Rebecca Kukla: evaluation

Transcript context

…It’s your answer. I think that 20 or 30 years ago, a lot of feminist philosophers were just starting what’s now known as standpoint epistemology, which is a version of epistemology that, in its sophisticated form, I’m very sympathetic with. But in its early, relatively unsophisticated form, the idea was that women, just in virtue of belonging to the group women, had a particular perspective coming out of their set of experiences that was not substitutable by somebody who hadn’t had that set of experiences. So it was very important to include women’s voice qua women, so they could represent this perspective and this set of experiences. I think that over the years, the idea that there is a thing — no matter how much you pare back — that there is a thing that is women’s common experiences or women’s common perspective has become increasingly debunked, including among feminists. Almost nobody would stand up for that anymore. Everybody understands that every woman is different, and that women’s experiences are inflected by their race, class, body shape, ability level, age, region of the country — just innumerable details that are going to intersect with and shape their experience. So there isn’t such a thing as the women’s perspective. You might think that means that there’s never a point to saying, “Speaking as a woman, blah, blah, blah,” because you can never speak for women. So why speak as a woman? But I do think that there are times where a conversation is going on in a way that universalizes a male positioning. And it helps to intrude into that conversation and say, “Look, there are other people in the room who don’t have the position that you are presuming.” That doesn’t mean that we all have the same position as one another. But it does mean that there’s a usefulness to reminding people rhetorically sometimes that what might seem like a universal position is not in fact a universal position. “Speaking as a woman” might just mean speaking as not the kind of man who all of you are right now presuming is the neutral case, or not even noticing that you’re taking as the neutral case. Kate Manne’s recent book, Down Girl — if I understand it properly, one argument is that misogyny is best thought of as a kind of enforcement structure for sexist norms. There are “good women” who follow certain norms and then “bad women” who don’t follow those norms and violate them. And the misogyny is a kind of punishment on the so-called bad women to strengthen the norm. Do you agree with that perspective or not?…

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