Download A and S on Marx and Smith

Notes on A and S on Marx and Smith
from Adams, B.N. and Sydie, R.A. (2002). Contemporary Sociological Theory (pp 206224). Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge Press.
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Karl Marx’s analysis assumed that women were subordinate to men due to their
absence from the production line in general, though they did figure prominently in the
textile industry. The “home” was not counted as gross national/domestic product, and is
still not counted in GNP/GDP.
• Until only about 50 years ago, Marxists believed gender equality would occur when
women had the same foothold in production as men.
• Feminists of the 1970s finally challenged with their claim that the “woman question”
of Marxists was anchored in how women related to the economy versus the feminist
question of how women related to men.
• But, many feminists still looked to the Marxist analysis to understand oppression,
despite its deep flaws, much like how psychologists still study and apply Freud’s
theories even though many of his ideas oppressed women and others.
• In response to Marx’s ideas, feminists took a woman-centered approach, questioned
not only Marxism but sociology in general: one of those feminists is Dorothy Smith
whose main question is: How can we affect social change to “produce a more
humane social world” (p. 210)? (She went beyond how to affect social change to
produce a world.)
• Dorothy Smith - Her Central Theories; She wanted to develop a sociology FOR women,
rather than about women. Until the 1970s, and still existing in some camps today, women
were excluded from sociological language!
• Society is where people may be understood as “expert practitioners of their own lives”
(p. 216). We cannot assume that we know their experiences.
• “Bifurcated Consciousness” is an awareness of the two ways of knowing “how” to be
in the world: 1. Through the body and space which we occupy (material and local
environment); 2. All space beyond the body. This consciousness is similar to the selfmonitoring concept in psychology whereby people sense the contradiction between
how they feel “on the inside” and their awareness of what others expect from them in
any social context to which they feel accountable (here, recall Durkheim’s social fact).
• “Standpoint Theory” (p. 214): “the only way to enter the ‘abstracted conceptual mode
of working class’ is to pass through and make use of the concretely and immediately
experienced-a fact that ‘official’ sociology obscures and ignores. Smith’s concept
indicates that we cannot assume to understand anyone else’s experience of living, at
least completely, though we can feel sympathetic and empathetic.
• “Relations of Ruling:” This theory of Smith is located mainly in text and other media
in how the ruling apparatus organizes, regulates, and directs society (us). We must
guard be aware of how sociology, itself, can do this, as in most of recorded herstory
and history, women and other genders have been largely excluded from text, thus from
communicating experience. These people, therefore, have quite often been
misrepresented or underrepresented from using and producing media.
• “Knowledge:” Smith felt that femininity and masculinity are social productions of
textual and symbolic discourse in how knowledge is located both locally to the
individual and beyond the individual. Concepts of class, religion, and race are
variables which compound gender-relations, for example, if social interactions and
media contain knowledge built up from marginality, prejudice, racism, agism,
stereotyping, exclusion…