unjapanologist

Originally published at Academic FFF. You can comment here or there.

Three months just got sucked into the vortex of cultural week organisation hell. Now it's over and done, and I managed to submit art for Snapely Holidays and Snarry Holidays a day before the November 16 deadlines too, so I can finally focus on research again.

Apart from the manga translation work, of course, but no complaints about that :)

I'm taking part in a fairly awesome PhD course on feminist theory this academic year. Given that the authors of the fics and dojinshi I'm analysing are almost all women and girls, and the kind of open-ended and non-restrictive analysis I want to employ in my research seemed to be related to certain aspects of feminist thinking, I was hoping that a course of this kind might help give me some direction in precisely how to make that open-ended analysis a meaningful one. The first session was extremely promising in that regard. How I wish I'd attended this kind of thing as an undergrad.

Readings are pretty challenging, probably due to my inability to concentrate on anything for longer than a minute and the general lack of exposure to theoretical work that students get in our Japanese Studies course. I've never habitually studied theoretical discourse, and it shows. (The more I think on this, the more bizarre area studies starts to look like as a discipline. How can you give students a theoretical framework for studying every single last aspect of one particular geographical entity?) I'll be blogging and editing my notes on the sessions; it will probably be quite illuminating to look back on them next year and cringe at the ignorance on display. There will be smatterings of Dutch, Japanese and perhaps some other languages in the notes. There will also be the habitual lack of anything resembling organization. I won't be adding many personal opinions/interpretations until I feel a bit more confident that I've mastered the material enough to say something relevant.

Session 1: Feminist epistemology 22/10/2009

The first session actually took place a couple of weeks ago, but I was still in cultural week hell back then and had no time to blog. It was mostly an introduction to feminist epistemology, preceded by prof. Sarah Bracke outlining the purpose of the course -it's entirely new- and participants introducing themselves.

Readings

Chandra Mohanty (1984) “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses.” Boundary 2 12(3):333–58

Sandra Harding (1991) "Whose Science, whose knowledge? Thinking from Women's Lives." Cornell University Press. Chapter 5 and 6.

Donna Haraway (1991) "Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective." Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. Routledge.

Notes

1970s conversations
-> 1980s writings

intersecting opressions
1982 Gloria Hull e.a.: All the women are white etc
1983 This bridge called my back
1984 Sister, outsider (Audre Lorde)

simultaneous challenges from less privileged groups of women (canonized story: first feminist theory, then challenged)

1984 Notes towards a politics of location -> crucial to feminit epistemology: feminist thinking should be located, embedded

"a place on the map is a place within history"

niet "women have always...", maar waar, wanneer, voor wie was dit waar?

Sandra Harding US philosopher, early 80s "Science question in feminism", mapping out difference that feminist thinking is making in the academy

epistemology vs. multiple epistemologies (eg feminist epistemology)

women throughout history not generally constructed as producers of knowledge
women's lives not considered legitimate objects of knowledge in canon

STRATEGIES used by woman academics
feminist empiricism (exact sciences): sexist/androcentrist bias/distortion can be overcome by more rigorous scientific method -> corrective objectivity
virtues: strong appeal because it produces new facts and is less threatening for academic practice as usual

standpoint theory: situated thinking, elaborated by feminist theory, knowlege is socially situated and there's a link between knowledge and power relations -> a position of oppression produces better knowledge (bell hooks) because oppressed have to be aware of framework of oppressor as well as their own for survival, meaning they're familiar with double consciousness and knowledge production
virtues: more attuned to thinking about power relationships

feminist postmodernism
strong objectivity: piece of research/thinking manages to incorporate researcher
weak objectivity: academic practice of research removing him/herself from object of research
"Situated knowledges" boek Haraway: juggles standpoint theory in constructivist way: feminist objectivity is situated knowledges
haraway refutes "god's eye view", metafoor ivoren toren
relativism and objectivity are two sides of same coin: researcher is NOT SITUATED
how to produce knowledge that doesn't replicate set of power relations that researcher is involved in?