From Identity to Non-Identity & Back Again: Feminist Dialectical Realism - Laura Gillman скачать в хорошем качестве

From Identity to Non-Identity & Back Again: Feminist Dialectical Realism - Laura Gillman

Abstract: There has been little engagement of critical realism with feminist theory, or of postpositivist realism and critical realism. A notable although not exclusive exception in terms of critical realism and feminism, other than the 2018 collection of essays, Gender Feminism and Critical Realism: Exchanges, Challenges, Synergies, edited by Lena Gunnarsson, Angela Martinez Dy and Michiel van Ingen, are the exchanges between Tony Lawson and a group of feminist scholars, published between 1999 and 2003. In the dialogue, Lawson suggested that feminist theorists strengthen their epistemological concepts of situated knowledge and epistemic privilege by bridging them with a social ontology. In working to model such a project and articulate an inclusive social ontology, Lawson posited his ontological concept of systematic contrasts as a resource for these epistemological concepts, affirming that in open (social) systems with internally related social positionings, one can articulate an ontological generality, namely, that contrasts of event regularities and interests exist in the social domain. Feminist philosophers engaged in the debate responded that scholars invoking generalities reinstate neutrality in research; mask or worse yet dismiss the deeply contextual and performative components of gendered, raced, and classed interventions in processes of discovery, understanding and knowledge creation; and fail to take their own social positioning into account in the construction of knowledge, thereby giving to understand that social ontological concepts and classifications seem to somehow preexist culture and politics rather than coming into existence within them. These concerns are echoed more broadly within feminist circles. Feminist philosopher Sally Haslanger underscores the tensions between metaphysical and feminist projects. Feminism is a normative project while metaphysics is not. Haslanger additionally affirms that feminists have always been concerned with ontology and metaphysics. The work does not get done, however, under the rubric of a sub-discipline, e.g. feminist metaphysics, but rather under the general rubric of feminist theory, within an open-ended interdisciplinary engagement. In this presentation, I locate myself within this interdisciplinary wing of feminist thought, one that has always highlighted the constellated relationship of ontology and epistemology and the entanglement of both with values and interests. My goal is to highlight the convergences and divergences of postpositivist realism, a feminist and minority scholars studies project originating in the humanities, and critical realism, a project originating in the social and natural sciences beginning with the work of Roy Bhaskar. I also evaluate feminist theory’s relationship to the distinct realisms. My talk begins by comparing feminism’s entry points into realist theories with critical realist interventions. I introduce the concepts of situated rationality and standpoint epistemology as early feminist efforts to address theoretical limitations in traditional science. I then trace these concepts within postpositivist realism as they get taken up in the project of a reconstructed hermeneutics; and within dialectical realism as they become reworked in a project of a reconstructed empiricism. I end with some thoughts about the implications of a feminist dialectical realism with regards to traditional methodologies, and suggest some methodological strategies: recursivity and pluritopic hermeneutics.