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Alternatives? From situated knowledges to standpoint epistemology
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/rewiring-bodies/alternatives-from-situated-knowledges-to-standpoint-epistemology
<b>The previous post explored, in detail, responses to science and technology in feminist and gender work in India. The idea was, more than anything else, to present an 'attitude' to technology, whether manifested in dams or obstetric technologies, that sees technology as a handmaiden of development, as instrument - good or evil, and as discrete from 'man'. Feminist and gender work in India has thereafter articulated approximately four responses to technology across state and civil society positions - presence, access, inclusion, resistance. The demand for presence of women as agents of technological change, the demand for improved access for women to the fruits of technology, the demand for inclusion of women as a constituency that must be specially provided for by technological amendments, and a need for recognition of technology’s ills particularly for women, and the consequent need for resistance to technology on the same count. Bearing in mind that women’s lived experiences have served as the vantage point for all four of the responses to technology in the Indian context, I will now suggest the need to revisit the idea of such experience itself, and the ways in which it might be made critical, rather than valorizing it as an official counterpoint to scientific knowledge, and by extension to technology. This post, while not addressing the 'technology question' in any direct sense, is an effort to begin that exploration.</b>
<p></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">One should
expect control strategies to concentrate on boundary conditions and interfaces,
on rates of flow across boundaries – and not on the integrity of natural
objects.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong>
(Haraway 1991: 163)</strong></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong>On the question of experience. This one statement
subsumes several questions, on politics, on knowledge, that I have been trying
to raise in this project. What I have been calling the old ideological model of
critique – the possibility of critique from the vantage point of a coherent set
of material interests – was also tied to a model of knowledge, a model that
said – <em>I know, you do</em>. This
constituted the rationale for the vanguard, this constituted the knowledge of
oppression. For a feminism having drawn from Marxist legacies of politics, this
then was the model to be adopted, and </strong>the politics around
women’s lives that gave birth to this entity, feminism, and has nurtured it
ever since, definitionally became that benevolent umbrella, that liberatory
tool, that protects those lives and inserts itself into them (the personal must
be politicized). Having identified the problems of vanguardism during the
post-nationalist, subaltern turn, however, a portion of the rethinking Left<strong> <em>and</em> a global,
universalist feminism may consider that what remains for us to do or think is a
turn to experience. The slogan changed; it became – <em>we all know, together</em>. Both these moves were, however, hyphenated
in the premise of ‘one knowledge’. </strong></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong>There were several moves critical of ‘one
knowledge’. Those that took the ‘Third World’ route either proposed a
‘different reason’, a different canon, an alternative system (as postcolonial
scholars sometimes did), or articulated a politics of complete heterogeneity that
held knowledge as necessarily provisional and separate from a rationale for
politics (as did those that took on the name ‘third world feminism’). A third
position here was of <em>I know mine, you
know yours, there can be no dialogue</em>. For this school of knowledge, the
experience of oppression was necessary, and sufficient. The consciousness of
oppression, which was ex-officio, offered knowledge. The community of knowers
here was a closed community. Asserting that the ‘one knowledge’ claim rested on
the active exclusion of other knowledges, it suggested a remaking of ‘low
knowledge’ through the <em>experience of
oppression</em>. This is the impulse </strong>that starts, and ends, with
the embodied insider, speaking with[in] and for itself, a complete closed
community. This impulse we have seen with respect to sexual minorities, women,
the subaltern – an impulse also tied to the organic or pastoral as opposed to
the technological, an impulse sometimes tracing direct connections with a
cultural past, and often offering a choice <em>between
systems of knowledge</em>. The above mentioned third worldist positions
sometimes tied up with this third position, proposing a politics of coalition
while keeping knowledge bases separate (as in third world feminisms), or
realizing implicit connections between ‘low knowledge’ practices and an
alternative system of knowledge.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">While I have made no
attempt here to directly examine the complex of phenomena often referred to by
the short-hand ‘globalization’, I will now refer back to my first mention of
development as a practice and to the gender work that involves itself with
disaggregated description as part of this phenomenon. The reaction to the
ideological has meant, in this frame, a shift from politics to self-help, from
the ideological to the intuitive, where the intuitive is taken as a flat
description of immediate reality as experience. While it might be tempting to
read this immediate everyday reality as organic, whole, feminine, and often
able to escape an overdetermination by patriarchal norms,<a name="_ftnref1" href="#_ftn1"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[1]</span></span></a>
the new gender analyses do not necessarily rely on organicity. Rather,
politics, or the politics of representation, have shifted, as Haraway notes
with deadly precision, to a game of simulation in what she calls the
“informatics of domination”, and the new gender analyses are as much part of it
as any other (recall Van Hollen’s terms – culture-in-the-making, “processural”,
etc). While none of this new critical scholarship addressing development or
technology actually denies domination or power, it has contributed to making it
so increasingly difficult to define or identify, as to make counter-hegemonic
attempts appear very nearly anachronistic.<strong> </strong></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong>What, then, of alternatives? After a rejection of
those feminist strands that seek to build a common, sometimes homogenous <em>narrative of</em> <em>feminine experience</em>, and of gender analysis that thrives on the
heterogeneity of <em>women’s experiences</em>,
but yet agreeing with the need to “speak from somewhere”, as against older
models of one knowledge that offered a “view from nowhere”, a neutral view,
what could be the nature of this critique?</strong></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong>I would suggest that it will have to be a <em>re-turn to experience, </em>a re-cognition, <em>rather than a turn</em>.<em> </em>That we pay attention not only, or not even so much, to the
fractured narrative offered by the wide variety or heterogeneity of experience,
as to its possible <em>aporicity</em></strong><a name="_ftnref2" href="#_ftn2"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[2]</span></span></a><strong> in dominant frames, so as to enact such a re-turn
treating the perspective of the excluded, aporetic experience as momentary
resource – not authentic, fixed, or originary, but appropriate.</strong><a name="_ftnref3" href="#_ftn3"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[3]</span></span></a><strong> Drawing on Haraway’s suggestion of a gift of
vision, of situation as a visual tool, this would mean a momentary cognizance,
a momentary gift of ab-normal vision – abnormal by way of not making sense in
dominant frames – that could describe the dominant in terms different than its
own, as also point to other possibilities. This would mean, most importantly
for a notion of the political, a shift from marginality to aporicity as a
vantage point for critique.</strong></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong>Perspective, here, would therefore take on the third
of three possible meanings,</strong><a name="_ftnref4" href="#_ftn4"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[4]</span></span></a> <strong>as the fantastic spur within the dominant, </strong>as
a moment of seeing, of ‘possession’,<span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><strong> </strong></span>that can be lost in the
looking. In this sense, it is also not possible to map perspective onto
identity or individual taste. Perspective as that moment of possession not only
gives a completely different picture of things, it also gives a picture not
available from anywhere else – that makes visible the dominant as such, as that
which had rendered invalid other possibilities. This invalidation, this
exclusion, could then be understood differently from a removal from circulation
of that which is disobedient – “At my heel, or outside”, as Le Doueff puts it;
it is better understood as a constitutive or primary exclusion with an entry
later on the dominant’s terms. As Le Doueff puts it again, “Outside, or at my
heel.”<a name="_ftnref5" href="#_ftn5"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[5]</span></span></a> <strong>Here I find useful, as a beginning, the model of the
excluded available within feminist standpoint theory, of the woman as ‘outsider
within’.</strong><a name="_ftnref6" href="#_ftn6"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[6]</span></span></a><strong> </strong>While this formulation evokes a
degree of unease about whether this social location can be enough as a starting
point (whether women then always have to be the outsiders within to be able to
speak from this space), it offers, I think, valuable clues for working toward a
possible model of feminist critique. To understand this, we need to understand,
also, that the issue here is not only that of recognizing hierarchies, nor is
it about building a stand-alone alternative system of knowledge that may be
called feminist. The very first example I gave in this post, of the clinical
consultation that turned into a conversation, tries to demonstrate this.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">The very notion of a
feminist standpoint would be then the act of interpretation that puts this
positioning, this transient possession, to work, not a place already defined,
as earlier understandings of standpoint would have; this process involves the
production of an attached
model of knowledge that begins from perspective, one that requires a
speaking from somewhere.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Such a speaking from
somewhere obviously requires a conceptualization of this ‘somewhere’; in other
words, a fidelity to context. Here context, I would suggest, is not (only)
about date-time-place, such that a concept of ‘one knowledge’ can be critiqued
from a situation. It is most importantly about relationality, the space between
you and me, both intra-community and inter-community. Once we take cognizance
of this, we realize that that space does many things – it induces a porosity of
boundaries (body, community), it creates attachment, it also creates
separation. With this in mind, we then have to talk of building a story from
perspective, where it is the <em>turning from
within outward</em> (from attachment to separation) that does the work of
building the story. Such a standpoint ‘is’ only in the <em>constant interrogation</em> of both dominant discourse – masculinist
Marxist discourse, <em>and of the category of
resistance</em> – feminism – within which it may be named. (This will have
resonances with the monster album of feminist stories that we began writing last
year).</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">What we may have to gain from an attention
to either consultations or conversations, then, is not so much the shift in
form that we have made in moving from one to another, but the recognition of
the fantastic perspective as a visual tool.
Perspectives are made fantastic by their positioning in an imbrication
of power <em>and</em> meaning; and unless the
position is required to be static through any counter-hegemonic exercise, they
cannot be the source of a permanent identity, nor an alternative system. I
present my report on the <em>dai</em> training
programme, then, in a different detail and from a different perspective than as
a look at indigenous systems of health or as a lesson to be learnt from women’s
experiences, or indeed as an essentially feminine perspective. What I call the
allegory of women’s lived experience serves, for me, as a test case, an example
of the fantastic perspective that both helps provide a different picture of the
dominant, and a glimpse of other possible worlds. I will attempt to delineate
this in more detail now, but would like to put in a statutory warning prior to
the attempt.</p>
<p class="MsoBodyTextIndent"> </p>
<p class="MsoBodyTextIndent"> </p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong><em>Min(d)ing
the turn</em></strong></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"> </p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Does this re-turn to experience that I have
talked about show up in individual <em>dai</em>
experience? Is this a concrete turn, something that can be applied in
straightforward ways? We turn to the Bengali Marxist who tried to find a
subaltern Lenin –</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">The concept
of the outside as a theoretical category is rooted in the concept of abstract
labour as opposed to concrete labour. Concrete labour, located within
particular industries, is within the sphere of production; abstract labour is
not. … It is situated where, as Lenin puts it, all classes meet – outside the
sphere of production.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"> (Chaudhury 1987: 248)</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Chaudhury is using the concept to gently
remind the Subaltern School of the difficulty of positing a ‘subaltern
consciousness’ as a separate domain, or the equal difficulty of speaking of
inversion, in other words revolution, from this vantage point. For my purposes,
the turn from within outward faces the same difficulty. It is a turn that has
to be mined for its possibility, not one that offers, straightforwardly, the
description of a different world.</p>
<p class="MsoBodyTextIndent"> </p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong><em> </em></strong></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong><em>Marking the turn: returning to the conversation</em></strong><strong><em></em></strong></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"> </p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">In what might perhaps be an unwarranted dissection of events, but one
useful for our purposes nonetheless, let us go back to the <em>dai</em> training programme, mapping onto my narrative of it the
paleonymies and possible difficulties of such a narrative. I have refrained
from relating to this exercise as either participant observation (in
anthropological mode) or as case study (the qualitative approach in medical
parlance). Both of these, positioned at the same end of the methodological
spectrum, were efforts that came up to serve a need for ‘qualitative’ analysis
– the latter from within the scientific establishment, the former from within
the social sciences. In its acting out, however, there is an effort to capture
the microcosm that is a stepping away from earlier structural analyses; and a
meshing of ‘observer’ and ‘observed’, a moving away from complete objectivity,
that all self-respecting qualitative analyses undertake. These analyses are
also an attempt to either expand or critique complete objectivity. This is what
I have in mind when I refer to that time as ‘conversation’ rather than
‘consultation’. What I am attempting here is a further<em> bracketing of that effort</em>, a bringing to bear, on the
conversations, the weight of my identification of the problems with existing
frames of critique that I have identified in the project. This is so that what
I have been laying down as a different contour of critique, finds its
possibility. To perform such a bracketing, I use the narrative of my experience
with the <em>dais</em> as a template within
which I identify moments of the anthropological narrative, and from which I
move towards a different possibility.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">This exercise will involve, therefore, as I have stated, through a
re-turn to experience, a re-examination both of dominant discourse and of the
category of resistance within which it has been named. Such a re-turn will mean
an attention to experience – not as narrative, resistant or otherwise, nor as
fractured and unpredictable, but as aporetic – as affording a fantastic
perspective on the dominant that had hitherto appeared as normal. An attention
to the fantastic perspective will result in a turn from within (a community)
outward – a different notion of the political from that of either
organizational, organic, or individual responses. It is, however, a notion that
is hardly structural, a notion of the political as interpretation, but one that
will have to be done each time. With these telegraphic steps in order, let us
proceed. <strong>We had started the classes
from the <em>dais’</em> voices – what they had
written or what they had to say regarding their experiences with the births
they had attended. The attendant presumption on both sides was that these
voices were constituted by experience, the only prerogative of those
uninitiated into <em>method</em> – <em>mukkhu sukkhu manush </em>(the unlearned
people). I then set about introducing a gentle reworking of the boundaries of
this category “experience” – till its quarrels with “method” had diminished to
negligible levels.</strong></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong>How did I rework these boundaries? What
were the contexts in which this was made possible? What were the terms of
reference for the exchange between “experience” and “scientific method” that
placed each, firmly, on a particular side of the divide between the untrained <em>dai</em> and the development expert, the body
and the mind, the sensible and the transcendental? </strong>Several notions of the feminist political are at work here, working
vis-à-vis dominant and other responses to the experience question. The
responses may be charted in the following way. In the turn to experience as
narrative, feminism has addressed the representation of the female body. The
“female body”, we have seen, is the site for the understandings as well as
operations of science (with its invisible qualifier Western). In its project of
defining the form and delineating the workings of the female body, this body of
knowledge enjoys the status of a value-neutral, objective method that
purportedly bases itself on solid empirical evidence to produce impartial
knowledge. In the case of the female body, it would then appear that science
has <strong><em>found </em></strong><strong>it<em> </em>exclusively and powerfully fashioned by
<em>nature</em> to bear and nourish children;
in the event, all it is doing is putting the facts before us.</strong><a name="_ftnref7" href="#_ftn7"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[7]</span></span></a><strong> Feminist engagements have sought to detect several
disclaimers to the purported value-neutrality of science. For one, the standard
body is that of the male, by which the female body is judged small, inferior,
or deviant; and through this a subtle process of othering or exclusion of the
woman is instituted <em>within science</em>.
Further, accounts of the workings of the body, its organs, its reproductive
processes, are strewn with gendered metaphors that privilege the male as
decisive, strong, productive, and the female, as complementarily passive,
wasteful, unreasoning.</strong><a name="_ftnref8" href="#_ftn8"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[8]</span></span></a><strong> In the event, this part of the feminist project has
been to make explicit the hidden cultural weight of scientific knowledge.
Further, in addressing the methods of science itself, feminism has pointed to
the homogenization inherent in the manner in which the scientific concept of
the “female body” is derived. It is somewhat against this authoritative,
homogenising strain that women’s bodily experiences are posited</strong><a name="_ftnref9" href="#_ftn9"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[9]</span></span></a><strong> in feminism – as something that is not only missed
in science’s project of objectivity but something that is excluded from or unable
to articulate itself in and through science’s abstractions. In the event, the
experience of the “woman” within science is seen as that which, through the
explicit introduction of an apparently inassimilable, pre-discursive
subjectivity, questions the <em>explanatory</em>
potential of science, while also offering possibilities for agency. </strong></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">There are certain
collusions in the goals of these two projects, however, that bear looking at.
Both are moving toward a single truth, whether derived from scientific theory
or subjective experience, which they alone can represent. To this end, both
homogenize and both declare the undisputed presence of this ‘reality out there’
that can be represented without mediations. And from here also flows a claim to
objectivity. If science posits a naturalized universal female body, experience
would posit the “woman” universalized through socialization. No experience can
exist here outside narrative history, unless as aporia – the seemingly
insoluble logical difficulty. One would then derive that if scientific theories
are built on exclusions, so is the category “experience”. If science claims
value-neutrality, a simple valorization of experience ignores the “historical
processes that, through discourse, position subjects and produce their experience”.
In the process, both science and experience in turn achieve status as
categories, homogenous and uniform in themselves. Both become discourses that
have the right to regulate entry, so that what counts as science or experience
becomes the qualifying question.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;" class="MsoBodyText2">If we then conclude
that there is in this separation a certain essentializing of categories that
ignores their very constitutions by the other, as also their constructions
through cultural intelligibility, several questions arise. Can experience be
that essential outside of Science that can grant agency? Or would it be also
explicable as reflective of hegemonic norms that grant the sensible body as
“women’s generic identity in the symbolic” while retaining a masculine topology
for Science? This brings us to another feminist cognition of experience as
constituted by history, circumstance, and <em>as</em>
circumscribed by the norm as outside it.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;" class="MsoBodyText2">But, caught as I was
between the conventional registers of science and feminism, I kept falling
backwards into the question of results, and their reflection on validity.
Experience, it would seem, was faulty by virtue of its very constitutivity,
while science continued to look rigorous and unbiased. As critical courier of
scientific knowledge, I thought I was trying to weave myself into the discourse
of the <em>dais</em> with minimum damage to
their framework, and to that end I had decided to keep the question marks alive
throughout, directing them towards science as well. But as I sat down to look
at the assessment sheets on the afternoon of the first day’s session, ‘I’ was
fairly stunned. Of the ten questions put to the dais, one was worded as follows
–</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;" class="MsoBodyText2">If the child does
not cry soon after birth, we must –</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;" class="MsoBodyText2">a] say prayers
over the baby</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;" class="MsoBodyText2">b] perform
mouth-to-mouth resuscitation</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;" class="MsoBodyText2">c] rush the baby
to the nearest health centre</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;" class="MsoBodyText2">d] warm the
placenta in a separate vessel.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;" class="MsoBodyText2">Almost all 46 of the
dais had affirmed the last answer. I remembered the asphyxiated babies that
used to be rushed to the nursery in Medical
College from the labour
room that was on another floor. I remembered the bitter debates as to why the
nursery was not stationed nearer the labour ward so that we could lose less
time in resuscitating them. I decided this could not be allowed to pass. And I
conducted the classes accordingly. When we repeated the written examination at
the end, none had ticked the last answer, and I was both relieved and
vindicated. Until I had come away, still thinking, and then I realised that I
had succeeded only because I had adopted a more positivist, authoritarian
approach – right and wrong – to get across. And why had I done that? I
realized, again, that with all my criticality, I was very much a scientific
subject, and not merely because of my disciplinary training. I had retained
reflexivity and criticality for as long as there was non-contradiction. Beyond
that, I stayed put – well within Science. I too had my experiences – I could
look at them as inseparably constituted by my production as scientific subject.
But I had been trained to look otherwise – at experience as empirical evidence
of theory. And there I was.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;" class="MsoBodyText2">In current
development policy, though, there is not so much the suppression of subaltern
voice as its making visible in extensions of scientific discourse. <strong>It has become part of development policy to include
women’s voices in their own development; the ‘third world woman’ is no longer
considered to have no voice. On the contrary, she has a <em>specific</em> voice that is apparently being heard now in development
projects in the third world. In order to articulate this voice, however, she
must have the capability to streamline it, make it universally understood as
well as reasonable, and this is the cornerstone of the ‘capabilities approach’.
Here the <em>dai, </em>once named as
dependable repository of traditional knowledge, can now be appropriated by
notions of development flowing from liberal theories, for she also represents,
in this frame, the rigid face of patriarchal traditions that have not given the
woman voice. Development here is taken to mean empowerment – a granting, or
rather restoration, of voice to the woman hitherto suffocated by tradition –
and it is to this end that the efficient model of scientific method may be
adopted. The old order will indeed change, for the <em>dais</em> … </strong><em>Aage ek rakam chhilo … ebar anya
rakam korte hobe</em><a name="_ftnref10" href="#_ftn10"><sup><sup>[10]</sup></sup></a><em>… </em>but that
is hardly an exchange of tradition for modernity, or of experience for science;
it is an accommodation of one by the other. In the pluralism of current
development discourse, the <em>dai</em> is a figure
who exists before context, occupies an underprivileged class position, and has
a voice that may be heard or streamlined into the mainstream.<em></em></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;" class="MsoBodyText2">And in feminism,
despite, or after, the recognition of ‘women’s experience’ as constitutive of
hegemonic norms, there is a renewed positing of experience as resistant, as the
natural habitat, perhaps, of the woman …</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">This is of course clearly
in evidence in what I have called the global feminist undertaking, which is
most well argued for philosophically in Nussbaum’s work, and most tellingly
represented in her examination and insertion of ‘Jayamma-the-brick-kiln-worker’
– who <em>cannot</em> <em>not</em> have a body that speaks – into the lexicon<em> </em>of development literature. As ‘third world women’s practices’ that
contribute to culture-in-the-making, it is visible in the gender work that I
have talked about.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">What of my
‘conversations’ with the <em>dai</em>? As
medical-professional-feminist-addressing-gendered-subaltern, I recognized and
tried to steer clear of the various precipitations of such a binary; I ended,
however, looking for a connection <em>through
experience </em>between the ‘professional’ and the ‘unlearned’; for an essence
to the feminine, perhaps, or to woman in the Symbolic. The earlier legacy of
experience, then, inheres here; in asking questions of an epistemic status for
experience, in the anxiety of not being able to accord it equal validity, in
looking for a separation between feminist critical projects and dominant
discourse through a recourse to a feminine difference which will be different
from the place accorded to women in the patriarchal Symbolic.<a name="_ftnref11" href="#_ftn11"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[11]</span></span></a>
Most telling, perhaps, it inheres in the anxiety over the similarity or
otherwise of perspective between the (feminist) professional and the (woman) <em>dai</em> … one that presumed that the origins
of an organic connectedness was to be found in the unspoilt <em>dai</em> who talked of <strong><em>meyeder
meyeder katha.</em></strong><a name="_ftnref12" href="#_ftn12"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[12]</span></span></a><strong><em> </em></strong><strong>So </strong><strong>t</strong><strong>he first attempt that the <em>dais</em> made to connect with me was through <em>abhigyata</em> – experience.<em> </em>And<em> </em>the overwhelming feeling at the end of
those 6 days amongst the <em>dais</em>, and in
me, was of a solidarity that had perhaps been established. A solidarity across
boundaries of authority (though not disruptive of it in any way), across
science, across different experiences. But … where then are feminist projects
going to differ from development initiatives? What do third world women want,
if one may ask the blasphemous question, a question that gathers momentum,
nevertheless, in the context of first world vanguardism. Can the solution be
that we must give up on capability altogether as a universal? While accessing a
connectedness that would not mean the place accorded to women in the
patriarchal Symbolic would definitely be a move, where would this connectedness
be situated? If not in family or traditional community, would it be in some
other sense of being together? Will we seek to continue its residence in women?
Will we travel from an erasure of experience, the feminine, the subjective, to
an essentialising of the same? Will women be the “embodied others, who are not
allowed <em>not</em> to have a body, a finite
point of view”? If so, are we still going to stay with the biological body as
pre-discursive resource of experience?
And if science is to remain the ultimate arbiter, is experiential agency
then to be only the aporia, showing up as resistances through gaps in policy,
that must let be, or can there be a feminist policy-framing that can work on
the aporicity of experience? </strong></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong>What of collaboration? Caught between the
conventional registers of science and feminism, where science is about
knowledge and feminism about politics, not only is the <em>dai’s</em> experience waiting to be rehabilitated within science but
also within feminism. While the mainstream policy dialogues with science remain
at the level of “filling in gaps in manpower”, the philosophies of science
attempt to talk about whether “midwives’ tales” might be justified – questions
of validity. The politics of inclusion have operated to bring ‘low knowledges’
into circulation, and feminism must be the natural host to these politics in a
frame where feminism is about politics and about women. Hence the whole debate
about representation – institutional science versus the <em>dai</em>, the <em>dai</em> as gendered
subaltern versus the third world feminist, that populate the space of critique
of knowledge by politics, of science by feminism. The questions therefore
continue to be – In frames where the <em>dai</em>
as “gendered subaltern” has been appropriated into governmental apparatuses,
and <em>made to speak</em> that language, are
conscious tools of collaboration with the master’s discourse available to her?
Or is this the tool lying there for the <em>feminist</em>
to pick up, to create a discursive space of negotiation for ‘third world
feminisms’? Is this, then, yet a battle for representation, a vanguardism, a
speaking for that continues to slip into a speaking of, where third world
feminists freeze their examinations of their own enmeshedness or location in
their negotiations with global feminism and global development? Is such a
freezing inevitable? Or is the <em>dai</em> as
gendered subaltern as much outside third world-first world feminist
negotiations as outside empire-nation exchanges?</strong></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">But there is also a
question here of the continuing separation of experience and knowledge. If
these attempts to rehabilitate experience seem to be at the level of according
it equivalent status to knowledge, thus actually keeping alive the binaries
feminism has been straining to step out of, what of experience as condition of
knowledge-making? The aporicity of experience I speak of might be a beginning.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"> Having
identified these existing trajectories for feminist critiques of science in the
Indian context, therefore, I pick up on the gaps in the quintessentially
anthropological narrative, to bring back the question of aporicity. We have
spoken extensively of the fractured narrative. Rather than the fractured <em>narrative</em>, however, it might be the <em>fracture</em> we need to speak of now. And
rather than look at women as being essentially capable of <em>mimetisme</em>,<a name="_ftnref13" href="#_ftn13"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[13]</span></span></a>
and therefore as the essential content of fracture, it might be useful to
access the moment of fracture, using as allegory, not narrative resource, the
responses of the <em>dais</em> to the
reproductive health apparatus, or the bizarre consultation between the
recalcitrant mother and the female physician. It might not be the connectedness
between me and the <em>dai</em> as women,
then, that will serve as my resource, but our very asymmetry of dialogue, our
seeming separation. This might be the fantastic perspective that must be worked
on, in feminism, to create the discursive space required to articulate the
inversion – an overturning of the dialectic of one knowledge – that Chaudhury
(2000) speaks of. Such a concentration on momentary fractures, disallowing as
it does a final and fixed concentration on ‘woman’, or a continuing separation
of registers between politics and knowledge on account of the ‘fantastic’
perspective opening up a fresh vantage point both of knowing and critique of
possible worlds, I submit, would constitute what I have been calling a feminist
standpoint epistemology.</p>
<div><br clear="all" />
<hr align="left" size="1" width="33%" />
<div id="ftn1">
<p class="MsoBodyTextIndent"><a name="_ftn1" href="#_ftnref1"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[1]</span></span></a> There is a wealth of theorizations on the
feminine, not going for such a simplistic reading of experience or the
everyday. Feminist work in India
that looks at autobiographies, for example, has taken on the notion of the
everyday as a fraught space, but also a liberating one, following on the
re-reading of the personal as the political. Parallels with theorizing in
western feminism may be found where the spectrum has, in talking of women’s
experience, included a valorizing, as in Adrienne Rich’s description of the
experience of motherhood in the Anglo-American second wave of feminism (1986),
as also a speaking of the body, of corporeality, of embodiment, and of
subjectivity as a foil to identity (as in the French feminist school, where
notions of touch as against vision [Luce Irigaray], of ‘there being no place
for woman’ in the patriarchal Symbolic’ and women needing a different Symbolic
to ‘be’[Irigaray], have been suggested. The subjectivity-identity theorization
also recalls the <em>sati</em> debates). This
has proceeded to either pit experience against ‘abstract reason’, or to
demonstrate, more interestingly, how reasonableness is itself infected by bias,
in some cases a ‘male sexualization’ (Grosz 1994). Other powerful analyses
could be made, following on Judith Butler’s concept of the ‘constitutive
outside’, to show how Reason enacts its hegemony through a continuous
production of experience as the constitutive outside to discourse. (This need
not be construed as a structural model, as a detailed reading of Butler’s theorization of ‘politically salient exclusions’
will show (Butler
1993). Parallely, ‘experience’ has been articulated, in the work of Joan Scott,
among others, not as an ‘out there’ but a historical production (Scott 1992).</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn2">
<p style="text-align: justify;"><a name="_ftn2" href="#_ftnref2"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[2]</span></span></a> I
have referred to the way in which I use aporia, in the introduction to the
thesis. To recapitulate, aporia is referred to as a logical impasse or
contradiction, that which is impassable, especially “a radical contradiction in
the import of a text or theory that is seen in deconstruction as inevitable” (<em>Merriam-Webster Dictionary Online</em>). </p>
</div>
<div id="ftn3">
<p style="text-align: justify;"><a name="_ftn3" href="#_ftnref3"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[3]</span></span></a> A
clarification here. I am not saying that experience <em>is</em> always aporetic to a narrative, but I am asking for an attention
to a particular perspective that might be so positioned as to be aporetic.</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn4">
<p style="text-align: justify;"><a name="_ftn4" href="#_ftnref4"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[4]</span></span></a>
The meaning that I activate here is of a perspective that appears fantastic, or
absurd, except from a particular point of view.</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn5">
<p style="text-align: justify;"><a name="_ftn5" href="#_ftnref5"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[5]</span></span></a>
“Exclusion in principle seems to function as a formidable method of forcing
dependence. And it is indeed a choice between “being on the outside or perhaps
at my heel,” conveying first an exclusion in principle, and then conditions for
secondary entry, rather than the reverse, “at my heel or on the outside,” which
would indicate first a frank authoritarianism and then punishment for
insubordination.” (Le Doueff 2003: 25)</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn6">
<p style="text-align: justify;"><a name="_ftn6" href="#_ftnref6"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[6]</span></span></a> Feminist Standpoint theory talks of the possibility
of a situated, perspectival form of knowing, of such a knowing as necessarily a
communal project, and of this knowing as one where the community of knowers is
necessarily shifting and overlapping with other communities. While Haraway
would speak of ‘situated knowledges’ as against the ‘God trick’, as she calls
it, of seeing from nowhere – a neutral perspective (Haraway 1992), Sandra
Harding<sup> </sup>would go on, however, to propose a version of strong
objectivity – a less false rather than a more true view; this, Harding would
suggest, can come only from the viewpoint of particular communities, sometimes
the marginalized, sometimes women. This is where Harding’s version of
standpoint epistemology is still grappling with the question of whether the
experience of oppression is a necessary route to knowledge. (Harding deals with
this with this by treating women’s lives as resource to maximise objectivity,
Haraway by treating these women as ironic subjects and seeing from below as
only a visual tool). A related question is whether the very notion of
standpoint epistemology requires a version, albeit a more robust one than in
place now, of systems of domination, and it is here that a productive dialogue
could be begun between Haraway’s more experimental version of “seeing from
below” and Harding’s notion of strong objectivity.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"> </p>
</div>
<div id="ftn7">
<p style="text-align: justify;"><a name="_ftn7" href="#_ftnref7"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[7]</span></span></a>
This would be stressing the empirical foundations of science, but human sciences
have always been the area where the subjective is most easily detected – hence
the name ‘soft sciences’. Things are changing, however, with the biological
sciences rooting themselves in the ‘knowable’ gene – their accession to hard
objectivity is now a reality.</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn8">
<p style="text-align: justify;"><a name="_ftn8" href="#_ftnref8"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[8]</span></span></a> As would be evident in the models of sexual
intercourse in the medical texts with the masculine/feminine metaphors for
sperm/ovum – a model we used in the class as well, with a lively response, for
it spoke to traditional languages of patriarchy as well. This has been
discussed in some detail by Emily Martin (1991).</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn9">
<p style="text-align: justify;"><a name="_ftn9" href="#_ftnref9"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[9]</span></span></a>
Where experience is separate from the empirical.</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn10">
<p style="text-align: justify;"><a name="_ftn10" href="#_ftnref10"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[10]</span></span></a>
Things were different before … they will have to be done differently now …</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn11">
<p style="text-align: justify;"><a name="_ftn11" href="#_ftnref11"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[11]</span></span></a>
The place of women – in patriarchy, in a language outside patriarchy, has been
a recurrent theme in the thought of Luce Irigaray. Interpreting Plato’s myth,
she draws a picture of the analogies with the patriarchal arrangement, and
proposes another topology. Plato’s Idea she designates as the realm of the Same
– “the hom(m)osexual economy of men, in which women are simply objects of
exchange. … The world is described as the ‘other of the same’, i.e. otherness,
but … more or less adequate copy … woman is the material substratum for men’s
theories, their language, and their transactions … the ‘other of the same’ …
[or] women in patriarchy … [t]he ‘other of the other’ … is an as yet
non-existent female homosexual economy, women-amongst-themselves … [I]n so far
as she exists already, woman as the ‘other of the other’ exists in the
interstices of the realm of the [Same]. Her accession to language, to the
imaginary and symbolic processes of culture and society, is the condition for
the coming-to-be of sexual difference.” See ‘The same, the semblance, and the
other’ in Whitford (1991: 104).</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn12">
<p style="text-align: justify;"><a name="_ftn12" href="#_ftnref12"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[12]</span></span></a>
This is between us women – a common saying in Bengali that carries connotations
both of an exclusivity – a woman’s domain – as well as insignificance – this is
just something between us women.</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn13">
<p style="text-align: justify;"><a name="_ftn13" href="#_ftnref13"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[13]</span></span></a>
To travel from ‘mimesis imposed’ (Irigaray’s term for the mimesis imposed on
woman as mirror of the phallic model) to ‘mimetisme’ – “an act of deliberate
submission to phallic-symbolic categories in order to expose them”, where “[t]o
play with mimesis is … to try to recover the place of … exploitation by
discourse, without … simply [being] reduced to it … to resubmit … so as to make
‘visible’, by an effect of playful repetition [mimicry, mimetisme] what was
supposed to remain invisible …” is the Irigarayan project (Irigaray 1991,
quoted in Diamond 1997: 173).</p>
</div>
</div>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/rewiring-bodies/alternatives-from-situated-knowledges-to-standpoint-epistemology'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/rewiring-bodies/alternatives-from-situated-knowledges-to-standpoint-epistemology</a>
</p>
No publisherashahistories of internet in Indiarewiring bodieswomen and internetmathemes and medicine2011-08-03T09:42:03ZBlog EntryA Detour: The Internet and Forms of Narration: A Short Note
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/queer-histories-of-the-internet/a-detour
<b>There are a number of blog posts on the Internet about transgendered and transsexual people but there is a separation between print as a medium and Internet as a medium. This blog post informally discusses the authority that attaches to media other than the Internet and how this authority is displaced when it comes to Internet texts of the same nature.</b>
<p>Recently, Bangalore saw the release of the first <em>hijra</em> autobiography, The Truth About Me written by A Revati, a <em>hijra </em>activist working with Sangama. The event was celebrated by the queer community, as a public acknowledgment of the lives of <em>hijras</em>, in print. There is no taking away from the importance of this event, but this is not the first autobiographical text of this kind in the public domain. Internet has already seen the setting up of a number of blogs by trans people (transgendered, transsexual), most of them male to female<strong>1</strong>.</p>
<p>Some of the blogs speak about acceptance, and narrate the stories of these women. They narrate the lives they led, the violence they suffered, the transformations effected and the contemporary moments these women inhabit. Others are blogs set up by public figures (for instance, Rose, the Tamil television talk show host, and Kalki, who set up Sahodari, a magazine for transgendered people); yet others talk about the success stories of these transgendered women – Bobby Darling, Rose, and Laxmi Tripathi. One blog (gazalhopes), speaks of people with gender dysphoria and how they can and should deal with it. In this sense, there is sometimes a borrowing from medical discourse and Western discourse on transsexualism (for many of these women have undergone a sex change or are seeking to). There are links to American sites or blogs, and also the effort to produce videos or short films on the community in India. But these blogs are hardly discussed, except perhaps within the transgender community (and that too, that part of the community that can access the English text – except for the occasional blog in Tamil or Hindi).</p>
<p>Granted that there is still, in the public imagination, the separation between print as a medium and the Internet as a medium – print still carries with it the authority of the printed word, something that has been accepted by the publishing industry, that bears witness to financial transactions in the writing and printing of the text, that has been edited and reworked, that has perhaps been translated into more than one other language, that is displayed in shop windows, with a formal launch. So it then becomes an event that is covered by the media and added to the lgbt community’s list of events in the year.</p>
<p>This blog post will informally discuss then, the authority that attaches to media other than the Internet, and how this authority is displaced when it comes to Internet texts of the same nature. The transgender blogs operate through similar modes of self-narrations, beginning with the idea of the person being gender-troubled, and ending on a triumphant note of having achieved a transformation, whether in living conditions or in gender performance or in attitude shifts in other people (friends, family, strangers), and also refer to political activism, and being true to who and what you are. The blogs are in languages besides English (Tamil, for instance). But they lack the truth effect that print publications seem to carry in them – they become part of the vast expanse that is cyberspace, with many other such stories circulating, being read occasionally, and imitating each other (there are several blogs about transgendered people in the United States, for instance). It almost seems like since the Internet, as a mode of being, is autobiographical in its entirety, with everything you do being read as a part of who you are – whether it is emails, records, social networking, blogging, tweeting, downloading – that on the Internet, an autobiography does not then carry that same meaning that it does in the world of cinema, print, television and radio. The truth about yourself cannot be produced independently of your other practices online. For example, Wikipedia is a site that involves knowledge production of a certain kind, but is denied the authority that published texts on the same topics will automatically be granted. Reviews of published work do address this authority, of course, but the very fact of publishing grants it at the outset.</p>
<p>Another example of this difference is the Nishit Saran documentary film Summer in my Veins, which deals with a young boy coming out to his mother on camera – we watch the unfolding of the drama, the moment when the truth about him is revealed, the mother’s reactions to this revelation, and at the end we know that something has happened, of an autobiographical nature. On the Internet, one cannot witness such a dramatic unfolding, and in that way, the medium differs from those before it. The spectacle that is staged is no longer the truth about one’s identity and the drama that surrounds this truth – the theatricalisation is no longer of this nature. It is perhaps the revelation of the lie instead of truth. Sexual practices and the extent to which they are revealed always walk the shadowy line between explicitness and secrecy – people in this sense do not “come out” on the Internet. This is not to say that secret worlds do not exist, but everyone has secret worlds, everyone stages different facets of their own identity (whether to do with work, sex, family, relationships and politics). Representation, in this sense, shifts – it is no longer either just a mirror of yourself or the act of standing in for a community of people. The mirror surrounds you and so does the community. Revati, for instance, speaks as a member of the <em>hijra</em> community, as the first <em>hijra</em> to publish her autobiography (at least in the English press). Her text claims its place as a true-to-life portrayal of her life story, of her sense of selfhood. <br /><br />This is not to say that the transgender bloggers are trying to do something different – there also is the effort to hold up a mirror to life. But you are in this case always already joining a community of such bloggers instead of standing in for them. The blog in fact is a way of excavating this community of other transgendered Internet users – one blog (which speaks of the blogger’s personal experiences, sex reassignment surgery in Bangkok, and the sense of triumph and comfort that followed) includes several comments from others at various stages of this process (of change and the desire for change).</p>
<p>This is also not to say that in RL (real life) there are no structures of imitation, and that Revati’s text emerges from a blank slate. Politics obviously involves these very structures of imitation (disloyal or otherwise). The autobiography of the dalit woman (Bama’s Sangati), that of the sex worker (Nalini Jameela’s Autobiography of a Sex Worker), that of Revati, a<em> hijra</em> activist – we have seen a trajectory of such texts in the Indian context, and it is not as if this particular text came out of nowhere. But it manages to stand apart in a way in which the Internet text does not – the latter becomes part of a continuum of producing the self and the identity online. <br /><br />If this were true, what is to be made of it? Is the point simply to celebrate the diversity that exists in cyberspace? Or does the point lie elsewhere – in a discussion of the authority of texts and technologies, in this case when it comes to a production of the sexual and gendered self? This is not a set of scales where the weight of the printed word defeats the weight of the digitalized one – neither is it an argument talking about what the Internet enables. The question is – Does the form that is the autobiography smoothly get translated in the language of the Internet? Before discussing what the Internet does to content (how much is borrowed from the west in terms of vocabularies, how texts are layered in one space to displace the unitextness the print autobiography sometimes gives rise to), we need to see how forms play out in different media. The autobiography as a representational form (the telling of one’s self, and through this, the telling of others) – does the form retain its essential nature but lose its authority as a set of utterances, since it is surrounded by its own kind? Or does the fact that the Internet is embedded in the telling of the self change this essential nature irrevocably?</p>
<p class="discreet">1 <a class="external-link" href="http://www.gazalhopes.blogspot.com/">www.gazalhopes.blogspot.com</a></p>
<p class="discreet"><a class="external-link" href="http://www.malikatv.blogspot.com/2006_07_01_archive.html">http://www.malikatv.blogspot.com/2006_07_01_archive.html</a></p>
<p class="discreet"><a class="external-link" href="http://kalki.tblog.com/">http://kalki.tblog.com/</a></p>
<p class="discreet"><a class="external-link" href="http://madhuri.tblog.com/">http://madhuri.tblog.com/</a></p>
<p class="discreet"><a class="external-link" href="http://www.close2rose.com/blog.php"> http://www.close2rose.com/blog.php</a></p>
<p class="discreet"><a class="external-link" href="http://livingsmile.blogspot.com/2010/08/blog-post_05.html">http://livingsmile.blogspot.com/2010/08/blog-post_05.html</a></p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/queer-histories-of-the-internet/a-detour'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/queer-histories-of-the-internet/a-detour</a>
</p>
No publisherNitya Vhistories of internet in India2019-09-18T14:10:58ZBlog Entry