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Gender and Communication

Although many people use the words sex and gender interchangeably, most social scientists would be quick to point out
that the terms don’t mean the same thing. And neither are the same as sexual orientation. Here’s how the American
Psychological Association (APA) distinguishes these terms.1

Sex refers to biology, including a person’s chromosomes, hormones, and reproductive organs. When a person’s
chromosomes or anatomy aren’t clearly male or female, APA refers to that person as intersex. And when a person’s
“assigned biological sex doesn’t match their felt identity,” they are transgender. When those do match, they are
cisgender.

Gender is “the attitudes, feelings, and behaviors that a given culture associates with a person’s biological sex.” In
American culture, characteristics such as emotional empathy and wearing lipstick tend to be perceived as feminine.
Being masculine typically includes attributes like assertiveness and physical strength. People who blend
masculinity and femininity are sometimes referred to as androgynous.

Sexual orientation is the nature of a person’s emotional, romantic, and/or sexual attraction to other people. APA
refers to those attracted to the other sex as heterosexual, those attracted to their own sex as gay or lesbian, and
those attracted to both sexes as bisexual.

Some people reject binary labels such as male/female, feminine/masculine, or heterosexual/gay/bisexual. APA
refers to them as genderqueer (or sometimes just queer).

What does this have to do with communication? Regarding sex, many people think that women and men communicate
quite differently. But after conducting a meta-analysis of hundreds of studies on topics such as talk time, self-disclosure,
and conflict management, University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee communication professor emerita Kathryn Dindia found
the differences were actually quite small.

Sometimes researchers measure gender using the Sex-Role Inventory, which was developed by the late Cornell University
psychologist Sandra Lipsitz Bem.2 Her research found that men tend to be masculine and women tend to be feminine.
But it’s not uncommon to find an assertive woman or a compassionate man. There’s more gender variation within the
sexes than between them.

The National Communication Association has an entire division devoted to the study of sexual orientation. Such research
often considers the lack of privilege experienced by sexual minorities. For example, Mark Orbe’s co-cultural theory
(Chapter 27) examines how lesbians and gay men address their marginalized position.

Orbe’s theory builds from both theories in this section. Feminist standpoint theory argues that we can gain a more
objective view of the world by starting from the perspective of marginalized groups. Muted group theory considers how
male control of language has shaped women’s opportunities to make their voices heard. Both theories agree we can’t
fully understand sexual identity without considering how it is shaped by communication.

Endnotes
1. 1. American Psychological Association, “Definitions Related to Sexual Orientation and Gender Diversity in APA
Documents,” https://www.apa.org/pi/lgbt/resources/sexuality-definitions.pdf, accessed May 21, 2021.

2. 2. Sandra L. Bem, “Androgyny vs. the Tight Little Lives of Fluffy Women and Chesty Men,” Psychology Today,
Vol. 9, 1975, pp. 58–62.
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Chapter 29

Feminist Standpoint Theory

of Sandra Harding & Julia T. Wood

To illustrate the gist of feminist standpoint theory, Sandra Harding (philosopher of science at the University of
California, Los Angeles) asks us to imagine looking into a pond and seeing a stick that appears bent.1 But is it
really bent? If we walk around to a different place, the stick seems straight—which it actually is. Physicists have
developed a theory of light refraction that explains why this visual distortion occurs based on our physical
location.

That’s physics, but what does light refraction have to do with communication? Standpoint theorists think it’s a
useful metaphor for how people have different perspectives about the same situation, and standpoint theory tries
to clarify which perspective is most true to life. Consider how Americans view police officers. One study of
California residents found 72 percent of white respondents agreed that “police treat all racial/ethnic groups
fairly.” African American respondents told a strikingly different story—just 23 percent agreed.2 That poll took
place in September 2020, four months after the murder of George Floyd under the knee of a white Minneapolis
cop. But this perception gap isn’t new. For decades, research has revealed that when it comes to law
enforcement, members of different racial groups stand on different sides of the pond.3

So, whose perspective is right? To begin answering that question, standpoint theorists insist that our view of the
world depends on our social location. That location is formed by our group memberships, including sex, race,
ethnicity, sexuality, and economic status: “The social groups within which we are located powerfully shape what
we experience and know as well as how we understand and communicate with ourselves, others, and the
world.”4 These group affiliations lead to different opportunities, working conditions, and degrees of power and
influence, so they generate distinctive accounts of nature and social relationships.

Those in powerful groups want to maintain their privileged position, but people at the margins see how the status
quo benefits some and disadvantages others. Standpoint theorists believe that knowledge starting from the social
location of marginalized people is like the physicist’s theory of light refraction. Such knowledge “can provide a
more objective view than the perspective from the lives of the more powerful.”5 We should trust those who have
the least to lose from challenging the status quo.
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Just as Harding is recognized as the philosopher who has most advanced standpoint theory among feminist
scholars,6 Julia Wood, communication professor emerita at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, has
consistently applied standpoint logic within the field of communication. For communication researchers, taking
women’s social location seriously means heeding Wood’s call to choose research topics that are responsive to
women’s concerns:

Abiding concern with oppression leads many feminist scholars to criticize some of the topics that
dominate research on relationships. When four women are battered to death by intimate partners
every day in North America, study of how abusive relationships are created and sustained seems
more compelling than research on heterosexual college students’ romances. Is it more significant to
study friendships among economically comfortable adolescents or social practices that normalize
sexual harassment and rape?7

This question reveals that standpoint theorists want to shake up what researchers study and what students learn.
The rest of this chapter will explore their critique of epistemology—how we know what we know. We’ll start by
examining what a standpoint is and what it does.

Philosophical Foundations: A Standpoint Necessarily Opposes the

Status Quo
Standpoint theorists build on a long tradition of scholarship about the struggle of the oppressed against those
with power. In 1807, German philosopher Georg Hegel analyzed master–slave relationships to show that what
people “know” about themselves, others, and society depends on which group they are in.8 For example, those
in captivity have a decidedly different perspective on the meaning of chains, laws, childbirth, and punishment
than do their captors who participate in the same “reality.” But since masters are backed by the established
structure of their society, they have the power to make their view of the world stick. They are the ones who write
the rules and the history books.

Following Hegel’s lead, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels referred to the proletarian standpoint. They suggested
that the socioeconomically poor who provide sweat equity are society’s ideal knowers, as long as they
understand the class struggle in which they are involved.9 Harding notes that standpoint theory “was a project
‘straining at the bit’ to emerge from feminist social theorists who were familiar with Marxian epistemology.”10
By substituting women for proletariat, and gender discrimination for class struggle, early feminist standpoint
theorists had a ready-made framework for advocating women’s way of knowing.

Standpoint theorists also draw on the symbolic interactionism of George Herbert Mead (see Chapter 5), a
theorist who worked hard to address the injustices brought about by industrialization. Contrary to the economic
determinism of Marx, Mead claimed that culture “gets into individuals” through communication. Likewise,
Wood maintains that gender is a cultural construction rather than a biological characteristic. “More than a
variable, gender is a system of meanings that sculpts individuals’ standpoints by positioning most males and
females in different material, social and symbolic circumstances.”11

As an additional philosophical influence, strains of postmodernism also weave throughout feminist standpoint
theory. When Jean François Lyotard announced an “incredulity toward metanarratives,” he included
Enlightenment rationality and Western science.12 Since many feminists regard these two enterprises as
dominated by men who refuse to acknowledge their masculine bias, they embrace a postmodern critique. In
return, postmodernists applaud the standpoint emphasis on knowledge as locally situated, though they push the
idea to the point where there is no basis for favoring one perspective over another. As we will see, Harding and
Wood reject that kind of absolute relativism.
Page 384

Feminist standpoint theorists fold these strands of thought around a deep concern about the social location of
women because throughout history and today, “men are the dominant, privileged, or centered group, and women
are a subordinate, disadvantaged, or marginalized group.”13 But they are quick to warn that a feminist
standpoint is not the same thing as a social location, an opinion, or a perspective. A standpoint is more. It
emerges from careful thought about why society privileges certain social locations. Gaining a standpoint
requires “critical reflection on power relations and their consequences.”14 The word critical means that a
standpoint identifies oppression and calls it out.

That’s what a standpoint is, but why develop one? What should a standpoint do once someone has achieved it?
For standpoint theorists, the answer is clear: a standpoint opposes the status quo. It leads to practical action
aimed at justice; it can’t be a mere intellectual exercise. Standpoints should champion the interests of those, such
as women, who have been oppressed by taken-for-granted beliefs about the way the world works. Although men
have a social location, feminist standpoint theorists think it’s nonsensical to speak of a male standpoint—men
already control the status quo, and the status quo cannot challenge itself or the injustices it perpetuates. (Of
course, other aspects of a man’s social location might encourage a standpoint—race, sexuality, socioeconomic
status, disability, and so forth.)

If you search for pictures of the philosophers cited above (Hegel, Marx, Engels, Mead, Lyotard), you’ll notice all
are white. Most feminist scholars who initially created standpoint theory share that Caucasian racial identity.
Before long, scholars of color pointed out that, if standpoint theory is right, racial privilege shapes the work of
the feminist project: “White feminists routinely point with confidence to their oppression as women but resist
seeing how much their White skin privileges them.”15 In response to these critiques, most critical scholars today
demand that all concerns regarding sex and gender must take into account the intersectionality of identity. The
next section explains what that means.

Intersectionality and Black Feminist Thought

In my mind, the word intersection conjures images of multiple roads crisscrossing each other. For critical
scholars, intersectionality refers to how identities occur at the crossroads of gender, race, sexuality, age,
occupation, ability, and many other characteristics. The term was coined by Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, a law
professor at UCLA and Columbia Law School, to describe how people may face multiple sources of
discrimination in the workplace.16 Since then, scholars from many fields have used the term to explain how all
aspects of identity are intertwined, mutually creating each other. Thus, race alters the meaning of gender, gender
alters the meaning of class, and so forth. For feminist standpoint theorists, that means we can’t understand the
social location of a woman without having a complete picture of her identity. Scholars of color particularly value
intersectionality as an intellectual tool that explains their experiences.
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One such scholar is Patricia Hill Collins, a sociologist and professor emerita at the University of Maryland, who
describes the patterns of “intersecting oppressions” that Black women in the United States have experienced.17
Those historical and current realities put them in a different marginalized social location than that of either white
women or Black men. “The drudgery of enslaved African-American women’s work and the grinding poverty of
‘free’ wage labor in the rural South tellingly illustrate the high costs Black women have paid for survival. The
millions of impoverished African-American women ghettoized in Philadelphia, Birmingham, Oakland, Detroit,
and other U.S. inner cities demonstrate the continuation of these earlier forms of Black women’s economic
exploitation’”18 Collins refers to this social location as that of an “outsider within,” a status that provides a
privileged view of white society, yet one in which a Black woman will never fully belong. She agrees with other
Black feminists that “we have to see clearly that we are a unique group set undeniably apart because of race and
sex with a unique set of challenges.”19

I’ll use Collins’ words from her book Black Feminist Thought to describe the four ways she says Black women
collectively validate what they know:20

1. Lived experience as a criterion of meaning. For most Black women, individuals who have lived through
the experience about which they claim to be experts are more believable and credible than those who have
merely read or thought about such experiences.

2. The use of dialogue in assessing knowledge claims. For ideas to be tested and validated, everyone in the
group must participate. To refuse to join in, especially if one really disagrees with what has been said, is
seen as “cheating.”

3. The ethic of caring. Emotion indicates that a speaker believes in the validity of an argument. The sound of
what is being said is as important as the words themselves in a dialogue of reason and emotion.

4. The ethic of personal accountability. Assessments of an individual’s knowledge claims simultaneously

evaluate an individual’s character, values, and ethics.

Inspired by Collins’ work on Black feminist thought, communication professor Shardé Davis (University of
Connecticut) launched an ambitious research program that seeks to describe the experiences of Black women
and challenge the oppressions they face. She appeals to Collins’ description of a strong Black woman controlling
image, which is “a socially constructed ideal that oppresses Black women by celebrating our attempts to meet
impossible expectations of strength at all times.” This ideal pushes Black women to “be self-sufficient, handle
problems without aid, send direct and forthright messages to others, be opinionated,” and a host of other
demands that no one could maintain forever.21 Standpoint theorists believe it is from the perspective of such
women that we should begin our search for knowledge.

Now that you’ve learned the fundamental philosophical commitments of standpoint theorists, the next four
sections will explore this feminist epistemological project. After critically reflecting on the social location of
women, we’ll consider how the dominance of powerful groups distorts our knowledge claims—what standpoint
theorists believe is a serious problem to solve. We will then describe their solution, a strong objectivity that
emerges from standpoints at the margins. Because practical application matters so much to standpoint theorists,
we’ll also examine how Wood has applied standpoint logic to understanding women’s caregiving activity.
Page 386

Women as a Marginalized Group

Feminist standpoint theorists maintain that gender, sex, and sexuality powerfully shape a person’s social
location. When Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg passed away in 2020, both her fans and critics
praised her role in reshaping laws that had placed men and women on unequal ground. As a lawyer and a justice,
she helped strike down laws that prevented women from receiving a bank loan without a husband’s approval (in
1974), serving on juries (in 1979), and gaining access to state-funded higher education (in 1996). She was also
part of the 2015 Obergefell v. Hodges decision that recognized the right of same-sex couples to marry.22 I’ve
listed the years of these changes to emphasize how recent they are—well within the lifetimes of many people
alive today.

Disparity by sex, gender, and sexuality isn’t only a matter of the law. According to Purdue University
communication professor Robin Patric Clair, the Me Too movement of the late 2010s (often referred to on social
media with the hashtag #MeToo) “breathed new life into the women’s movement and especially into
understanding and rectifying sexual harassment, abuse, and assault.”23 Moving beyond the experiences of
cisgender people, communication professor Sarah Jones (Ohio University) used feminist standpoint theory to
investigate sexuality in the workplace. One transgender woman reported her experience: “The bathrooms are
outside. You need a key to get in, and you need to choose between the male or female key. . . . It feels like
having to announce your gender every time you use the bathroom, which is wild. Nobody else is confronted with
that choice.”24

Given these realities and more, Wood does not attribute gender differences to biology, but rather the cultural
expectations arising from how people talk about gender. She fears that “championing any singular model of
womanhood creates a mold into which not all women may comfortably fit.”25 For Davis, the strong Black
woman controlling image is one such mold that creates an impossible standard for Black women to attain. She
notes that it is an image learned early in life: “Black women of all ages, including small children, are vulnerable
to the mystification of strength. In fact, researchers show that many little Black girls are socialized in life to be
self-sufficient and resilient at all costs, and carry this burden well into adulthood.”26 Cultural expectations define
the meaning of sex, race, and how they intersect, and those with power create those cultural expectations.

According to Wood, such power discrepancies are found in all societies: “A culture is not experienced identically
by all members. Cultures are hierarchically ordered so that different groups within them offer dissimilar power,
opportunities, and experiences.”27 An intersection of minority positions creates a highly looked down-upon
location in the social hierarchy. Impoverished Black lesbian women are almost always marginalized. On the
other hand, positions of high status and power are overwhelmingly “manned” by wealthy white heterosexual
males. Collins refers to these intersecting dimensions of privilege as a matrix of domination. It’s a mix of
“interrelated forces of white supremacy, heteropatriarchy, ableism, capitalism, settler colonialism, and other
forms of oppression” that keeps privileged groups in a place of power.28 For standpoint theorists, that matrix of
domination plays out in the classroom as teachers and students communicate about what we believe to be true.

“Actually, Lou, I think it was more than just my being in the right place at the right time. I think it
was my being the right race, the right religion, the right sex, the right socioeconomic group, having
the right accent, the right clothes, going to the right schools . . .”

Warren Miller/Cartoon Collections

Page 387

Knowledge From Nowhere vs. Local Knowledge

Standpoint theorists emphasize the importance of social location because they are convinced that people at the
top of the societal hierarchy are the ones privileged to define what it means to be female, male, or anything else
in a given culture. Those with power decide what is true and good. As one example, Davis describes how the
dominant culture dictates women’s hairstyles:

The politics of hair in the U.S.A. are oppressive. Black women are held to European standards of
beauty and expected to style their hair in a manner that resembles whiteness, including relaxers,
press ‘n curls, and silky straight weaves and wigs. Professional environments have notoriously
enforced norms that accommodate white (masculine) forms of beauty and underaccommodate Black
femininity. Some Black women resisted this mandate by wearing their hair in its natural state or in
various protective styles (e.g., braids) to display the versatility of Black hair.29

As Harding argues, this power to define also occurs in schools and universities: “The social group that gets the
chance to define the important problematics, concepts, assumptions, and hypotheses in a field will end up
leaving its social fingerprints on the picture of the world that emerges from the results of that field’s research
process.”30 Harding and other standpoint theorists insist there is no possibility of an unbiased perspective that is
disinterested, impartial, value-free, or detached from a particular historical situation. The physical and social
sciences are always situated in time and place. She writes that “each person can achieve only a partial view of
reality from the perspective of his or her own position in the social hierarchy.”31 Unlike postmodernists,
however, she is unwilling to abandon the search for reality. She simply thinks that the search for it should begin
from the lives of those without privilege and power.
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This insistence on local knowledge contrasts sharply with the claim of traditional Western science that it can
discover “Truth” that is value-free and accessible to any objective observer. In her book Whose Science? Whose
Knowledge? Harding refers to empiricism’s claims of disembodied truths as “views from nowhere.” Feminist
scholar Donna Haraway calls such pronouncements the God trick, which Harding describes as “speaking
authoritatively about everything in the world from no particular location or human perspective at all.”32 As for
the notion of value-free science, Harding chides detached scientists that “it cannot be value-free to describe such
social events as poverty, misery, torture, or cruelty in a value-free way.”33 Even Galileo’s statement Anyone can
see through my telescope has been interpreted by empirical scientists as dismissing concern for any relationship
between the knower and the known. For Harding and Wood, this is a big problem: our education system presents
knowledge biased toward the interests of the powerful and against the experiences of the vulnerable.

In contrast, standpoint theorists maintain that “the perspectives of subordinate groups are more complete and
thus, better than those of privileged groups in a society.”34 That doesn’t mean the perspectives of women or any
other marginalized groups give them a perfectly clear view of the way things are. Situated knowledge— the only
kind standpoint theorists think there is—will always be partial. But the theorists believe we have a better chance
of discovering truth if we start our search from the margins. They recognize that this is a controversial claim. US
Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor voiced the same idea in a 2001 lecture on law and multicultural
diversity: “I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than
not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.”35 That one remark was the stated
reason why many white male senators voted against her confirmation to the Supreme Court in 2009.

So that is standpoint theorists’ analysis of the problem: what counts as knowledge supports those with power and
ignores, silences, and oppresses those without it. Harding and Wood advocate strong objectivity as a corrective.

Strong Objectivity: Less Partial Views from Standpoints at the

Margins
Harding uses the term strong objectivity to refer to the strategy of starting research from the lives of women and
other marginalized groups whose concerns and experiences are usually ignored.36 Her choice of label suggests
that knowledge generated from the perspective of dominant groups offers, by contrast, only a weak objectivity.
To illustrate this claim, she speaks directly of the oppositional viewpoints of slaves and their masters a century
ago: “It is absurd to imagine that U.S. slaveowners’ views of Africans’ and African Americans’ lives could
outweigh in impartiality, disinterestedness, impersonality, and objectivity their slaves’ view of their own and
slaveowners’ lives.”37

Why should the standpoints of women and other marginalized groups be less partial, less distorted, or less false
than the perspectives of men in dominant positions? Wood offers two explanations: “First, people with
subordinate status have greater motivation to understand the perspective of more powerful groups than vice
versa.”38 Even if the meek don’t inherit the earth, they have a special interest in figuring out what makes it turn.
Taking the role of the other is a survival skill for those who have little control over their own lives. Lacking this
motivation, those who wield power don’t consider how those with less privilege view the world.
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Wood’s second reason for favoring the perspective of groups that are constantly put down is that they have little
reason to defend the status quo. Not so for those who have power. She asserts that “groups that are advantaged
by the prevailing system have a vested interest in not perceiving social inequities that benefit them at the
expense of others.”39

Robbie, a student in Em’s class, expressed a new realization of the link between a social location of privilege
and the tunnel vision that may go with it.

This is a hard theory to write on. I am an upper-middle-class white man and this theory deals with
the marginalized and underappreciated, particularly women. I struggled to think of any way the
theory related to me. But then I got it. My social location made it difficult for me to apply the
theory. I was born into the dominant culture and have been taught to maintain the status quo. Our
opinion is the “right” one because it follows the “rules” (rules that we wrote, by the way).
Admittedly, my perspective is probably one of the least objective of all, and what’s worse, I have
been taught to think that it is objective.

Robbie’s words are unusual coming from a privileged white man with much to lose if the status quo is shattered.
Most of his peers would resist grappling with the theory. For those with money, status, and power, ignorance of
perspectives on the margins is bliss, so it’s folly to be wise. Robbie’s new insight is perhaps a testimony to the
power of feminist standpoint theory to change the world one mind at a time.

Yet standpoint theorists would want Robbie and us to understand that being a woman (and/or a member of other
marginalized groups) is no guarantee of strong objectivity. Harding and Wood emphasize that a feminine social
location is not the same thing as a feminist standpoint. A standpoint is an achievement gained through critical
reflection on power relations.40 When Kamala Harris became the first woman and first person of color elected to
the office of vice president of the United States, her victory speech revealed her standpoint:

I’m thinking about. . . the generations of women—Black women, Asian, white, Latina and Native
American women—throughout our nation’s history who have paved the way for this moment
tonight. Women who fought and sacrificed so much for equality, liberty, and justice for all,
including the Black women, who are too often overlooked, but so often prove that they are the
backbone of our democracy. . . . While I may be the first woman in this office, I won’t be the
last.”41

Theory to Practice: Communication Research Based on Women’s

Lives
If we want to see a model of communication research that starts from the lives of women, a good place to begin
is Wood’s in-depth study of caregiving in the United States. Consistent with feminist standpoint theory’s
insistence that all knowledge is situated in a time and place, the first chapter of Wood’s Who Cares? Women,
Care, and Culture describes her own situation as a white, heterosexual, professional woman who for nine years
took on the consuming responsibility of caring for her ill parents until they passed away. Her experience squared
with her subsequent research findings:

First, it seems that caring can be healthy and enriching when it is informed, freely chosen, and
practiced within a context that recognizes and values caring and those who do it. On the other hand,
existing studies also suggest that caring can be quite damaging to caregivers if they are unaware of
dangers to their identities, if they have unrealistic expectations of themselves, and/or if caring
occurs within contexts that fail to recognize its importance and value.42
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Wood discovered that gendered communication practices reflect and reinforce our societal expectation that
caregiving is women’s work. After rejecting his daughter’s proposal to hire a part-time nurse, her father mused,
“It’s funny, Julia. I used to wish I had sons, but now I’m glad I have daughters, because I couldn’t ask a son to
take this kind of time away from his own work just to take care of me.”43 She heard similar messages that
devalued caregiving from male colleagues at her university. While praising Wood for her sacrifice, they reassured
a fellow professor that he had taken the proper action by placing his mother in a nursing home: “Well, she surely
understood that as busy as you are with your work you couldn’t be expected to take on that responsibility.”44

Wood says these comments reveal the opposing, gender-based privileges and restraints in our society. For Black
women living at the intersection of race and gender oppressions, the struggle is even more acute. Shardé Davis
argues that the image of the strong Black woman both enables and constrains what Black women caregivers can
say and do: “As members of the [strong Black woman collective] desire to uplift one another during times of
social support and foster strong sisterly bonds within the group, they may forget that their communication
messages stifle emotional expression, vulnerability, and healing, and impede one in sharing areas of perceived
weakness.”45 The double obligation to dutifully support someone while also suppressing painful emotions could
result in “high stress levels because they were trying to handle all of their problems, even when the task seemed
unbearable.”46

Wood suggests that a standpoint approach is practical to the extent that it generates an effective critique of unjust
practices. She believes that “our culture itself must be reformed in ways that dissociate caring from its historical
affiliations with women and private relationships and redefine it as a centrally important and integral part of our
collective public life.”47 As an unapologetic feminist committed to the equal value of all human life, Wood
understands that a sense of solidarity is politically useful if women are to effectively critique a male-centered
world.

Ethical Reflection: Fricker’s Epistemic Injustice

Like Wood and Harding, ethicist and philosopher Miranda Fricker (CUNY Graduate Center) is frustrated with the
long tradition of (mostly white and male) scholars who try to address epistemology without considering identity
and power. It’s clear that society assigns greater worth to some knowers than it does to others. She refers to
epistemic injustice as the harm resulting from that bias, and believes it’s a serious ethical problem: “Any
epistemic injustice wrongs someone in their capacity as a subject of knowledge, and thus in a capacity essential to
human value.”48 She describes two types of epistemic injustice.

Testimonial injustice.
Say you’ve been accused of a crime. You know you’re innocent, but the circumstantial evidence looks bad. Three
years in prison is a real possibility. Your attorney says your best shot at avoiding that fate rests on the testimony of
a wealthy, white businessman. You feel relief. But would you become concerned if the businessman is old and
speaks with a thick foreign accent? Or has gay pride symbols tattooed on both arms? What if the businessman
were instead a businesswoman? Or a teenage boy with hair dyed blue? Or a Latina refugee with a disability?

If the scale of justice is fair, the identity of the witness shouldn’t matter. But your experience could reveal the
scale isn’t balanced. If members of the jury harbor bias that leads them to disregard the witness, you could be in
deep trouble. Testimonial injustice occurs when “prejudice on the hearer’s part causes [them] to give the speaker
less credibility than [they] would otherwise have given.”49 And testimonial injustice is more than a courtroom
matter. If you tune out or dismiss a classmate’s comment because they’re younger, or unattractive, or in a
religious group you think is strange, you’ve committed testimonial injustice.
Page 391

Hermeneutical injustice.
“Hermeneutic” is an imposing philosophical word that essentially means “interpretation.” In this chapter, you’ve
learned that standpoint theorists believe people at the margins have a truer interpretation of the world. The
problem is that the dominant group controls language—the words, symbols, and phrases people use to express
knowledge. According to Fricker, this linguistic power imbalance creates hermeneutical injustice, which occurs
when people “participate unequally in the practices through which social meanings are generated.”50 We
struggle to understand our experiences when our language doesn’t offer words to name them.

Hermeneutical injustice is very close to the concerns of muted group theorists such as Cheris Kramarae (Chapter
30). Both Fricker and Kramarae point to the creation of the term sexual harassment. Before the phrase became
popular in the 1980s and 1990s, women lacked common language to describe the harm they’d experienced.
Likewise, terms such as systemic racism, mansplaining, and “driving while Black” encode marginalized
experiences. Such words wouldn’t emerge from dominant groups that don’t suffer these things.

If we are concerned about epistemic injustice, what should we do? Fricker’s advice is twofold. First, individuals
should consciously reflect on their biases. If you notice you’re rejecting a person’s words because of their
identity, you have an opportunity to instead listen more closely and consider what they have to say.

Second, and tougher, Fricker believes a thorough reckoning with epistemic injustice must address not only
individuals, but also broader social structures and systems such as “the judiciary, the police, local government,
and employers.”51 This is necessary because “even if we are personally innocent of prejudiced beliefs, still the
social atmosphere in which we must judge speakers’ credibility is one in which there are inevitably many stray
residual prejudices that threaten to influence our credibility judgements.”52 Fricker sees herself as part of the
broader feminist project that calls for societal reform that takes the perspectives of oppressed groups seriously.
Her contribution reveals that standpoint theory has a sharp ethical edge.

Critique: Can Standpoint Theory Be Misused?

For those at the margins, the qualitative research done by standpoint theorists might produce a sense of gratitude
and relief: Finally, someone is giving voice to my experiences! But for those with power, standpoint theory isn’t
easy to hear. That includes some communication professors.

The logic of standpoint theory has been at the heart of serious and sometimes painful conversations about the
state of the communication discipline. At the 2019 National Communication Association conference, one scholar
publicly declared, “I don’t have time for intersectionality”—and in response, many communication professors
signed an open letter indicating strong disagreement.53 Likewise, in an article titled “#CommunicationSoWhite,”
Paula Chakravartty (New York University) and her colleagues provided evidence that communication
scholarship privileges the perspectives of white men. Their unsettling conclusion: “Knowledge production that
reinforces Whiteness as its undisputed, unexamined frame is incapable of asking what we might learn from the
experiences of those who have been, for decades if not centuries, dispossessed of their lands, policed, bombed,
detained, indebted, and rendered illegal.”54 Chakravartty and like-minded communication scholars insist our
understanding of people will be incomplete unless we seriously consider social locations beyond the white,
male, heterosexual, nondisabled, socioeconomically comfortable norm. They also believe that seriously
reckoning with power differences must lead to societal reform to end oppression.
Page 392

Despite these intentions, could some applications of standpoint theory become oppressive? John McWhorter, a
professor of English at Columbia University, expresses concern about that possibility. Perhaps you’ve heard
someone on your campus say, “Check your privilege.” It’s a call to reflect on social location, a challenge
inspired by the thinking of standpoint theorists and other critical scholars. As a Black man, McWhorter agrees
that privilege exists and students should reflect on it, but he warns that discussions of privilege become harmful
when they undermine an individual’s sense of inherent worth:

The idea is you are to learn that you’re a privileged white person; you are to learn it over and over;
really what you’re supposed to learn is to feel guilty about it; and to express that on a regular basis,
understanding that at no point in your lifetime will you ever be a morally legitimate person, because
you have this privilege.55

Other critics dismiss the concept of strong objectivity as contradictory.56 Harding and Wood argue that
perspectives and standpoints are relative and can’t be evaluated by any absolute criteria. Yet they also claim that
the oppressed are less biased and more impartial than the privileged. This appears to bring universal standards of
judgment back into play. On the matter of transcendental truths, standpoint theory seems to want to have it both
ways. If the theory isn’t sure whether values are objective or subjective, it’s tough for it to clarify those values
for us.

Despite these difficulties, as authors of this book (all of us white men), we find the logic of feminist standpoint
theory to have both aesthetic appeal and persuasive force. If all knowledge is shaped by the social location of
the knower, then it makes sense to pay particular attention to the perspectives of people who are most sensitive
to inequities of power. They will have the least to lose if findings challenge the status quo. The theory calls us to
question much of the received wisdom that comes from a male-dominated, Western European research
establishment and replace it when a strong objectivity provides a more complete picture of the world. This idea
energizes Idaho State University rhetorician Lynn Worsham and others in the theory’s broad community of
agreement who believe that standpoints from the margins can be a partial corrective to the biased knowledge that
now passes for truth:

In what I consider, in all sincerity, to be a heroic and marvelous conception, Harding turns the tables
on philosophy and the sciences and constructs a sort of feminist alchemy in which the idea of
standpoint, revamped by postmodern philosophy, becomes the philosophers’ stone capable of
transforming the West’s base materials into resources for producing a more “generally useful
account of the world.”57
Page 393

Questions to Sharpen Your Focus

1. What is common to the standpoints of women, Black people, the poor, and members of the LGBTQ community
that may provide them with a less false view of the way society works?

2. How could we test the claim that strong objectivity from women’s lives provides a more accurate view of the
world than does knowledge generated by a predominantly male research establishment? According to
standpoint theorists, is such a test desirable?

3. Em, Andrew, and Glenn are privileged white men who decided which theories would be covered in this book.
Suppose they were economically disadvantaged Black women. What theories might they drop and which might
they keep?

4. Identify three synonyms for the idea of intersectionality. How could you use these synonyms to explain
intersectionality to someone unfamiliar with the concept?

A Second Look
Recommended resource: Julia T. Wood, Communication Theories in Action, 3rd ed., Wadsworth, Belmont, CA,
2004, pp. 212–220.

Comprehensive statement: Sandra Harding, Whose Science? Whose Knowledge? Thinking from Women’s Lives,
Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY, 1991.

Diverse forms of standpoint theory: Sandra Harding (ed.), The Feminist Standpoint Theory Reader:
Intellectual and Political Controversies, Routledge, New York, 2004.

Explanation and defense of strong objectivity: Sandra Harding, “Rethinking Standpoint Epistemology: What Is
‘Strong Objectivity’?” in The Feminist Standpoint Theory Reader, pp. 127–140.

#CommunicationSoWhite and communication research: Paula Chakravartty, Rachel Kuo, Victoria Grubbs, and
Charlton McIlwain, “#CommunicationSoWhite,” Journal of Communication, Vol. 68, 2018, pp. 254–266; Eve
Ng, Khadijah Costley White, and Anamik Saha, “#CommunicationSoWhite: Race and Power in the Academy
and Beyond,” Communication, Cultural and Critique, Vol. 13, 2020, p. 143–151.

Standpoint critique of science: Sandra Harding, Science and Social Inequality: Feminist and Postcolonial
Issues, University of Illinois, Urbana, 2006, pp. 80–97.

Women and care: Julia T. Wood, Who Cares? Women, Care, and Culture, Southern Illinois University Press,
Carbondale, 1994.

Black feminist thought: Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the
Politics of Empowerment, 2nd ed., Routledge, New York, 2000.

Strong Black woman collective theory: Shardé M. Davis, “The ‘Strong Black Woman Collective’: A
Developing Theoretical Framework for Understanding Collective Communication Practices of Black Women,”
Women’s Studies in Communication, Vol. 38, 2015, pp. 20–35.

Comparing two feminist theories: Julia T. Wood, “Feminist Standpoint Theory and Muted Group Theory:
Commonalities and Divergences,” Women and Language, Vol. 28, 2005, pp. 61–64.

Epistemic injustice: Miranda Fricker, Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing, Oxford
University Press, New York, 2007, pp. 1–8.
 Page 394

Intersectionality, standpoints, and sexual harassment of women of color: Brian K. Richardson and
Juandalynn Taylor, “Sexual Harassment at the Intersection of Race and Gender: A Theoretical Model of
the Sexual Harassment Experiences of Women of Color,” Western Journal of Communication, Vol. 73,
2009, pp 248–272.

Feminist critiques: Joseph Rouse, “Standpoint Theories Reconsidered,” Hypatia, Vol. 24, 2009, pp. 200–
209; Susan Hekman, “Truth and Method: Feminist Standpoint Theory Revisited” in The Feminist
Standpoint Theory Reader, pp. 225–241; Lynn Worsham, “Romancing the Stones: My Movie Date with
Sandra Harding,” Journal of Advanced Composition, Vol. 15, 1995, pp. 565–571.

Endnotes
1. 1. Sandra Harding, “Comment on Hekman’s ‘Truth and Method: Feminist Standpoint Theory Revisited’:
Whose Standpoint Needs the Regimes of Truth and Reality?” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and
Society, Vol. 22, 1997, p. 384.

2. 2. Mark Baldassare, Dean Bonner, Alyssa Dykman, and Rachel Lawler, “Changing Views of Police and
Race Relations,” Public Policy Institute of California, September 22, 2020,
https://www.ppic.org/blog/changing-views-of-police-and-race-relations, accessed April 10, 2021.

3. 3. Joshua C. Cochran and Patricia Y. Warren, “Racial, Ethnic, and Gender Differences in Perceptions of
the Police: The Salience of Officer Race within the Context of Racial Profiling,” Journal of Contemporary
Criminal Justice, Vol. 28, 2012, pp. 206–227.

4. 4. Julia T. Wood, Communication Theories in Action, 1st ed., Wadsworth, Belmont, CA, 1997, p. 250.

5. 5. Sandra Harding, Whose Science? Whose Knowledge? Thinking from Women’s Lives, Cornell University
Press, Ithaca, NY, 1991, pp. 269–270.

6. 6. Meenakshi Gigi Durham, “On the Relevance of Standpoint Epistemology to the Practice of Journalism:
The Case for ‘Strong Objectivity,’” Communication Theory, Vol. 8, 1998, p. 117.

7. 7. Julia T. Wood, “Feminist Scholarship and the Study of Relationships,” Journal of Social and Personal
Relationships, Vol. 12, 1995, p. 110.

8. 8. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind, Macmillan, New York, 1910, pp. 182–
188.

9. 9. Friedrich Engels, “Socialism: Utopian and Scientific,” and “The Origin of the Family, Private Property,
and the State,” in The Marx–Engels Reader, Robert Tucker (ed.), W. W. Norton, New York, 1978, pp.
701–702, 734–736. See also Sandra Harding, “The Instability of the Analytical Categories of Feminist
Theory,” in Sex and Scientific Inquiry, Sandra Harding and Jean O’Barr (eds.), University of Chicago, IL,
1987, p. 292.

10. 10. Harding, “Comment on Hekman’s ‘Truth and Method,’” p. 389.

11. 11. Wood, “Feminist Scholarship,” p. 111.

12. 12. Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, Geoff Bennington and
Brian Massumi (trans.), University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1984, p. xxiv.
13. 13. Julia T. Wood, “Feminist Standpoint Theory and Muted Group Theory: Commonalities and
Divergences,” Women and Language, Vol. 28, 2005, p. 62.

14. 14. Julia T. Wood, “Feminist Standpoint Theory and Muted Group Theory: Commonalities and
Divergences,” Women and Language, Vol. 28, 2005, p. 62.

15. 15. Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of
Empowerment, 2nd ed., Routledge, New York, 2000, p. 287.

16. 16. For an accessible description of Crenshaw’s experience with coining the term intersectionality, see
Jane Coaston, “The Intersectionality Wars,” Vox, May 28, 2019, https://www.vox.com/the-
highlight/2019/5/20/18542843/intersectionality-conservatism-law-race-gender-discrimination, accessed
April 10, 2021.

Page 395

17. 17. Collins, Black Feminist Thought, p. 22.

18. 18. Ibid., p. 4.

19. 19. Pearl Cleage, Deals with the Devil and Other Reasons to Riot, Ballantine, New York, 1993, p. 55.

20. 20. The wording of the four criteria of Black feminist epistemology and the quotations that accompany
them are from Collins, Black Feminist Thought, pp. 257–266.

21. 21. Shardé M. Davis, “Strong Black Woman Collective Theory: Understanding the Group-Level
Communication Practices of Black Women,” in Engaging Theories in Interpersonal Communication, 3rd
ed., Dawn O. Braithwaite and Paul Schrodt (eds.), Routledge, New York, in press.

22. 22. Sara M. Moniuszko, Maria Puente, and Veronica Bravo, “Ruth Bader Ginsburg Becomes First Woman
to Lie in State: 8 Other Strides She Made for Women,” USA Today, September 24, 2020,
https://www.usatoday.com/in-depth/life/2020/09/24/ruth-bader-ginsburg-8-things-she-did-womens-
rights/3502065001, accessed April 12, 2021.

23. 23. Robin Patric Clair, Nadia E. Brown, Debbie S. Dougherty, Hannah K. Delemeester, Patricia Geist-
Martin, William I. Gorden, Tyler Sorg, and Paaige K. Turner, “#MeToo, Sexual Harassment: An Article, a
Forum, and a Dream for the Future,” Journal of Applied Communication Research, Vol. 47, 2019, pp.
111–129.

24. 24. Sarah E. Jones, “Negotiating Transgender Identity at Work: A Movement to Theorize a Transgender
Standpoint Epistemology,” Management Communication Quarterly, Vol. 34, 2020, pp. 251–278.

25. 25. Julia T. Wood, “Gender and Moral Voice: Moving from Woman’s Nature to Standpoint Epistemology,”
Women’s Studies in Communication, Vol. 15, 1993, p. 8.

26. 26. Davis, “Strong Black Woman Collective Theory.”

27. 27. Julia T. Wood, Communication Theories in Action, 3rd ed., Wadsworth, Belmont, CA, p. 212. See also
Harding, Whose Science? Whose Knowledge? p. 59.

28. 28. Lourdes A. Vera, Dawn Walker, Michelle Murphy, Becky Mansfield, Ladan Mohamed Siad, Jessica
Ogden, and EDGI, “When Data Justice and Environmental Justice Meet: Formulating a Response to
Extractive Logic Through Environmental Data Justice,” Information, Communication & Society, Vol. 22,
2019, p. 1014.
29. 29. Shardé M. Davis, “Taking Back the Power: An Analysis of Black Women’s Communicative
Resistance,” Review of Communication, Vol. 18, 2018, pp. 301–318.

30. 30. Harding, Whose Science? Whose Knowledge? p. 192.

31. 31. Harding, Whose Science? Whose Knowledge?, p. 59.

32. 32. Donna Haraway, “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of
Partial Perspective,” Feminist Studies, Vol. 14, 1988, p. 3; Sandra Harding, “Introduction: Standpoint
Theory as a Site of Political, Philosophic, and Scientific Debate,” in The Feminist Standpoint Theory
Reader, Sandra Harding (ed.), Routledge, New York, 2004, p. 4.

33. 33. Harding, Whose Science? Whose Knowledge? p. 58.

34. 34. Wood, Communication Theories in Action, 1st ed., p. 257.

35. 35. Sonia Sotomayor, “Lecture: ‘A Latina Judge’s Voice,’” The New York Times, May 14, 2009,
https://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/15/us/politics/15judge.text.html, accessed April 24, 2021.

36. 36. Harding, Whose Science? Whose Knowledge? pp. 149–152.

37. 37. Harding, Whose Science? Whose Knowledge?, p. 270.

38. 38. Wood, Communication Theories in Action, 1st ed., p. 254.

39. 39. Wood, Communication Theories in Action, 1st ed., p. 254.

Page 396

40. 40. Harding, “Introduction,” p. 9; Wood, “Feminist Standpoint Theory,” pp. 61–64.

41. 41. “Read Vice President-Elect Kamala Harris’ Full Victory Speech,” PBS, November 7, 2020,
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/read-vice-president-elect-kamala-harris-full-victory-speech,
accessed April 12, 2021.

42. 42. Julia T. Wood, Who Cares? Women, Care, and Culture, Southern Illinois University Press, Carbondale,
1994, p. 4.

43. 43. Julia T. Wood, Who Cares? Women, Care, and Culture, Southern Illinois University Press, Carbondale,
1994, p. 6.

44. 44. Julia T. Wood, Who Cares? Women, Care, and Culture, Southern Illinois University Press, Carbondale,
1994, pp. 8–9.

45. 45. Shardé M. Davis, “The ‘Strong Black Woman Collective’: A Developing Theoretical Framework for
Understanding Collective Communication Practices of Black Women,” Women’s Studies in
Communication, Vol. 38, 2015, p. 30.

46. 46. Shardé M. Davis, “The ‘Strong Black Woman Collective’: A Developing Theoretical Framework for
Understanding Collective Communication Practices of Black Women,” Women’s Studies in
Communication, Vol. 38, 2015, p. 24.

47. 47. Wood, Who Cares? p. 163.

48. 48. Miranda Fricker, Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing, Oxford University Press,
New York, 2007, p. 5.

49. 49. Miranda Fricker, Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing, Oxford University Press,
New York, 2007, p. 4.

50. 50. Miranda Fricker, Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing, Oxford University Press,
New York, 2007, p. 6.

51. 51. Miranda Fricker, Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing, Oxford University Press,
New York, 2007, p. 176.

52. 52. Miranda Fricker, Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing, Oxford University Press,
New York, 2007, p. 5.

53. 53. Jasmine R. Linabary, Joëlle M. Cruz, Brenda J. Allen, Jed August Chalupa, Sarah E. Dempsey, Cerise
L. Glenn, Kate Lockwood Harris, Ziyu Long, James McDonald, Samira Musleh, Fitri H. Oktaviani,
Patricia S. Parker, and Francesca Sobande, “Envisioning More Equitable and Just Futures: Feminist
Organizational Communication in Theory and Praxis,” Management Communication Quarterly, Vol. 35,
2021, p. 149.

54. 54. Paula Chakravartty, Rachel Kuo, Victoria Grubbs, and Charlton McIlwain,
“#CommunicationSoWhite,” Journal of Communication, Vol. 68, 2018, p. 262.

55. 55. Conor Friedersdorf, “A Columbia Professor’s Critique of Campus Politics,” The Atlantic, June 30,
2017, https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/06/a-columbia-professors-critique-of-campus-
politics/532335, accessed May 25, 2021.

56. 56. John Michael, “Making a Stand: Standpoint Epistemologies, Political Positions, Proposition 187,”
Telos, Vol. 108, 1996, pp. 93–103.

57. 57. Lynn Worsham, “Romancing the Stones: My Movie Date with Sandra Harding,” Journal of Advanced
Composition, Vol. 15, 1995, p. 568.