Consciousness Raising I

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, women’s groups organised consciousness-raising activities to learn more about themselves. Consciousness-raising (CR) was the de facto term feminists used to identify knowledge-producing projects designed by and for women. Proponents such as bell hooks, Donna Haraway, and Sandra Harding describe organised learning activities where women could express their experiences. These activities aim to help women eventually identify the necessary ingredients to redirect their lives in meaningful and productive ways. Grounded in conversation, it functions as both a therapy and strategy session, drawing together various forms of knowledge to improve their experience¹A well-known example of this is the Our Bodies, Ourselves book produced by the Boston Women’s Health Collective.. To put it in terms described by Susan Wells, a CR group member of Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, “members developed ways of speaking their own embodied experience and of bracketing that experience as partial and local²Susan Wells, ‘Our Bodies, Ourselves: Reading the Written Body’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 33, no. 3 (2008): 698..” Whilst these settings could be fierce and argumentative, echo chambers of hostility and celebration, the work done in these settings revealed much about problematic power dynamics³Although internal dynamics were not the focus of CR groups, as byproducts of collective meaning-making processes, power dynamics revealed how embodied knowledge production requires negotiating different ways of knowing and being rather than simply cataloguing oppression.. At the same time, CR groups and their subjects built communities and forged alliances that supported not only education, but healing via the bonds created through deep connection.

Standpoint theory’s innovations bring into focus fresh perspectives on some of the most difficult and anxiety-producing dilemmas of our era. (ST critiques)the relations between the production of knowledge and practices of power⁴Sandra Harding, ‘Introduction: Standpoint Theory as a Site of Political, Philosophic, and Scientific Debate’, in The Feminist Standpoint Theory Reader: Intellectual and Political Controversies, ed. Sandra Harding (London: Routledge, 2004), 1. .  

CR groups gave rise to a variety of projects to realise these aspirations – publishing and forming women’s studies departments was one way to facilitate learning on a larger scale⁵bell hooks, Feminism Is for Everybody: Passionate Politics (Pluto Press, 2000), 8–9. . Standpoint theory was one practice that emerged in this world. Standpoint theories (ST)and many of its offspring aim to provide a more realistic portrait of a subject by starting with women and other marginalised positions⁶bell hooks, 58; Sandra Harding, ‘Rethinking Standpoint Epistemology: What Is Strong Objectivity’, in Feminist Epistemologies, ed. Linda Alcoff and Elizabeth Potter (London: Routledge, 1993), 65.. ST is an invitation to perspectives that can describe experiences in both the margins and centres. It is a self-reflective practice critical of de facto standards and conventions, prioritising subjects over institutions. It aims for transparency, emphasising that the subjective offers a more vivid picture of reality than the conventional scientific methods, which aim to disembody truth-claims by assuming there is a universal position. What was apparent through many grounded studies was that newly emerging feminist methods, such as ST, proved successful in presenting accurate data, thus challenging assumptions about the nature of bias and the ‘objective’ possibilities of conventional scientific methods.