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Foucault’s Deconstruction of the Subject: A Feminist Epistemological Critique
Introduction
In this paper, I examine the merits of a feminist standpoint epistemology as a response to
Foucault’s argument for a self-referential, autonomous discourse which he gives in The Order of
Things and the 1969 lecture What is An Author? Foucault initially presents the idea of
autonomous language in The Order of Things as a natural progression of epistemology in the
modern era. He expounds upon this claim in the lecture What is an Author?, stating that the
author exists as nothing but a function within the textual experience of discourse rather than as a
subjective consciousness which infuses text with meaning. I will examine Foucault’s claims in
relation to political discourse about power and ultimately refute them as being too abstract and
remote from contemporary society to fully encompass the manner in which power dynamics
function. Additionally, I will argue that although Foucault’s presentation of subjectivity
dismantles certain forms of social hierarchy, it does not address a complete analysis of the
interplay of power structures. In other words, he fails to recognize that certain standpoints cannot
afford to minimize subjectivity if the discourse concerning power is to be genuine. I will make
this argument using Donna Haraway and Sandra Harding’s feminist epistemological critiques, as
well as support from Calvin Schrag’s theory of the subject’s importance in community after postpostmodernity. To solve Foucault’s issue of subjectivity, I assert that feminist standpoint theory
provides a consideration of author which is not completely ahistorical nor excessively relative,
but rather, sufficiently appropriate in terms of recognizing the value of subject within political
discourse.
Foucault’s argument for language as self-referential appears in the book The Order of
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Things, where Foucault states that “language becomes object”1 in comparison to the more
representative function language possessed during the Classical and Renaissance eras. He argues
that “to know language is no longer to come as close as possible to knowledge itself; it is merely
to apply the methods of understanding in general to a particular domain of objectivity.”2 In other
words, language has no value other than being a function of the text. For Foucault, the
knowledge of language simply becomes the knowledge of how to utilize that particular tool,
rather than the knowledge of any epistemological truth. In the lecture What is an Author?, he
wants to eliminate questions which infer a subjective consciousness within text, seeing as this
would establish language as epistemically valuable instead of as an objective tool.3 Instead,
Foucault poses the question of “how, under what conditions, and in what forms can something
like a subject appear in the order of discourse?”4 However, through the avoidance of questions
such as how a subjective consciousness can infuse text with meaning, Foucault ignores certain
power structures which social and political location can exert on an author or which an author
can exert on the audience. It is true that when Foucault deemphasizes the author, the objective in
mind is to eliminate the possibility of any social hierarchy through the erasure of its constituents.
However, although this can be successful in some cases, the lack of emphasis on the subject
contains a danger of not sufficiently addressing certain types of power. From the position of
feminist standpoint epistemology, the ability to extract the author from the text is nearly
impossible and any success in doing so could be regarded as ignorance. Standpoint theory refutes
the idea that language “was to be an idealized agent who performed the ‘God trick’ of speaking
1
Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. New York: Pantheon Books, 1971,
294.
2
Ibid., 296.
3
Foucault, Michel, and James D. Faubion. Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology. New York: New Press, 1998 294.
4
Ibid., 221.
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authoritatively about everything in the world from no particular perspective or location at all.” 5
Alternatively, standpoint epistemology views the consideration of social and political views as a
form of enrichment of the text and a rightful acknowledgment of power structures inherent in
knowledge and writing. Thus, the lack of a sovereign author in Michel Foucault’s presentation of
discourse provides a starkly limited and remote examination of discourse, which does not take
into account the significance of social and political locations. A more subversive and realistic
form of political discourse can be achieved through the consideration of the author’s experience
and identity, as exemplified by feminist standpoint theory.
Foucault and the Deconstruction of the Subject
Foucault’s earliest and most foundational works include notions of man as “an invention
of recent date” which will promptly “be erased like a face drawn in the sand at the edge of the
sea.”6 He further elaborates on such statements both in The Order of Things and What Is An
Author? to mean an eventual deconstruction of the author. However what exactly does
Foucault’s erasure of subjectivity entail?
First and foremost, Foucault’s notion of the subject/author can be defined as “the
privileged moment of individualization in the history of ideas, knowledge, literature, philosophy,
and the sciences.”7 In other words, he defines the subject to be a source of identity which
prevails over a text during “privileged” moments. It is also important to keep in mind that
Foucault’s notion of the subject/author is a sovereign one, meaning that he doesn’t deny a
presence of individuality altogether but rather one that holds all the power of meaning within a
5
Harding, Sandra G. The Feminist Standpoint Theory Reader: Intellectual and Political Controversies. New York:
Routledge, 2004, 30.
6
7
Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things: An Archeology of Human Sciences. New York: Pantheon Books, 1971, 387.
Foucault, Michel, and James D. Faubion. Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology. New York: New Press, 1998, 205.
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text. He continues on to commence the deconstruction of the subject with the question posed by
Beckett, “‘what does it matter who is speaking, someone said, what does it matter who is
speaking.’”8 By commencing the discussion with such a question, Foucault points to a lapse of
authorship within writing which has become an “immanent rule”9 for discourse and impedes any
attempt at attributing meaning to the individual. Simply put, according to Foucault, the lack of
sovereign subject isn’t simply a choice or tendency, but rather a fundamental status in language.
In The Order of Things, Foucault defines the aversion to authorial power as a shift from the
Romantic mode of writing during the Renaissance to the self-referential status which discourse
holds currently. By self-referential status, he means that a state of language which finds meaning
solely within the functions of itself rather than any sort of power from the author. “From the
nineteenth century, language began to fold in upon itself, to acquire its own particular density, to
deploy a history, an objectivity, and laws of its own. It became one object of knowledge among
others, on the same level as living beings, wealth and value, and the history of the events and
men.”10 In other words, language no longer depends a human referent to give the text meaning.
The discourse exists independently of any such character, stripping the author of any
responsibility other than that of simply being a function. Thus, any sort of sovereign subject
becomes irrelevant and Foucault poses the “question of creating a space into which the writing
subject constantly disappears.”11 Simply put, Foucault argues that writing and language isolated
tools which do not depend on the power of a single individual (the author) for meaning.
8
Ibid., 205.
Ibid., 206.
10
Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things: An Archeology of Human Sciences. New York Pantheon Books, 1971, 296.
11
Foucault, Michel, and James D. Faubion. Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology. New York: New Press, 1998, 207.
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There are however some instances where Foucault accepts counter-examples to the idea
that all subjects are presented as ideological authors, such as instances of transdiscursive writers,
such as Karl Marx. By transdiscursive writers, Foucault means the individuals who have created
a new discipline altogether and thus, have an influence which spans across discourses. He calls
such examples “discursive incarnations,”12 due to the fact that these writers have constructed a
particular genre of discourse which gave birth to writing within that field. Writers such as Karl
Marx created their respective discourses and withdrew into the language, replacing the notion of
authorship with genre or theory in general. However, even with examples such as transdiscursive
writers, Foucault argues that the entire presence must be deleted to the point where the name
Karl Marx carries no leverage whatsoever, regardless whether the text is a work of fiction or
non-fiction and if the author is presented in an ideological manner or not. “The author is not an
indefinite source of situations which fill a work; the author does not precede the works; he is a
certain functional principle by which, in our culture, one limits, excludes and chooses; in short,
by which one impedes the free circulation, the free manipulation, the free composition, the free
decomposition and recomposition of fiction,” Foucault states.13 By stating this, he reasserts the
idea that the author should not be the primary source to consult when searching for the meaning
of a text nor does authorship provide any conditions for how to make sense of the text.
Therefore, even with the examples of transdiscursive writers, Foucault exhibits hesitation to
attribute any meaning whatsoever to the identities themselves. Karl Marx did not precede the
discourse of Marxism; he is simply a function of it, a presence which must be acknowledged but
not consulted to determine understanding.
12
13
Ibid., 218.
Ibid., 221.
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Furthermore, Foucault warns against the cult of personality which occurs when the
subject is valorized to an excessive extent and becomes an idolized. “We are used to thinking
that the author is so different from all other men, and so transcendent with regard to all languages
that, as soon as he speaks, meaning begins to proliferate, to proliferate indefinitely.”14 In other
words, the weight of an author’s name can engender meaning not only disingenuously, but to a
progressively heightening degree which has no true foundation other than the identity of the
subject. According to Foucault’s analysis, the danger of such an idolization not only falsely
attributes meaning to the author, but additionally limits the meaning of a text solely to the
author’s intention. Thus, an excessive amount of credit given to the subject of discourse has a
high potential to distort the language and sense of discourse.
Subsequently, Foucault reacts to the dilemma of the proliferation of meaning by
predicting an inevitable lapse of sovereign author in the near future. He argues that the
constraints that an author imposes on text renders subjectivity obsolete and eventually, any
notion of defining individuality will no longer exist. “I think that, as our society changes, at the
very moment when it is in the process of changing, the author function will disappear, and in
such a manner that fiction and its polysemous texts will once again function according to another
mode but still with a system of constraint – one that will no longer be the author but will have to
be determined, or perhaps, experienced.” 15 Thus, Foucault firmly asserts the deconstruction of
subject as an undeniable future outcome. However, the lecture What is an Author? never delves
into an explanation of the mechanisms which would push forward such a change.
14
15
Ibid., 221.
Ibid., 222.
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Through assertions of the inevitability of self-referential discourse, Foucault not only
provides a descriptive analysis but also attributes the lack of sovereign author to a status of
language which is already unfolding. He does this while utilizing Nietzsche’s death of God/man
as a reference. In The Order of Things, Foucault states:
…Nietzsche rediscovered the point at which man and God belong to one another,
at which the death of the second is synonymous with the disappearance of the
first, and at which the promise of the superman signifies first and foremost the
imminence of the death of man. In this, Nietzsche, offering this future to us as
both promise and task, marks the threshold beyond which contemporary
philosophy can begin thinking again; and he will no doubt continue for a long
while to dominate its advance…It is no longer possible to think in our day other
than in the void left by man’s disappearance. 16
By the “disappearance of man,” Foucault of course does not mean the literal
disappearance of man, but the figurative deconstruction of the subject. Through the utilization
and agreement with Nietzsche’s philosophy, he presents his analysis as not only descriptive but
prescriptive. In fact, although Foucault gives no solutions or alternatives to the space left behind
the subject, he argues that there is no other framework within which to think. Thus, the
deconstruction of subject is not only a status which Foucault argues for, but also believes is
inherently necessary and present within the modern and post-modern era.
It is important to note that Foucault initiates the project of deconstructing the subject with
the objective of eliminating any room for power structures. The de-valorization of the subject
would entail an equalization between all texts, seeing no one author could be privileged over
another. However, such an analysis of the relationship between subject and power structures is
too limited and remote. In order to fully understand the different interplays of forces and power,
16
Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. New York: Pantheon Books, 1971,
342.
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it is essential to look as the social and political location of the subject, such as feminist
epistemology.
The Importance of the Self in Community According to Feminist Standpoint Epistemology
Elizabeth Anderson, a noted professor of social and political philosophy at the University
of Michigan, writes in Feminist Epistemology: An Interpretation and a Defense, that feminist
epistemology is “the branch of social epistemology that investigates the influence of socially
constructed conceptions and norms of gender and gender-specific interests and experiences on
the production of knowledge.”17 In other words, feminist epistemology provides an account of
knowledge in which the proper construction of truth and meaning relies on the social and
political position of the knower. Although the feminist epistemological critique specifies gender
as a principle influence of knowledge, the action of considering the perspective of gender points
to the manner in which Foucault’s deconstruction of subject falters in terms of defying power
structures overall.
First and foremost, the main principle to highlight within feminist standpoint
epistemology is the fact that standpoint epistemology does not focus on the female subject solely
as a single individual, but more significantly, as a single individual participating and reflecting in
the larger community of womanhood. In Defense of Ignorance: Its Value for Knowers and Roles
in Feminist and Social Epistemologies, Cynthia Townley states “that understanding relationships
is integral to understanding epistemic practices…An adequate epistemology must pay attention
to epistemic interactions, both for theoretical completeness, and in order to be useful, since most
17
Anderson, Elizabeth. "Feminist Epistemology: An Interpretation and a Defense." Hypatia 10, no. 3 (1995): 50-84.
doi:10.1111/j.1527-2001.1995.tb00737.x, 54.
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dealings with knowledge are dealers with other knowers.”18 In other words, feminist
epistemology not only accounts for the political and social position of the female knower, but
also the female knower in regards to other female knowers. Thus, feminist social epistemology
highlights the importance of the subject in regards to community and how community founds the
manner in which meaning can be found within a text. When analyzing the self, it is important to
remember that the subject does not exist within a vacuum, but also in relation to other subjects
which reflect a larger reality. As Calvin Schrag states, “community is constitutive of selfhood.”19
There is no consideration of the community without the consideration of the self and
subsequently, Foucault’s deconstruction of subject lacks a crucial aspect of understanding the
power structures between communities within political discourse.
In Habermas and Lyotard on Post-Modernity¸ Richard Rorty states that Foucault’s
analysis contains:
a dryness produced by a lack of identification with any social context, any social
communication. Foucault once said that he would like to write ‘so as to have no
face...’ There is no ‘we’ to be found in Foucault’s writings, nor in those of many
of his French contemporaries. It is this remoteness which reminds one of the
conservative who pours cold water on hopes for reform, who affects to look at the
problems of his fellow citizens with the eye of the future historian.20
Rorty also goes on to describe Foucault as “a stoic, dispassionate observer of the present
social order, rather than its concerned critic.”21 In other words, the lack of acknowledgment for
the self within Foucault’s writing puts him in a position where he no longer engages with
discourse on a practical level. The level at which Foucault writes comes from one which is
detached and inconsiderate of the relationships between knowers, e.g. community. In what
18
Townley, Cynthia. A Defense of Ignorance: Its Value for Knowers and Roles in Feminist and Social Epistemologies.
Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2011, X.
19
Schrag, Calvin O. The Self after Postmodernity. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997, 78.
20
Rorty, Richard. "Habermas and Lyotard on Post-Modernity." Praxis International 4, no. 1 (April 1984): 32-44.
http://lchc.ucsd.edu/MCA/Mail/xmcamail.2012_11.dir/pdfra52oWH3FA.pdf, 40.
21
Ibid., 40.
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manner could community exist without an acknowledgment of the subject? Subsequently, how
could an examination of power structures, such as hierarchies between genders, be examined if
there is no acknowledgment of community? Foucault hopes to endorse a universal equality
within discourse when he argues to cease turning to the author to for meaning. However,
ignorance of the author is in effect, ignorance of the relationship between the author and other
subjects, and consequently, the power structures at play within a text.
Feminist standpoint epistemology allows for a consideration of the subject through
community which no longer partakes in the false dichotomies of subjective versus objective or
the absolute versus relative, which Schrag calls “conceptual constructs of a theoretical positiontaking that are no longer compelling, options bereft of practical consequences for an
understanding of ourselves and the world.”22 On the contrary, the theory provides a solution to
the polarized view of discourse which Foucault promotes, though the notion of “situated
knowledges,” first coined by Donna Haraway in 1988 to synthesize the states of subjectivity and
objectivity.23 The term “situated knowledge” refers to a feminist epistemological approach to
objectivity which extensively takes into account the social construction of knowledge/meaning
as well as the manner in which perspective shapes the nature of knowledge.24 Haraway poses the
problem which situated knowledge seeks to answer as such:
‘our’ problem is how to have simultaneously an account of radical historical
contingency for all knowledge claims and knowing subjects, a critical practice for
recognizing our own ‘semiotic technologies’ for making meanings and a nononsense commitment to faithful accounts of a ‘real’ world, one that can be
partially shared and that is friendly to earthwide projects of finite freedom,
22
Schrag, Calvin O. The Self after Postmodernity. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997, 108.
Haraway, Donna. “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial
Perspective.” Feminist Studies 14, no. 3 (1988): 575-99. doi: 10.203/3178066.
24
Grasswick, Heidi. "Feminist Social Epistemology." Stanford University. 2006. Accessed October 8, 2016.
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/feminist-social-epistemology/.
23
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adequate material abundance, modest meaning in suffering and limited
happiness…We also don’t want to theorize the world, much less act within it, in
terms of Global Systems, but we do need an earthwide network of connections,
including the ability partially to translate knowledges among very different – and
power-differentiated – communities.25
In other words, the problem which Foucault’s deconstruction of the subject presents is
one of favoring the objective side of the false dichotomy when in reality, meaning is much more
nuanced. Situated knowledge provides an acknowledgment of “semiotic technologies” which
reside internally, through the identification and recognition of individuals in relation to larger
communities, rather than externally, through the practice of defining autonomous systems, as
Foucault does. By de-emphasizing the subject, Foucault restricts the meaning of a text to the
self-referential system of language and discourse. However, discourse on its own cannot account
for the power dynamics which the subject faces on a daily basis and in each aspect of reality,
including the aspects which have driven the author to not only write and know, but the manner in
which they write and know. Thus, Haraway emphasizes the fact that Global Systems are not
sufficient forms for identifying meaning within a text and proposes that a network of connections
is necessary, particularly one which possesses the ability to translate knowledge between powerdifferentiated communities. The feminist epistemological tool of situated knowledge provides
the resources for such a network.
Situated knowledge answers Foucault’s deconstruction of subject issue by providing a
form of “partial” vision or partial perspective. It is a manner in which to position the individual
within a larger community and to recognize that positions are crucial to meaning and knowledge
claims. As Haraway states, “only those occupying the positions of the dominators are self-
25
Haraway, Donna. “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial
Perspective.” Feminist Studies 14, no. 3 (1988): 575-99. doi: 10.203/3178066, 579-580.
12
identical, unmarked, disembodied, unmediated, transcendent, born again.”26 Thus, the solution is
to recognize an individual’s position in political discourse as not simply a function of the text,
but an embodiment of certain truths or meanings. Haraway’s situated knowledge does so in a
series of steps: an initial identification of the partial perspective27, a recognition that subdued
voices possess a more telling account of reality than those in dominant positions28 and an
application of the said partial perspective to the larger web or spectrum of community rather than
a dichotomy. For example, we must not approach one female’s perspective as an embodiment of
all femininity, but rather as a point on the spectrum of female experience.29 Haraway writes that
“situated knowledges are about communities, not about isolated individuals…Its images are not
the products of escape and transcendence of limits (the view from above), but the joining of
partial views and halting voices into a collective subject position that promises a vision of the
means of ongoing finite embodiment, of living within means and contradictions – of views from
somewhere.”30 Therefore, situated knowledge evades the vapid approach of relativism as a
solution to the deconstruction of subject by claiming that simply the identity of an individual is
not grounds for locating the meaning of text. The subject becomes valuable when put in context
of the community which it reflects and embodies inevitably, seeing as individuals do not exist in
a vacuum, free of all influence. As Calvin Schrag claims, “the space of such truth claims and
effective critique is the space of communicative praxis, transversely textured, enabling a
transhistorical assessment to guide a fitting response that is neither ahistorically absolutist nor
historically relativistic.”31 Through the construction of political unifications and participating in
26
Ibid., 586.
Ibid., 585
28
Ibid., 584.
29
Ibid. 587
30
Ibid., 590.
31
Schrag, Calvin O. The Self after Postmodernity. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997, 109.
27
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epistemic dialogues concerning situated knowledge, it is possible to achieve certain meanings
and truths about reality, though Haraway does not argue that by doing so, all difference will be
eliminated.
Rebuttals to Situated Knowledges/Standpoint Theory
In Epistemology of the Closet, Eve Sedgwick provides a structuralist account of
homosexuality as an evolving historical context rather than a form of standpoint. If she is
successful, her work could be seen as a counterexample to the utility of standpoint theory. On
page 47 she writes:
for someone who lives…in a state where certain acts called ‘sodomy’ are criminal
regardless of gender, never mind the homo/heterosexual ‘identity’ of the persons
who perform them, the threat of the juxtaposition on that prohibition against acts
of an additional, unrationalized set of sanctions attaching to identity can only be
exacerbated by the insistence of gay theory that the discourse of acts can represent
nothing but an anachronistic vestige. The project of the present book will be to
show how issues of modern homo/heterosexual definition are structured by…the
relations enabled by the unrationalized coexistence of different models during the
times they coexist.32
In other words, the elimination of the author does not completely eradicate the
significance of oppressed voices, but in fact, does away with certain complications which arise
from prescribing set conditions to identity, such as the identity of the homosexual. In response,
Sedgwick addresses the problem by providing the approach that homosexuality should not be
viewed as an identity attributed by the subject but rather as a culmination of relationships
between differing, simultaneous models of homosexuality. Wendy Brown posits a similar
critique of standpoint theory in States of Injury: Power and Freedom of Late Modernity, stating
that “contrary to its insistence that it speaks in the name of the political, much feminist post32
Sedgwick, Eve K. Epistemology of the Closet. Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1990,
47.
14
modernism betrays a preference for extrapolitical terms and practices: for Truth (unchanging,
incontestable) over politics (flux, contest, instability).”33 Simply put, according to Sedgwick and
Brown, feminist standpoint theory places too much value on the status of identity and by doing
so, constructs a view of meaning which relies too heavily on absolutes. Sedgwick’s emphasis on
the relationships between historical contexts of homosexuality eliminates any room for such
absolutes and builds the meaning within political discourse to be one where the recognition of
subject is no longer necessary. If the historical contexts of certain modes of being
(homosexuality, gender, etc.) are to be the main sources of meaning within discourse, as
Sedgwick argues, the need for subject no longer stands and does so in a manner which evades
any problem of absolutism. Thus, Foucault’s deconstruction of subject would no longer be
disembodied, remote and limited, but instead a logical progression for balanced discussion.
First and foremost, the initial problem to address with Sedgwick and Brown’s claims is
that an emphasis on subject inherently implies an essentialist approach to identity. Haraway
makes no claims about having the standpoint of the author be the grounds for defining that
particular identity. The consideration of a female author as a reflection on some aspect of the
female experience does not account for the entirety of the female experience. In fact, Haraway’s
approach of situated knowledge focuses on the splitting of perspective and recognizing that it
truly is a partial vision; one which becomes epistemically valuable in relation to other identities
and communities. The social and political location of a subject does not define one identity and
is instead a complex web of relationships and contradictions. In Situated Knowledges, she writes
“…female embodiment resists fixation and is insatiably curious about the webs of different
33
Brown, Wendy. "Postmodern Exposures, Feminist Hesitations." In States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late
Modernity, 30-51. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995, 37.
15
possibilities. There is no single feminist standpoint because our maps require too many
dimensions for that metaphor to ground our vision. But the feminist standpoint theorists’ goal of
an epistemology and politics of engaged, accountable positioning remains eminently potent.” In
other words, the feminist standpoint has no essentialist foundation because a situated knowledge
lays no claim to a single Female Truth. Wendy Brown points out that feminist epistemology
favors fixed immutable truths over states of flux, but Haraway specifically argues against such a
utilization of standpoint. Therefore, the idea that standpoint theory “betrays a preference for
extrapolitical terms and practices” is simply false.
However, how does standpoint theory stay relevant in face of the argument for historical
context which Sedgwick provides? Standpoint theory provides a degree of an engagement which
a focus on historical context does not. Therefore, the insight into a subject’s perspective accounts
for a real account of experience which can be more telling than simply looking for the historical
context surrounding the subject. In Postmodernism and Political Change: Issues for Feminist
Theory, Nancy Hartsock states:
in addition, the knowledge of marked subjectivities opens possibilities that may or
may not be realized. To the extent that these knowledges are self-conscious about
their aspects and assumptions, they make available new epistemological options.
The struggles they represent and express, if made self-conscious can go beyond
efforts at survival to recognize the centrality of systematic power relations; they
can become knowledges that are both accountable and engaged…As knowledges
that recognize themselves as those of the dominated and marginalized, these selfconsciously situated knowledges must focus on changing contemporary power
relations and thus point beyond the present.34
In other words, what gives standpoint theory its uniqueness is the focus on location
specifically. Haraway and Hartsock both explicitly highlight the importance of rejecting the
34
Hartsock, Nancy. "Postmodernism and Political Change: Issues for Feminist Theory." Cultural Critique, no. 14
(1989): 15-33. doi:10.2307/1354291, 30.
16
“god-trick” or view from nowhere which the rejection of subject attempts to achieve due to the
fact that the god-trick works to dismantle power structures in a manner which does not take into
consideration all dynamics involved. 35 If one were to accept Sedgwick’s theory of historical
context, it would be yet another form of pushing forward this view from nowhere. There exists
no self-consciousness when regarding historical context solely without the acknowledgement of
standpoint. Therefore, as Hartsock describes, what standpoint provides which detached history
cannot is a sense of accountability and engagement within knowledge and thus work to change
power relations as they are currently in effect. One must remember that the very act of
considering historical context is one which is reflexive; it is a consideration of power structures
and relationships after the fact. A more effective form of considering Sedgwick’s account of
homosexuality would be an account of the social context of those individuals, which would
subsequently be an account of the community those individuals compose and in effect, the
subject and standpoint once again come into play. Hartsock makes a poignant point by stating
that “situated knowledges must focus on changing contemporary power relations and thus point
beyond the present.”36 The focus on contemporary relations and a focus on the future are both
factors which standpoint theory provides that historical context sans subject cannot.
Conclusion
In conclusion, it is evident that the tools of feminist social epistemology, such as
standpoint theory and situated knowledges, provide an account of subject which works forward
to dismantle power structures more effectively than Foucault’s elimination of author. Although
Foucault’s attempt to separate the subject from the text possesses the goal of disassembling
35
36
Ibid., 17.
Ibid., 30.
17
certain power dynamics, it works toward such a goal without any sense of action or engagement.
In fact, any investigation into the human condition is another form of participating in and adding
to the “discourse of power.” Thus, all subject must be removed. However, by doing so, Foucault
does not take into account power structures as they unfold in real time and the manner in which
the experience of individuals contribute to knowing. Standpoint theory does so through an
emphasis on the subject in relation to the community around it, highlighting suppressed voices
and relating them to the larger web of implications. Therefore, feminist social epistemology
supports an investigation of power structures in a more contemporary manner as well as in a
manner that can take into account the voices which are most frequently not allowed to speak.
18
Bibliography
Anderson, Elizabeth. "Feminist Epistemology: An Interpretation and a Defense." Hypatia 10, no.
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