Sociology 2240E Lecture Notes - Lecture 19: Bechdel Test, Feminist Sociology, Frankfurt School
30 Apr 2018
School
Department
Course
Professor
Gender and feminism(s)
Monday, April 9, 2018
10:37 PM
Point of departure: social theory toolbox
• Are women's voices absent from public discourse?
o Consider the 'bechdel test' (a heuristic for thinking about the inclusion and representation
of women in media)
• At least two women in a movie/tv (who have names)
▪ Who talk to each other about something other than a man
• Epistemology ('knowledge' and 'explanation'
o The study of the nature of knowledge and justification
o Specifically, the study of the features, conditions, and limits of knowledge
• What can we know (ex. About society and how do we know it)
• 'problematic' refers to a particular set of conditions warranting (or eligible for) further critical
examination, and the kinds of issues, debates, tensions, that may arise therefrom
o May also pertain to the 'field' or possible questions or 'problems' accessible from a given
standpoint/paradigm
o Allows us to think critically about the context in which social problems are identified in the
first place and to perhaps 'problematize' issues that are systemic and might therefore
escapes our conscious consideration
• Combined, these two concepts might make us think about, or problematize, how knowledge itself
oes to e deeed edile…
o Foucault week 6: the political question is truth itself
o Thomas week 7: if men define situations as real, they are real in their own consequences'
o Bourdieu week 8: the struggle for symbolic is a struggle to define what's taken as 'common
sense'
o As sociologists: are there social differences in what kinds of knowledges are deemed 'valid'
or 'truthful'
o Bourdieu week 8: sociology as a martial art -a means of self-defence
• Basically you use it to defend yourself, without having the right to use it for unfair
attacks
• How can sociological analysis be used as 'self-defence' in confronting and critiquing
unjust social relations
Point of departure
• This week: taking up the question of 'credibility' and 'validity' -and the power relations that
underlie them
o Smith and collins develop critical feminist sociologies that end up reshaping the discipline
• We'll look at smith via marx and 'standpoint theory'
• We'll look at collins as an 'intersectional' theorists
Smith's critique of sociology (and society)
• Recall: problems concerning the 'value-fee' 'detahed' stud of soial ealit…
• Smith argues that 'what one knows is affected by where one stands in society' therefore
o No one can have complete, objective knowledge
o No two people have exactly the same standpoint
o We must not take the standpoint from which we speak for granted
• Because sociology's first practioners were almost exclusively men, the ideas, concerns, interests
reflected those of men
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o Both mainstream and radical sociology fail to adequately investigate areas of social life
pertinent to women's lives
• Ex. Sexual reproduction, childcare, unpaid domestic labour, harassment
• Overall effect/'unintended consequences':
o The knowledge and ideas that emerged served to exclude, alienate women from sociology
• Sociology fails to describe significant aspects of social reality
• But note: its not just a matter of women's issues of women's inclusion that's at stake in her
critique
o Recall: marx's hierarchical conception of social power, critique of Bourgeois ideology as the
'ruling ideas' of society
o Today: in a similar vein, smith examines the 'relations of ruling' and the effects of male
domination on what gets accepted as 'knowable' in society and sociology
• Shes going to do it using marx, with specific reference to the male domination of the
social sciences
• Smith speaks to a 'disjuncture' between women's experience of the world and the available
concepts and theoretical schemes within society and social theory
o Although this doiat oeptio pupots to e ojetie, it does’t adeuatel desie
women's subjective or objective experience
o Smith: women become compelled 'to think their world in the concepts and terms in which
men think theirs'
o Hence, they're faced with 2 antagonistic forms of consciousness -what smith calls bifurcated
consciousness
• Recall: Marxian notion of 'false consciousness', alienation
• Today: smith's notion of the 'bifurcated consciousness'
• Consider: two mods of knowing, experiencing, doing
o One located in the body, which acts, moves, occupies space
o Once that extends beyond this, that operates abstractly
• Smith -the established social forms of consciousness alienate women from their own experience'
• Smith's sociological insight: there's an issue of power and gendered going on here
o The reproduction of male domination in more abstract, socially venerated 'ways of knowing'
is enabled by:
• The socialized association of male consciousness with rationality
• The domestic labour traditionally preformed by women -and social subordination of
that labour
• The conditions ('privileges') that allow men not to have to focus upon their bodily
existence in the same way as women
• We ight theefoe eaie the aious 'elatios of ulig' that ae i opeatio hee…
o Institutional ethnography: a method of elucidating and examining the relationship between
everyday activities and experiences and larger institutional imperatives'
• Looks at structures of power (institutions)
• And micro-level practices (ethnography)
• Key points so far:
o Not simply calling for a shift in subject matter -this is more than just talking on more 'topics'
o Like marx, calls for something more radical: a shift in how sociologists understand the
conditions of peoples experiences in contemporary capitalist society
• Smith's radical proposal:
o Rather than explaining behaviour, we begin from where people are in the world, explaining
the soial elatios of the soiet of hih e ae pat…We…egi fo a diffeet
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