Donna Haraway

Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective
Donna Haraway
Feminist Studies, Vol. 14, No. 3. (Autumn, 1988), pp. 575-599.


Holy Feminist batman!!!! These are the words Robin might utter were he to read this article... Hehe, this is not a bad thing so please don't take it as such.

"Vision can be good for avoiding binary oppositions. I would like to
insist on the embodied nature of all vision and so reclaim the sensory
system that has been used to signify a leap out of the marked
body and into a conquering gaze from nowhere (page 8)."

We had an interesting talk earlier this semester about gaze, namely the male gaze. The current dominant gaze being male it engulfs us and everything we view. So this discussion on vision is quite interesting. Reclaiming the "sensory system" is an interesting idea and one that Mulvey was trying to convey. I cannot fathom what it would take for this to happen. Reconstructing the entire societal stance with regards to what is visible and how things are portrayed is a daunting task. It is almost as daunting as Kristeva's attempts to abandon the patriarchal form of language and write in poetry.

"Understanding how these visual systems work, technically, socially, and psychically,
ought to be a way of embodying feminist objectivity."

Understanding how any system works with regards to those societal elements is a way to embody any form of objectivity. If we examine freud or foucault, lacan, or mulvey we could see how they all fit into this grander schema of objectivity, and while their ideas may differ vastly they all also share one thing the desire to understand how we get to where we are. The bold social constructionist ideals rely on the interwoven nature of physicality, social structures, and technical learnings. It is in the intersection of these that we determine our subjectivity, our place in the world. Where we stand and what we believe can all be understand by examining our experiences in terms of the elements described in the above quote. The genealogy of thoughts can explain where the differing theories have come from and that is why it is fun to examine them, it is more fun to figure out why they are not right. Is it wrong to think that no one theory of subjectivity is right? I think not. I think they are all valuable, each has its own merit but the wide array of opinions makes me think there is no one explanation and that a composite view is where its at. I have no idea how i digressed as far as i did, that is an impressive tangent. Oh no i must hold back more nerd humor is trying to come through.

Thank you for the amazing class. I'm glad this could be my last class at CU.