[показать] [GS_DISC:] Hypatia, Summer 2006. Special Issue: Feminist Epistemologies of Ignorance
Date: Mon, 19 Jun 2006 10:32:36 -0400

Hypatia
Volume 21, Number 3, Summer 2006
Special Issue: Feminist Epistemologies of Ignorance
Guest Editor: Nancy Tuana and Shannon Sullivan

CONTENTS

Tuana, Nancy.
Sullivan, Shannon, 1967- Introduction: Feminist Epistemologies of
Ignorance

Tuana, Nancy. The Speculum of Ignorance: The Women's Health Movement
and
Epistemologies of Ignorance
Abstract:
This essay aims to clarify the value of developing
systematic
studies of ignorance as a component of any robust theory of knowledge.
The
author employs feminist efforts to recover and create knowledge of
women's
bodies in the contemporary women's health movement as a case study for
cataloging different types of ignorance and shedding light on the
nature of
their production. She also helps us understand the ways resistance
movements
can be a helpful site for understanding how to identify, critique, and
transform ignorance.

Harding, Sandra. Two Influential Theories of Ignorance and Philosophy's
Interests in Ignoring Them
Abstract:
Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud provided powerful accounts of
systematic interested ignorance. Fifty years ago, Anglo-American
philosophies of science stigmatized Marx's and Freud's analyses as
models of
irrationality. They remain disvalued today, at a time when virtually
all
other humanities and social science disciplines have returned to
extract
valuable insights from them. Here the argument is that there are
reasons
distinctive to philosophy why such theories were especially disvalued
then
and why they remain so today. However, there are even better reasons
today
for philosophy to break from this history and find more fruitful ways
to
engage with systematic interested ignorance.

Townley, Cynthia. Toward a Revaluation of Ignorance
Abstract:
The development of nonoppressive ways of knowing other
persons,
often across significantly different social positions, is an important
project within feminism. An account of epistemic responsibility
attentive to
feminist concerns is developed here through a critique of
epistemophilia—the
love of knowledge to the point of myopia and its concurrent ignoring of
ignorance. Identifying a positive role for ignorance yields an enhanced
understanding of responsible knowledge practices.

Ortega, Mariana. Being Lovingly, Knowingly Ignorant: White Feminism and
Women of Color
Abstract:
The aim of this essay is to analyze the notion of "loving,
knowing ignorance," a type of "arrogant perception" that produces
ignorance
about women of color and their work at the same time that it proclaims
to
have both knowledge about and loving perception toward them. The first
part
discusses Marilyn Frye's accounts of "arrogant" as well as of "loving"
perception and presents an explanation of "loving, knowing ignorance."
The
second part discusses the work of Audre Lorde, Elizabeth Spelman, and
María
Lugones in their attempts to deal with the issue of arrogant perception
within feminism, and examines how Lugones's notion of
"'world'-traveling"
may help us deal with "loving, knowing ignorance." Ultimately, the
author
suggests that we need to become aware of instances of "loving, knowing
ignorance," especially if we are to stay true to Third Wave feminism's
commitment to diversity.

Lugones, Maria, 1944- On Complex Communication
Abstract:
This essay examines liminality as space of which dominant
groups
largely are ignorant. The limen is at the edge of hardened structures,
a
place where transgression of the reigning order is possible. As such,
it
both offers communicative openings and presents communicative impasses
to
liminal beings. For the limen to be a coalitional space, complex
communication is required. This requires praxical awareness of one's
own
multiplicity and a recognition of the other's opacity that does not
attempt
to assimilate it into one's own familiar meanings. Refusing the
assumption
of transparency and operating with relational identities, the complex
communication that occurs in the limen—often invisible to dominant
groups—can enable genuine coalition and effective resistance to
domination.

Chanter, Tina, 1960- Abjection and the Constitutive Nature of
Difference:
Class Mourning in Margaret's Museum and Legitimating Myths of Innocence
in
Casablanca
Abstract:
This essay examines the connections between ignorance and
abjection. Chanter relates Julia Kristeva's notion of abjection to the
mechanisms of division found in feminist theory, race theory, film
theory,
and cultural theory. The neglect of the co-constitutive relationships
among
such categories as gender, race, and class produces abjection. If those
categories are treated as separate parts of a person's identity that
merely
interlock or intermesh, they are rendered invisible and unknowable even
in
the very discourses about them. Race thus becomes gender's unthought
other,
just as gender becomes the excluded other of race. Via an exploration
of
Margaret's Museum and Casablanca, the author shows why the various
sexual,
racial, and nationalist dynamics of the two films cannot be reduced to
class
or commodity fetishism, following Karl Marx, or psychoanalytic
fetishism,
following Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan. Whether they are
crystallized in
Marxist or Lacanian terms, fetishistic currencies of exchange are
haunted by
an imaginary populated by unthought, abject figures. Ejected from the
systems of exchange consecrated as symbolic, fragmented, dislocated,
diseased body parts inform and constitute meaning.

May, Vivian M. Trauma in Paradise: Willful and Strategic Ignorance in
Cereus
Blooms at Night
Abstract:
Shani Mootoo's Cereus Blooms at Night demonstrates how
willful
and strategic epistemologies of ignorance intertwine. By rejecting a
compartmentalized approach to domination, Mootoo highlights the
disjuncture
between idealized images of family, home, love, and the Caribbean and
traumatic events of personal and cultural history. Mootoo not only asks
readers to take up resistant questioning, argues May, but also to
recognize
that epistemology must acknowledge unspeakable and silenced stories to
adequately account for multiple ways of knowing.

Deutscher, Penelope, 1966- When Feminism Is "High" and Ignorance Is
"Low":
Harriet Taylor Mill on the Progress of the Species
Abstract:
This essay considers the important role attributed to
education
in the writings of nineteenth-century feminist Harriet Taylor Mill.
Taylor
Mill connected ignorance to inequality between the sexes. She called up
the
specter of regression into lowness and ignorance when she associated
feminism with progress. As she stressed the importance of education,
she
constructed an 'other' to feminism, variously associated with lowness,
poverty, and the primitive. She made a case for the advantages of
civilization (education, enfranchisement, equality) to be opened up to
women. Yet Taylor Mill's position that the ignorant poor, like all
humans,
should be in a position of so-called "perfect equality" drifted
intermittently into the view that the elevation of women to perfect
equality
would refine and elevate the lower classes.

Heldke, Lisa M. (Lisa Maree), 1960- Farming Made Her Stupid
Abstract:
This essay is an examination of stupid knowing, an attempt
to
catalog a particular species of knowing, and to understand when, how,
and
why the label "stupid" gets applied to marginalized groups of knowers.
Heldke examines the ways the defining processes work and the conditions
that
make them possible, by considering one group of people who get defined
as
stupid: rural people. In part, the author intends her identification
and
categorization of stupid knowing to support the work of theorists of
resistance who have identified ways that those marginalized as stupid
knowers use the cloak of their purported stupidity in the aid of their
resistance. Heldke also hopes to add to the existing critique of the
hierarchies of knowing an understanding of one particular way one form
of
knowledge is devalued: stupidification. Why are some forms of knowledge
actually regarded as leaving one incapable of other forms of rational
thought?

Brand, Peggy Zeglin. Feminist Art Epistemologies: Understanding
Feminist Art
Abstract:
Feminist art epistemologies (FAEs) greatly aid the
understanding
of feminist art, particularly when they serve to illuminate the hidden
meanings of an artist's intent. The success of parodic imagery produced
by
feminist artists (feminist visual parodies, FVPs) necessarily depends
upon a
viewer's recognition of the original work of art created by a male
artist
and the realization of the parodist's intent to ridicule and satirize.
As
Brand shows in this essay, such recognition and realization constitute
the
knowledge of a well-(in)formed FAE. Without it, misinterpretation is
possible and viewers fail to experience and enjoy a full and rewarding
encounter with a provocative and subversive work of art.

Book Reviews

* Hekman, Susan J. The Subject of Liberty: Toward a Feminist Theory of
Freedom, and: The Claims of Culture: Equality and Diversity in the
Global
Era (review)
* Weiss, Gail, 1959- Toward a Phenomenology of Sexual Difference:
Husserl,
Merleau-Ponty, Beauvoir (review)
* Moya, Paula M. L. Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes: Theorizing Coalition
against
Multiple Oppressions (review)
* Babbitt, Susan E. Reading across Borders: Storytelling and Knowledges
of
Resistance (review)
* O'Connor, Peg, 1965- Wittgenstein: A Feminist Interpretation (review)
* Bowden, Peta, 1946- Embodied Care: Jane Addams, Maurice
Merleau-Ponty, and
Feminist Ethics (review)
* Calhoun, Cheshire. Moral Psychology: Feminist Ethics and Social
Theory
(review)
* Veltman, Andrea. The Other Within: Ethics, Politics, and the Body in
Simone de Beauvoir (review)
Musing
* Code, Lorraine. Skepticism and the Lure of Ambiguity

Contributors

* Notes on Contributors
Books Received

* Books Received