Standpoint Epistemologies-February 19

In the pursuit of advancing feminist goals for equality among the sexes, we must first understand the nature of gender oppression around the world.  The two articles, "The Feminist Standpoint: Toward a Specifically Feminist Historical Materialism" and "The Project of Feminist Epistemology: Perspectives from a Nonwestern Feminist," emphasize the structure of knowledge and its inability to be universal.  Hartsock uses a "feminist standpoint" to look at the value of women in materialism in a historical context.  To do this, she needed to eliminate nonwestern traditions from her text, as it would dilute her argument.  Using Marxist theory as a backdrop for her argument that the feminist standpoint accounts for all of the oppressed, she focuses on the sexual division of labor that reinforces male dominance.  Women are, if not more, essential to the labor force than men, as they work double days and are responsible for the creation of new beings.  Moreover, the nature of human development according to Freudian doctrine contributes to the polarization of many dualisms that exist between the two genders.  I thought it was interesting that she listed many dualisms, but did not mention public/private, which I believe would have been critical in explaining the global phenomenon of male dominance.  All of her dualisms justify sexual division of labor, but public/private accounts for women's absence from the economic public sphere as well as the political, as we see especially in Iran. For her article, the feminist standpoint encapsulates the material necessity of the proletariat to understand the oppression of women.
Narayan argues that the biggest weakness of feminist epistemology is that it does not account for nonwestern standpoints.   Feminist epistemology, according to both articles, attempts to link all oppressed groups.  However, western feminist tend to dominate feminist discourse, excluding or stereotyping the issues and values experienced by nonwestern feminists. Narayan makes it clear that west is not best when it comes to feminist epistemology, using the example that western romantic love is equally as oppressive as arranged marriages.  Furthermore, western voices dominating feminist discourse strengthens the legacy of colonization in nonwestern countries, a legacy that led to devaluation of the values of womanhood in these cultures.  Western feminist epistemology is inherently flawed due to its dominating nature, especially as it romanticizes the oppressed and fails to understand the true issues at hand.  The abandonment of nonwestern feminist concerns ultimately weakens the feminist platform on a global scale.