictive sisterhood, as sisters are often quarrelling. But maybe this political sisters have a different hi/story to tell : one of sisters who choose to see each other as such, through the experience of suffering, struggle and construction.

 

Some elements for a different hi/story

So there is a different hi/story to tell, and I have chose the "situated" approach to tell it. This approach stresses that we are all ways speaking, producing knowledge from somewhere. That all knowledge is located. But situatedness is also an  act, a gesture. A political gesture. It doesn't function as an accusative external “moralistic theory” but as an embodied gesture of affirmation : we situate ourselves. As such, it is better propagated by contagion, not as a normative framework. You cannot force situatedness on others, you cannot simply force somebody to be a witness : s/he would lie.

I have described and tried to enact one of the moves out of epistemology implied in approach to knowledge construction: it avoids teleological schemes - the ones who erase the old under new truths. This treatment of our past differs from the “hi/story of the triumphant” because it approaches positions and the knowledge they entail as located webs, mapping their existence in complex political (inter-relational) situations.

Other things can be said about this situated hi/story telling. It means to pay attention to the in-between zones, sites of political relations of our knowledge constructions, to cherish ambiguities and contradictions not mobilising against them as if they were theoretical obstacles which separate us from truth. As Harding has often stressed, traditional epistemological discourses tend to mask tensions to produce stable and “coherent” stances. A coherence based on             a non-contradictory principle. Harding invites us to cherish our tensions and don't try to eliminate them[32].

In addition, this hi/stories are meant to be situated not only in an autobiographical sense but in a political positioning of what the hi/story teller privileges as pertinent. Embodiment and experience are key terms what doesn't meant they are authoritative tools. Concepts are "introduced", not given as impersonal evidences, as objective universal data. As Tobie Nathan says, civilised people are those who know how to introduce themselves. Occidental philosophy is plenty of those “uncivilised“ moments where “neutrality“ (i.e. :needing no introduction) served as an alibi to colonise in the name of the “norm“[33]. Situatedness is an attempt to deviate from this destiny[34].

And, last but not least, transversal connections are preferred to generalising connections, a transversality which needs a great deal of modesty and diplomacy[35]. In academic practices this entails situated transdisciplinarity, respectful of closures, specially when we are willing to transgress them.

All this are elements of knowledge politics at stake in feminism[36]. I have said before that there are many ways of trying to connect a singular situation to another, and I have affirmed that the typical epistemological move is to turn situated singularities into generalities to be able to connect them in a global picture. A situated account, instead, shows how the singularity of a situation  yearns  for connections with other situated singularities : “a feminist standpoint is a practical technology rooted in yearning, not an abstract foundation“[37]. Transversal moves that resist to sacrifice the local to the global, but to build the global on consented (never easy) constructive politics.

An account of common tendencies needs to be subtle enough if it aspires to be meaningful to a large number of people. I think of situatedness as a powerful appeal to yearning, as an effort to work out shared meanings on a situation without trying to transcend it . A situated account of knowledge construction resembles more to an implicated mapping gesture than to a normative foundational gesture.

 

An encounter in situated zones : Latour’s amoderns  

I fear to be pointed as deconstructionist or post-modern, when I advocate strategies and political positioning instead of foundations. Maybe the difference from what I think this words intend to mean - when used in a pejorative way - is that while I do believe that every human institution is a construction, I respect constructions and don’t dismiss or think them as illusions because they have failed or refused to ground themselves in transcendent or universal claims. I indeed respect and fear knowledge politics and struggles on it. Isabelle Stengers says that it is different to affirm “this is nothing but construction” than to affirm “this is construction”. Human constructions help, they can also be very painful, so I think we can spare the “nothing but”. So I am not deconstructing if this means to find “nothing but” discourse, text or ideology under human constructions[38] as some accounts claimed post-modern seem to pretend[39].

 

Bruno Latour is also interested in knowledge construction, specially scientific knowledge. His position (which reclaims neither post-modernism or deconstructionism) seems interesting to me and can encounter feminist hi/stories of knowledge. The feminist situated position I am exposing here makes me think to the “amodern” position advocated by Bruno Latour.  Let me (re)produce this possible encounter[40] in two times.

Firstly, feminist situated hi/stories on their own hi/story are not “modern” accounts if we accept Latour’s definition of moderns as those in rupture with the past, and with all others that have not acknowledged the great break of Modernity. Moderns are those who “believe” that others “believe(d)”. When “modern” is pronounced in a polemical context it designs both a   “break in time” and “a struggle with its victors and defeated”[41].

From this particular point of view, feminist theoretical accounts are not modern, as far as we don’t believe that women from the past were dupe, drown in ideology, that they were unconscious believers while we are conscious knowers, that past theoreticians where wrong, misguided by their believes, while we know better now. They are not modern, as long as we don’t believe that women from other cultures are believers while we are (rational) knowers. Sandra Harding’s last book is an exemple of an attempt for situated respectful relationships between past and present as well as between different cultures’s knowledge[42]. So following Latour, it seems that feminist situated accounts, in conflict with teleological meanings, are not modern[43].

The other characteristic of moderns is for Latour the love of purification moves between carefully delimited universes, including theoretical, to which we apply epistemology, politics, sociology, natural sciences…

The challenging argument produced by Latour is that we are not post-modern because we have never been moderns in the sense that we have always been producing hybrids in between our modern well delimited universes[44]. Even if we didn’t believe in hybrids and we tried to purify them, life happens in the in-between zones. Relations have always proliferated in those zones - what Nina Lykke calls “grey zones” - and because we deal with relations, we need a concern for politics and power effects implicated - which doesn’t mean that we can reduce everything to power effects[45], as we can’t reduce it to nature or even to discourse[46].

Situated hi/stories of knowledge construction can’t be produced by merely objectivist fact believers, or power believers, or discourse believers… This hi/stories are not about facts/objects or illusions/ideologies or texts/ discourses. They are not addressing or natures or cultures. All this divisions are of no use to account differently of this different hi/story. Latour stresses that contemporary “objects to think” can’t be addressed from this separated points of view. He gives the example of “ozone holes”, which can’t be either simply “naturalised” or “sociologicised” or “deconstructed”, we could also give Dolly, the cloned sheep, as an example. Latour argues that our objects are webs : which without being “mere objective or natural, nor mere social not mere discourse effects” they are “still real, collective and discursive”[47]. They are at the same time “real as nature, narrated as discourses, collective as society”[48].This objects can't be addressed while maintaining this divisions. A better attention given to our hybrid webbed constructions appeals for different accounts.

So I arrive to the second time of the encounter. Translative and transdisciplinary moves are somehow inevitable in feminism :  women and social relations between genders are, everywhere ,the subject is not containable within a single disciplinary framework.[49]. If  feminists have developed amodern positions it is maybe because many of their questions were born of hybrid situated objects.

-            Hybridity of that odd and paradoxical position of claiming recognition for woman as a group while being the first to re-consider this identity and rejecting it partially. As Braidotti puts it female subjects are  objectified as the other of patriarchy but the site of resistance to patriarchy[50]. The “contradictory” positions where feminist women find themselves in issues of their identity are well known in feminism. It is not easy to say, for instance, that second wave feminists believed in a modern unified subject of knowledge until post-modernists gave the alert against essentialist tendencies. The collective and political subject of “second wave feminism” doesn’t easily fit in the idea of the modern individualistic subject or in “naive” essentialism. Something else was already being produced in a complex position in-between natural, social and political identities which we have only began to theorise, the emergence and limits of new forms of political subjectivity[51].

-            Hybridity of feminist “objects” to think. For instance, “women”, and the “sex/gender system” are already monsters : hybrids of our naturecultures, impossible to think in purified ways[52]. This dimension is being constantly discussed in feminist environments around the issue of the sex/gender distinction. It seems to me that feminist experience in addressing strange webbed objects has been illuminating for situated knowledge politics. Objects which can’t be addressed from a mere natural, nor mere social, nor mere discursive point of view.

Addressing our in-between position as women in-between nature and culture, personal and political, passive and active, ignorant because uneducated but savants because plenty of knowledge, ideological because trapped by systems but conscious because ever in struggle, addressing the inseparability of theory and practice, the reality of discourses and representations but the irreducibility of pain to discourses… feminists have tried to develop transversal politics which is very different from homogeneous purified models for theory and politics. A politics of addition : and woman, and black (or white), and oppressed, and strong[53]. Situatedness is the conceptual expression of our political difficulty/ability to be in so many places at the same time, dealing with the micro-politics of situatedness.  

Situatedness is a key for this transversal politics, Haraway has picked-up bell hook’s idea of yearning as a strong pass-word for feminist coalitions. But the very possibility of yearning coalitions, is situatedness, situated political positions, knowledges and hi/stories. We can’t make alliances with abstractions, we can make alliances with situated positions which recognise our own situatedness. Mutual respect based in the naturecultural acknowledgement that we are not the owners of what it means to speak as a woman. Situated alliances also because they can be reformed strategically depending on the mask hegemonic oppressive tendencies choose to wear.

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I have tried to produce in this paper a witnessing position. I have told that I prefer to avoid the word epistemology because I think it is in their deviance from epistemology that feminist accounts on knowledge construction are more interesting. It is not my intention to dismiss the reference to epistemology as the account of knowledge constructions. Yet I have tried to show what epistemology means to me, and by contrast a different oppositional path within feminist politics. I have tried to exhibit some typical epistemological manners (linear teleological hi/stories, purification moves) and how feminists very often escape from this framework. This meanings belong to mixed cultural and theoretical influences.

A word appears as less important than what it represents. Even while appealing to epistemology, feminists have developed theories that are not epistemological in that hegemonic sense. The move that translates descriptions, propositions and positions into epistemologies, methodologies and normative frameworks is not easily found in feminist situated accounts. I have tried to show in this paper the importance of this knowledge politics and my commitment to try to prolong them in my academic work, by following the path of situated accounts of knowledge constructions.

I dont find it an easy task, the legitimity of our propositions seems often linked to serious language, academic prestigious labels. This confronts me to the impurity  of politics. I may have to use the word epistemology to describe aspects of my research to be quickly understood in academic and institutional contexts of  communication. But there is a different speed at stake when I try to work out what I want to say : a situated, slowing down pace. At this reduced speed, when accounts of knowledge construction take epistemological forms the word appears before me as the empty abstract label which can assure the respect that methodological aspirations and "scientificity" inspire : a tied-up bundle of non-contradictory axioms. An abstraction which is far from the delicate concreteness of accountable theoretical practices at stake in feminism. If theory implies power, epistemology pretends to "meta-power" the power to say who is able to think the world and how. Epistemology aims to define general rules underlying the possibility of knowledge : a powerful aim indeed. A fearful aim.

My current main location is the academy, within this location, where my job is mainly theoretical, words are an important political terrain. Words (specially those with theoretical homogenous tendencies) are a territory of struggle. For feminism, this means at least two things, first the resistance to see concepts born political commodified and deradicalised, second, a reflexive use of concepts which have been historically the allies of multiple forms of oppression. Situatedness is not only a question of sex/gender, class and race, it concerns situated gender@tional relations with our inherited pasts and our desired futures. In this sense situatedness concerns the ways we construct our theories, with old words and new desires.

 

As a witness the vision I have exposed is partial, and as a yearning witness (trying to be) modest, this paper is an appeal for connections.