Unit 8 - Female Perspective

Question 1

standpoint theory

Answer 1

Smith
- women bring to knowledge something that men don’t - a perspective grounded in everyday, material living
- women’s knowledge ought to be privileged as superior because their knowledge is grounded in the experience of being an oppressed group - have special insight into systems of suppression
- based on readings on Dorothy E. Smith, Nancy Hartsock, and Hillary Rose
- who is preferred and why?

Question 2

embodied knowledge

Answer 2

Smith
- women’s knowledge tends to be embodied, grounded in practical action, and so less likely to be led astray by ideology
- a female standpoint approaches life and its activities as a whole
- because it was more ground-level, everyday, practical knowledge, a female standpoint does analysis as a participant, sociology as a member of society, and not a theorist floating, disembodied above it all
- women’s knowledge gives an “insider’s” perspective, a holistic account that men’s knowledge misses
- female standpoint brings with it a healthy subjectivity, a local, practical knowledge

Question 3

institutional ethnography

Answer 3

Smith
- ethnography (from Garwinkle/anthropology, paying attention to the small details of everyday life) of institutions (larger social structures that house power relations)
- “women’s sociology” - later called a sociology for the people
- alternative approach of studying and understanding the social
- the aim to explicate how people’s everyday activities are coordinated or ruled by different institutions
- use these to reason up to institutional level

Question 4

ruling relations

Answer 4

Smith
- institutions - larger social structures that house power relations
- “a complex of relations forming part of the ruling apparatus, organized around a distinctive function - education, healthcare, law, and the like”
- our subjectivity, sense of self, actions - all shaped by these constraining, ruling structures that surround and bind us to certain courses of action - on this ruling level that distorting ideologies are generated
- embodied action reinforces to overall social structures