Study with the several resources on Docsity
Earn points by helping other students or get them with a premium plan
Prepare for your exams
Study with the several resources on Docsity
Earn points to download
Earn points by helping other students or get them with a premium plan
Community
Ask the community for help and clear up your study doubts
Discover the best universities in your country according to Docsity users
Free resources
Download our free guides on studying techniques, anxiety management strategies, and thesis advice from Docsity tutors
Feminist and Gender Theories in explain relation of ruling, standpoint theory, institutional ethnography, object relation theory and sociological theory in contemporary ERA.
Typology: Study Guides, Projects, Research
1 / 69
This page cannot be seen from the preview
Don't miss anything!
312
Dorothy E. Smith Patricia Hill Collins Nancy Chodorow
(^) Relations of Ruling (^) Bifurcation of Consciousness (^) Institutional Ethnography (^) Standpoint Theory
(^) Standpoint Epistemology (^) Black Feminist Thought (^) Matrix of Domination
(^) Object Relations Theory
Feminist and Gender Theories ^313 There is no original or primary gender a drag imitates, but gender is a kind of imitation for which there is no original. —Judith Butler
(^) Hegemonic Masculinity (^) Patriarchal Dividend R. W. Connell
(^) Queer Theory (^) Heterosexual Matrix (^) Performativity Judith Butler A Brief History of Women’s Rights in the United States 1700s American colonial law held that “by marriage, the husband and wife are one person in the law. The very being and legal existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage, or at least is incorporated into that of her husband under whose wing and protection she performs everything.” By 1777, women are denied the right to vote in all states in the United States. (Continued)
Feminist and Gender Theories ^315 1893 New Zealand 1950 India 1902 Australiaa^ 1954 Colombia 1906 Finland 1957 Malaysia, Zimbabwe 1913 Norway 1962 Algeria 1915 Denmark 1963 Iran, Morocco 1917 Canadab^ 1964 Libya 1918 Austria, Germany, Poland, Russia 1967 Ecuador 1919 Netherlands 1971 Switzerland 1920 United States 1972 Bangladesh 1921 Sweden 1974 Jordan 1928 Britain, Ireland 1976 Portugal 1931 Spain 1989 Namibia 1944 France 1990 Western Samoa 1945 Italy 1993 Kazakhstan, Moldova 1947 Argentina, Japan, Mexico, Pakistan 1994 South Africa 1949 China 2005 Kuwait Table 7.1 International Women’s Suffrage Timeline SOURCE: The New York Times, May 22, 2005. NOTE: Two countries do not allow their people, male or female, to vote: Brunei and the United Arab Emirates. Saudi Arabia is the only country with suffrage that does not allow women to vote. aAustralian women, with the exception of aboriginal women, won the vote in 1902. Aboriginals, male and female, did not have the right to vote until 1962. bCanadian women, with the exception of Canadian Indian women, won the vote in 1917. Canadian Indians, male and female, did not win the vote until 1960. to toe when in public. Men are entitled to divorce without explanation simply by registering a statement to the court and repeating it three times. By contrast, most women not only lack the right to divorce, but also, because their children legally belong to the father, to leave their husband means giving up their children (Freedom House 2009; PBS 2002). What these latter cases also demonstrate is that the expansion of women’s rights does not proceed auto- matically and must not be taken for granted. Laws that discriminate against women were instituted in the United States in the nineteenth century; these laws had not existed in previous decades. On a global scale, nowhere was the precariousness of women’s rights more evident than it was when the Taliban radically rescinded them in Afghanistan (1996–2002). Under the rule of the Taliban, women who had previously enjoyed many rights were banished from the workforce, forbidden an education, and prohibited from leaving their homes unless accompa- nied by a close male relative (PBS 2002). Photo 7.1 Kuwaiti Women Protesting Kuwaiti women press for their full political rights amid crucial parliamentary meeting in March 2005.
316 ^ SOCIOLOGICAL THEORY IN THE CONTEMPORARY ERA In this chapter, we explore the works of five different analysts who take seriously the distinct social situation of women and men and examine it from a variety of theoretical viewpoints. We begin with the Canadian sociologist Dorothy E. Smith, who provocatively blends neo-Marxist, phenomenological, and ethnomethodological concepts and ideas. We then turn to the work of African American sociologist Patricia Hill Collins, who extends the work of Smith by formally situating the variable of race into the critical/phenomenological exploration of class and gender, while also borrowing significantly from postmodernism and recent work on the body and sexu- ality. We then turn to the psychoanalytic feminist Nancy Chodorow, who draws on both the Frankfurt School and Freud to explore various factors that serve to perpetuate sexism. Both of the final two theorists featured in this chapter challenge the prevailing “sex/gender” dichotomy, i.e., the notion that “sex” is the biological difference between “male” and “female” human ani- mals, while “gender” is the social difference “between males’ and females’ roles or men’s and women’s personalities” (Connell 2002:33). Australian sociologist Raewyn Connell explains how in many ways men and boys are gatekeepers for gender equality. Finally, in accordance with postmodern lines of thought, the American philosopher Judith Butler challenges the very binary categories that we use to think about both gender and sexual orientation.^2 That gender analysts bring to bear such a wide variety of theoretical approaches brings us to the question, why not discuss each of these theorists in the chapter on the theoretical tradition of which they are a part? Although this is certainly an option for professors and students, as you will see, the feminists whose works you will read in this chapter do not fit very neatly into a single theoretical tradition; rather, they provocatively draw from a variety of theoretical and disciplinary wells in order to fully address feminist concerns. In addition, grouping feminist theorists together in this chapter better enables us to compare and contrast these various approaches to gender. (^2) To be sure, feminism has never been a unified body of thought, and there are various ways that feminisms and feminist theorists can be contemplated. One of the most common is according to political/ideological orientation. According to this approach, which typically equates “feminism” with “feminist theory,” “liberal feminists” such as Betty Friedan (see Significant Others, p. 317), focus on how political, economic, and social rights can be fully extended to women within contemporary soci- ety, while “radical feminists” such as Andrea Dworkin (1946–2005) and Catharine MacKinnon (1946– ), most famous for their proposal for a law that defined pornography as a violation of women’s civil rights (thereby allowing women to sue the producers and distributors of pornography in a civil court for damages), view women as an oppressed group, who, like other oppressed peoples, must struggle for their liberation against their oppressors—in this case, men. However, here we consider feminists largely in terms of their theoretical orientation rather than in terms of their political/ideo- logical commitment, because we view the former as prior to the latter (Alexander 1987:7). As dis- cussed in Chapter 1, theoretical presuppositions are, by definition, simply the most basic assumptions that theorists make as they go about thinking and writing about the world (ibid.:12). Simone de Beauvoir (1908–1986): The Second Sex Simone de Beauvoir was born in Paris in 1908 to a bourgeois family. Like her famous companion, Jean-Paul Sartre, whom she met at the École Normale Supérieure, she was an acclaimed French existentialist philosopher who wrote fiction and memoirs, as well as philosophy. In her most influential book, The Second Sex (1949), de Beauvoir argued that women have been defined by men and that if they attempt to break with this, they risk alienating themselves. Specifically, following Hegel, de Beauvoir maintained that Significant Others
318 ^ SOCIOLOGICAL THEORY IN THE CONTEMPORARY ERA
Dorothy E. Smith was born in the north of England in 1926. She worked at a variety of jobs and was a secretary at a publishing company before she decided to enhance her employment prospects by attaining a college degree. She began college at the London School of Economics in 1951, and received her bachelor’s degree in sociology in 1955. She and her husband then decided to both go on to graduate school at the University of California, Berkeley. Smith maintains that, although her years at Berkeley were in many ways the unhappiest of her life, she learned a lot, both inside and outside the classroom (University of California n.d.). Through “the experience of marriage, of immigration closely following marriage,... of the arrival of children, of the departure of a husband rather early one morn- ing, of the jobs that became available” she learned about the discrepancy between social scientific description and lived experience (Smith 1987:65). Through courses in survey methods and mathematical sociology, she learned a type of sociological methodology that she would come to reject, but with which she would come to formulate her own opposing methodology. Through a wonderful course taught by Tamotsu Shibutani, she gained a deep appreciation for George Herbert Mead, which “laid the groundwork for a later deep involve- ment with the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty” (Institutional Ethnography n.d.). After completing her doctorate in sociology in 1963, Smith worked as a research soci- ologist and lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley. At times, she was the only woman in the university’s department of sociology. Deeply moved by the newly emerging women’s movement, Smith organized a session for graduate students to “tell their stories” about gender inequities in academia (of which “there were many”) (ibid.). By the late 1960s, Smith’s marriage had fallen apart, and, lacking daycare and family support, she returned home to England to raise her children and teach. She became a lecturer in sociology at the University of Essex, Colchester. Several years later, Smith accepted a full-time position at the University of British Columbia, and it was here that Smith’s femi- nist transformation, which had begun in Berkeley, deepened. Smith taught one of the first women’s studies courses; the lack of existing materials gave her impetus to “go from the kind of deep changes in my psyche that accompanied the women’s movement to writing those changes into the social” (ibid.). Smith also helped create a women’s action group that worked to improve the status of women “at all levels of the university”; she was involved in establishing a women’s research center in Vancouver outside the university that would provide action-relevant research to women’s organizations (ibid.). Smith also edited a vol- ume providing a feminist critique of psychiatry ( Women Look at Psychiatry: I’m Not Mad, I’m Angry , 1975) and began to reread Marx and integrate Marxist ideas into her work, as is reflected in her pamphlet Feminism and Marxism: A Place to Begin, a Way to Go (1977).^3 In 1977, Smith became a professor in the Department of Sociology and Equity Studies in Education at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto. Here Smith published the works for which she is most well known, including The Everyday World as Problematic (1987), The Conceptual Practices of Power (1990), Texts, Facts, and Femininity (1990), Writing the Social (1999), and, most recently, Institutional Ethnography: A Sociology for People (2005). In these works, Smith exhorts a powerful feminist theory of what she calls relations of ruling, and she sets out her own approach, which she calls insti- tutional ethnography, as a means for building knowledge as to how the relations of ruling operate from the standpoints of the people participating in them. These pivotal ideas will be discussed further below. (^3) Interestingly, Smith (1977:9) maintains that, although she worked as a socialist when she was a young woman in England, it was not until she reread Marx in the 1970s that she came to really understand what Marx meant.
Feminist and Gender Theories ^319 Smith continues to be an active teacher and scholar. As professor emerita in the Department of Sociology and Equity Studies in Education at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto and an adjunct professor in the Department of Sociology, University of Victoria, British Columbia, she continues to educate and inspire a new generation of scholars dedicated to institutional ethnography (see, for instance, Campbell and Manicom 1995).
Although Dorothy Smith has written on a wide variety of topics, including education, Marxism, the family, mental illness, and textual analysis, she is most well known as one of the originators of standpoint theory.^4 Smith uses the notion of standpoint to emphasize that what one knows is affected by where one stands (one’s subject position) in society. We begin from the world as we actually experience it, and what we know of the world and of the “other” is conditional on that location (Smith 1987). Yet, Smith’s argument is not that we cannot look at the world in any way other than from our given standpoint. Rather, her point is that (1) no one can have complete, objective knowledge; (2) no two people have exactly the same stand- point; and (3) we must not take the standpoint from which we speak for granted. Instead, we must recognize it, be reflexive about it, and problematize it. Our situated, everyday experience should serve as a “point of entry” of investigation (Smith 2005:10). Put in another way, the goal of Smith’s feminist sociology is to explicitly reformulate sociological theory by fully accounting for the standpoint of gender and its effects on our experience of reality. Interestingly, it was Smith’s particular standpoint as a female in a male- dominated world, and specifically as simultaneously a wife, mother, and sociology graduate student in the 1960s, that led her to the formulation of her notion of standpoint. By overtly recognizing the particular standpoint from which she spoke, Smith was bringing to the fore the extent to which the issue of standpoint had been unacknowledged in sociology. This point is quite ironic, really. Sociology was explicitly set out as the “scientific” and “objective” study of society when it first emerged as a discipline in the nineteenth century, but because its first practitioners were almost exclusively men, it implicitly assumed and reflected the relevancies, interests, and perspectives of (white, middle-class) males.^5 “Its method, conceptual schemes and theories had been based on and built up within the male social universe” (Smith 1990a:23). The failure to recognize the particular standpoints from which they spoke not only left soci- ologists unaware of the biases inherent to their position; in addition, it implicitly made the disci- pline of sociology a masculine sociology. In other words, by focusing on the world of paid labor, politics, and formal organizations (spheres of influence from which women have historically been excluded) and erasing or ignoring women’s world of sexual reproduction, children, household labor, and affective ties, sociology unwittingly served as a vehicle for alienating women from their own lives (Seidman 1994:212–13). This is the irony mentioned previously: at the same time that (^4) The term “feminist standpoint theory” was actually not coined by Smith. Rather, feminist standpoint theory (and hence “standpoint theory”) is traced to Sandra Harding (1986), who, based on her reading of the work of feminist theorists—of which the most important were Dorothy Smith, Nancy Hartsock, and Hilary Rose—used the term to describe a feminist critique beyond the strictly empirical one of claiming a special privilege for women’s knowledge, and emphasizing that knowledge is always rooted in a particular position and that women are privileged epistemologically by being members of an oppressed group (“epistemology” means how we know what we know, how we decide what is valid knowledge) (Smith 2005:8; see also Harding 2004). (^5) Although Smith did not focus on race, as you will shortly see, Patricia Hill Collins built on Smith’s work by illuminating how race is intertwined with gender and class standpoints.
Feminist and Gender Theories ^321 dominant view to which you must adapt (e.g., a masculine point of view). The notion of bifurcation of consciousness underscores that subordinate groups are conditioned to view the world from the perspective of the dominant group, since the perspective of the latter is embedded in the institutions and practices of that world. Conversely, the dominant group enjoys the privilege of remaining oblivious to the worldview of the Other, or subordinate group, since the Other is fully expected to accommodate to them. The “governing mode” of the professions, then, creates a bifurcation of consciousness in the actor: “It establishes two modes of knowing, experiencing, and acting—one located in the body and in the space that it occupies and moves into, the other passing beyond it” (ibid.:82). Of course, bifurcation of consciousness reflects Smith’s own experience of living in “two worlds”: the dominant, masculine-oriented, “abstract” world of the sociologist, and the “concrete” world of wife and mother. The key point, as Smith (2005:11) notes, is that “the two subjectivities, home and university, could not be blended.” In this way, Smith’s concept of bifurcation of consciousness recalls W. E. B. Du Bois’s concept of “double conscious- ness,” which he used to describe the experiential condition of black Americans.^6 In both cases, it is the oppressed person who must adapt to the “rules of the game” that do not reflect her interests or desires, even though, in both cases, the dual subjectivities provide a uniquely “clairvoyant” vantage point (in Du Bois’s terms). Thus, for instance, women in male-dom- inated professions (e.g., law enforcement, construction) acclimate themselves to sexist and even misogynistic talk about the female body that is a normal part of their everyday work environment. Not only do they learn to ignore the banter, but also, indeed, they might even chime in. However, because they must continually accommodate themselves to the domi- nant group in order to gain acceptance in a world that is not theirs, members of oppressed or minority groups become alienated from their “true” selves. Thus far, we have discussed Smith’s dual neo-Marxist and phenomenological roots. There is also an important discursive bent in Smith’s work that has become especially apparent in the last decade, however. In conjunction with the poststructuralist turn (see Chapter 8), Smith emphasizes that in modern, Western societies, social domination oper- ates through texts (such as medical records, census reports, psychiatric evaluations, employment files) that facilitate social control. Thus, Smith (1990b:6) describes relations of ruling as including not only forms such as “bureaucracy, administration, management, professional organization and media,” but also “the complex of discourses, scientific, tech- nical, and cultural, that intersect, interpenetrate, and coordinate” them. Smith (1987:4) maintains that behind and within the “apparently neutral and impersonal rationality of the ruling apparatus” is concealed a “male subtext.” Women are “excluded from the practices of power within textually mediated relations of ruling” (ibid.). Thus, for instance, official psychiatric evaluations replace the individual’s actual lived experience with a means for interpreting it; the individual becomes a case history, a type, a disease, a syndrome, and a treatment possibility (Seidman 1994:216). Smith goes on to suggest that because sociology too relies on these same kinds of texts, it too is part and parcel of the relations of ruling. The subject matter and topics of sociology are those of the ruling powers. Sociological knowledge receives its shape less from actuali- ties and the lived experiences of real individuals than from the interests in control and regu- lation, by the state, professional associations, and bureaucratization (ibid.:216). Most important, Smith does not just criticize modern, “masculinist” sociology; she pro- vides an alternative to it. Inspired by Marx’s historical realism but also drawing on ethno- methodology—which, as discussed in Chapter 6, considers that practical activities, practical circumstances, and practical sociological reasoning must not be taken for granted but rather (^6) See Edles and Appelrouth (2005/2010:323–15).
322 ^ SOCIOLOGICAL THEORY IN THE CONTEMPORARY ERA be topics of empirical study (Garfinkel 1967:1)—Smith advocates a “sociology for women” that begins “where women are situated”: in the “particularities of an actual, everyday world” (Smith 1987:109). Smith’s sociology for women aims not to “transform people into objects” but to “preserve their presence as subjects” (ibid.:151). Smith (ibid.:143) argues that the “only route to a faithful telling that does not privilege the perspectives arising in the sites of her sociological project and her participation in a sociological discourse is to commit herself to an inquiry that is ontologically faithful, faithful to the presence and activity of her sub- jects and faithful to the actualities of the world that arises for her, for them, for all of us, in the ongoing co-ordering of our actual practices.”^7 Smith calls her particular approach institutional ethnography. Institutional ethnography is a method of elucidating and examining the relationship between everyday activities and experiences and larger institutional imperatives. Interestingly, the very term “institutional ethnography” explicitly couples an emphasis on structures of power (“institutions”) with the microlevel practices that make up everyday life (“ethnography”). Smith’s point, of course, is that it is in microlevel, everyday practices at the level of the individual that collective, hierar- chical patterns of social structure are experienced, shaped, and reaffirmed. For instance, in one passage you will read, Smith explains how the seemingly benign, everyday act of walking her dog actually reaffirms the class system. As Smith “keeps an eye on her dog” so that it does its business on some lawns as opposed to others, she is, in fact, “observing some of the niceties of different forms of property ownership” (renters versus owners) (Smith 1987:155); she is participating in the existing relations of ruling. This point is illustrated in Figure 7.1. (^7) In her most recent book, Smith (2005) updates her terminology by replacing the notion of “a sociol- ogy for women” with that of “a sociology for people.” In other words, the notion of “a sociology for women” can be understood as reflecting a particular historical era in which feminists called attention to the fact that the standpoint of women was absent in the academy. Today, however, the more perti- nent (and more postmodern) point is that we must begin wherever we are—that is, in terms not only of “gender,” but also of class, race, sexual orientation, ablebodiedness, and so on. This is institutional ethnography. Nonrational Rational Institutional ethnography: Walking the dog Figure 7.1 Smith’s Concept of Institutional Ethnography: Walking the Dog Individual Collective Habituated experiential reality and consciousness Relations of ruling/ Institution of private property Relations of ruling/ Complexes of discourses Notion of “private property” Relatively conscious practices for avoiding sanctions Figure 7.1 Smith’s Concept of Institutional Ethnography: Walking the Dog
324 ^ SOCIOLOGICAL THEORY IN THE CONTEMPORARY ERA organizing and regulating society (collective/rational) as well. That said, above all, “stand- point” reflects the specific attitudes, emotions, and values that I experience and internalize at the level of the individual (individual/nonrational) as well as the habituated day-to-day expe- rience, and the particular strategic advantages and disadvantages I am able to accrue through this position and my mundane working existence (individual/rational). Put in another way, Smith articulates not only how individuals unthinkingly “do” gender (and class) in daily life at the individual/nonrational level, but also the subjective categories that make this possible—that is, the taken-for-granted understandings of what it means to be a “boy” or a “girl” that reflect the collective, nonrational realm. Akin to Schutz and Berger and Luckmann (see Chapter 6) as well as the poststructuralists who emphasize dis- course and are discussed in the next chapter, Smith continually emphasizes that gender cannot be “done” at the individual level in everyday life without taken-for-granted concep- tualizations at the collective level. In a similar vein, that Smith’s concept “relations of ruling” encompasses both such forms as “bureaucracy, administration, management, professional organization and media” and scientific, technical, and cultural discourses, reflects the collective/rational and collective/ nonrational realms, respectively (see Figure 7.2). Specifically, that Smith (2005:227; emphasis added) defines ruling relations as “objectified forms of consciousness and organi- zation, constituted externally to particular places and people ,” clearly reflects her collectiv- istic orientation to order_._ And although Smith also underscores that ruling relations refer to “that total complex of activities, differentiated into many spheres... through which we are ruled and through which we, and I emphasize this we , participate in ruling” (Smith 1990a, as cited in Calhoun 2003:316; emphasis in original), which indicates an acknowledgment of individual agency, that “forms of consciousness are created that are properties of organiza- tion or discourse rather than of individual subjects ” (Smith 1987:3, emphasis added) clearly reflects a collectivistic approach to order. This dual rational/nonrational approach to action and collectivistic approach to order inherent in Smith’s concept of relations of ruling is illustrated in Figure 7.2. Interestingly, then, taken together, Figures 7.1 and 7.2 illustrate that the multidimensionality of the concept of institutional ethnography is a function of its incor- poration of the more individualistic concept of standpoint and the more collectivistic con- cept of ruling relations.
In this excerpt from her most recent book, Institutional Ethnography (2005), Smith explicitly defines “institutional ethnography” and explains how she came to formulate this unique method of inquiry. In addition, Smith explains the historical trajectory of gender and relations of ruling—that is, how the radical division between spheres of action and of consciousness of middle-class men and women came to emerge. As indicated pre- viously, it is precisely this conceptualization of relations of ruling (or ruling relations) as not simply modes of domination but also forms of consciousness that forms the crux of Smith’s work.
Feminist and Gender Theories ^325 Institutional Ethnography (2005)
It’s hard to recall just how radical the experience of the women’s movement was at its inception for those of us who had lived and thought within the masculinist regime against which the movement struggled. For us, the struggle was as much within ourselves, with what we knew how to do and think and feel, as with that regime as an enemy outside us. Indeed we ourselves had participated however pas- sively in that regime. There was no developed dis- course in which the experiences that were spoken originally as everyday experience could be trans- lated into a public language and become political in the ways distinctive to the women’s movement. We learned in talking with other women about experi- ences that we had and about others that we had not had. We began to name “oppression,” “rape,” “harassment,” “sexism,” “violence,” and others. These were terms that did more than name. They gave shared experiences a political presence. Starting with our experiences as we talked and thought about them, we discovered depths of alien- ation and anger that were astonishing. Where had all these feelings been? How extraordinary were the transformations we experienced as we discovered with other women how to speak with one another about such experiences and then how to bring them forward publicly, which meant exposing them to men. Finally, how extraordinary were the transfor- mations of ourselves in this process. Talking our experience was a means of discovery. What we did not know and did not know how to think about, we could examine as we found what we had in com- mon. The approach that I have taken in developing an alternative sociology takes up women’s stand- point in a way that is modeled on these early adven- tures of the women’s movement. It takes up women’s standpoint not as a given and finalized form of knowledge but as a ground in experience from which discoveries are to be made. It is this active and shared process of speaking from our experience, as well as acting and organiz- ing to change how those experiences had been cre- ated, that has been translated in feminist thinking into the concept of a feminist standpoint—or, for me, women’s standpoint. However the concept originated, Sandra Harding (1988) drew together the social scientific thinking by feminists, particu- larly Nancy Hartsock, Hilary Rose, and myself, that had as a common project taking up a stand- point in women’s experience. Harding argued that feminist empiricists who claimed both a special privilege for women’s knowledge and an objectiv- ity were stuck in an irresolvable paradox. Those she described as “feminist standpoint theorists” moved the feminist critique a step beyond feminist empiri- cism by claiming that knowledge of society must always be from a position in it and that women are privileged epistemologically by being members of an oppressed group. Like the slave in Hegel’s par- able of the master-slave relationship, they can see more, further, and better than the master precisely because of their marginalized and oppressed condi- tion. She was, however, critical of the way in which experience in the women’s movement had come to hold authority as a ground for speaking, and claim- ing to speak truly, that challenged the rational and objectified forms of knowledge and their secret masculine subject. Furthermore, feminist stand- point theory, according to Harding, implicitly reproduced the universalized subject and claims to objective truth of traditional philosophical dis- course, an implicit return to the empiricism we claimed to have gone beyond. The notion of women’s standpoint—or indeed the notion that women’s experience has special authority—has also been challenged by feminist theorists. It fails to take into account diversities of SOURCE: Excerpts from Institutional Ethnography by Dorothy Smith. Copyright © 2005 by AltaMira Press. Reproduced with permission of AltaMira Press via Copyright Clearance Center.
Feminist and Gender Theories ^327 than feminist) standpoint is integral to the design of what I originally called “a sociology for women,” which has necessarily been transformed into “a sociology for people.” It does not identify a position or a category of position, gender, class, or race within the society, but it does establish as a subject position for institutional ethnography as a method of inquiry, a site for the knower that is open to anyone. As a method of inquiry, institutional ethnog- raphy is designed to create an alternate to the objectified subject of knowledge of established social scientific discourse. The latter conforms to and is integrated with what I have come to call the “ruling relations”—that extraordinary yet ordinary complex of relations that are textually mediated, that connect us across space and time and organize our everyday lives—the corpora- tions, government bureaucracies, academic and professional discourses, mass media, and the complex of relations that interconnect them. At the inception of this early stage of late-twentieth- century women’s movement, women were excluded from appearing as agents or subjects with the ruling relations. However we might have been at work in them, we were subordi- nates. We were women whose work as mothers reproduced the same gendered organization that subordinated us; we were the support staff, store clerks, nurses, social workers doing casework and not administration, and so on. In the univer- sity itself, we were few and mostly marginal (two distinguished women in the department where I first worked in Canada had never had more than annual lectureships). “Standpoint” as the design of a subject posi- tion in institutional ethnography creates a point of entry into discovering the social that does not subordinate the knowing subject to objectified forms of knowledge of society or political econ- omy. It is a method of inquiry that works from the actualities of people’s everyday lives and experience to discover the social as it extends beyond experience. A standpoint in people’s everyday lives is integral to that method. It is integral to a sociology creating a subject position within its discourse, which anyone can occupy. The institutional ethnographer works from the social in people’s experience to discover its pres- ence and organization in their lives and to expli- cate or map that organization beyond the local of the everyday.
The project of developing a sociology that does not objectify originated, as did so much in the women’s movement, in exploring experiences in my life as a woman. That exploration put into question the fundamentals of the sociology I had learned at length and sometimes painfully as an undergraduate and graduate school student. I was, in those early times, a sociologist teaching at the University of British Columbia, on the west coast of Canada, and a single parent with two small boys. My experience was of contradic- tory modes of working existence: on the one hand was the work of the home and of being a mother; on the other, the work of the academy, preparing for classes, teaching, faculty meetings, writing papers, and so on. I could not see my work at home in relation to the sociology I taught, in part, of course, because that sociology had almost nothing to say about it. I learned from the women’s movement to begin in my own experience and start there in finding the voice that asserted the buried woman. I started to explore what it might mean to think sociologically from the place where I was in- body, living with my children in my home and with those cares and consciousness that are inte- gral to that work. Here were the particularities of my relationships with my children, my neigh- bors, my friends, their friends, our rabbit (sur- prisingly fierce and destructive—my copy of George Herbert Mead’s Mind, Self, and Society bears scars inflicted by our long-eared pet’s teeth and claws), our two dogs, and an occasional hamster. In this mode, I was attentive to the vari- eties of demands that housekeeping, cooking, child care, and the multiple minor tasks of our local settings made on me. When I went to work in the university, I did not, of course, step out of my body, but the focus of my work was not on the local particularities of relationships and set- ting but on sociological discourse read and taught or on the administrative work of a univer- sity department. Body, of course, was there as it had to be to get the work done, but the work was not organized by and in relation to it. The two subjectivities, home and university, could not be blended. They ran on separate tracks with distinct phenomenal organization. Memory, attention, reasoning, and response were
328 ^ SOCIOLOGICAL THEORY IN THE CONTEMPORARY ERA organized quite differently. Remembering a dental appointment for one of the children wasn’t part of my academic consciousness, and if I wasn’t careful to find some way of reminding myself that didn’t depend on memory, I might have well forgot it. My experiences uncovered radical differences between home and academy in how they were situated, and how they situated me, in the society. Home was organized around the particularities of my chil- dren’s bodies, faces, movements, the sounds of their voices, the smell of their hair, the arguments, the play, the evening rituals of reading, the stress of getting them off to school in the morning, cooking, and serving meals, and the multitudes of the every- day that cannot be enumerated, an intense, preoc- cupying world of work that also cannot really be defined. My work at the university was quite differ- ently articulated; the sociology I thought and taught was embedded in the texts that linked me into a discourse extending indefinitely into only very partially known networks of others, some just names of the dead; some the heroes and masters of the contemporary discipline; some just names on books or articles; and others known as teachers, colleagues, and contemporaries in graduate school. The administrative work done by faculty tied into the administration of the university, known at that time only vaguely as powers such as dean or presi- dent or as offices such as the registrar, all of whom regulated the work we did with students. My first act on arriving in the department office, after greet- ing the secretaries, was to open my mail and thus to enter a world of action in texts. I knew a practice of subjectivity in the university that excluded the local and bodily from its field. Learning from the women’s movement to start from where I was as a woman, I began to attend to the university and my work there from the standpoint of “home” subjectivity. I started to notice what I had not seen before. How odd, as I am walking down the central mall of that university that opens up to the dark blue of the humped islands and the fur- ther snowy mountains to the north, to see on my left a large hole where before there had been a building! In the mode of the everyday you can find the connections, though you may not always understand them. In a house with children and dogs and rabbits, the connection between the destruction of the spine of my copy of Mind, Self, and Society and that rabbit hanging around in my workspace was obvious. But the hole where once there’d been a building couldn’t be connected to any obvious agent. The peculiar consciousness I practiced in the university began to emerge for me as a puzzlingly strange form of organization. If I traced the provenance of that hole, I’d be climbing up into an order of rela- tions linking administrative process with what- ever construction company was actually responsible for the making of the hole; I’d be climbing into a web of budgets, administrative decisions, provincial and federal government funding, and so on and so on. I’d be climbing into that order of relations that institutional eth- nographers call the “ruling relations.” These could be seen as relations that divorced the sub- ject from the particularized settings and rela- tionships of her life and work as mother and housewife. They created subject positions that elevated consciousness into a universalized mode, whether of the social relations mediated by money or of those organized as objectivity in academic or professional discourse. Practicing embodiment on the terrain of the disembodied of those relations brought them into view. I became aware of them as I became aware of their presence and power in the everyday, and, going beyond that hole in the ground, I also began to think of the sociology I practiced in the everyday working world of the university as an organization of discursive relations fully inte- grated with them.
In this reading taken from The Everyday World as Problematic (1987), Smith further eluci- dates institutional ethnography using concrete examples from her own experience. As you will see, by starting from her own experience Smith does not mean that she engages only in a self-indulgent inner exploration with herself as sole focus and object. Rather, Smith means that she begins from her own original but tacit knowledge as well as from the acts by which
330 ^ SOCIOLOGICAL THEORY IN THE CONTEMPORARY ERA one individual whose participants are not nec- essarily present or known to one another. There are social relations that are not encompassed by the setting in which my dog is walked, but they nonetheless enter in and organize it. The exis- tence of single-family dwellings, of rental units, and the like has reference to and depends upon the organization of the state at various levels, its local by-laws, zoning laws, and so forth deter- mining the “real estate” character of the neigh- borhood; it has reference to and depends upon the organization of a real estate market in houses and apartments, and the work of the legal profession and others; it has reference to and organizes the ways in which individual ownership is expressed in local practices that maintain the value of the property both in itself and as part of a respectable neighborhood. Thus this ordinary daily scene, doubtless enacted by many in various forms and settings, has an implicit organization tying each particular local setting to a larger generalized complex of social relations.... The language of the everyday world as it is incorporated into the description of that world is rooted in social relations beyond it and expresses relations not peculiar to the particular setting it describes. In my account of walking the dog, there are categories anchored in and depending for their meaning on a larger complex of social relations. The meaning of such terms as “single- family residence” and “rental units,” for exam- ple, resides in social relations organizing local settings but not fully present in them. The par- ticularizing description gives access to that which is not particular since it is embedded in categories whose meaning reaches into the com- plex of social relations our inquiry would expli- cate. Ordinary descriptions, ordinary talk, trail along with them as a property of the meaning of their terms, the extended social relations they name as phenomena. Thus taking the everyday world as problem- atic does not confine us to particular descriptions of local settings without possibility of general- ization. This has been seen to be the problem with sociological ethnographies, which, however fascinating as accounts of people’s lived worlds, cannot stand as general or typical statements about society and social relations. They have been seen in themselves as only a way station to the development of systematic research proce- dures that would establish the level of generality or typicality of what has been observed of such- and-such categories of persons. Or they may be read as instances of a general sociological prin- ciple. This procedure has been turned on its head in an ingenious fashion in “grounded theory,” which proposes a method of distilling generaliz- ing concepts from the social organization of the local setting observed whereupon the latter becomes an instance of the general principles distilled from it.ii^ The popularity of this device testifies to the extent to which the problem of generalizability is felt by sociologists. The single case has no significance unless it can in some way or another be extrapolated to some general statement either about society or some subgroup represented methodologically as a population of individuals, or connecting the local and particu- lar with a generalizing concept of sociological discourse. Beginning with the everyday world as prob- lematic bypasses this issue. The relation of the local and particular to generalized social rela- tions is not a conceptual or methodological issue, it is a property of social organization. The par- ticular “case” is not particular in the aspects that are of concern to the inquirer. Indeed, it is not a “case” for it presents itself to us rather as a point of entry, the locus of an experiencing subject or subjects, into a larger social and economic pro- cess. The problematic of the everyday world arises precisely at the juncture of particular expe- rience, with generalizing and abstracted forms of social relations organizing a division of labor in society at large.... I am using the terms “institutional” and “insti- tution” to identify a complex of relations form- ing part of the ruling apparatus, organized around a distinctive function—education, health care, law, and the like. In contrast to such concepts as bureaucracy, “institution” does not identify a determinate form of social organization, but iiBarney Glaser and Anselm L. Strauss, The Discovery of Grounded Theory: Strategies for Qualitative Research (Chicago: Aldine Press, 1967).
Feminist and Gender Theories ^331 rather the intersection and coordination of more than one relational mode of the ruling apparatus. Characteristically, state agencies are tied in with professional forms of organization, and both are interpenetrated by relations of discourse of more than one order. We might imagine institu- tions as nodes or knots in the relations of the ruling apparatus to class, coordinating multiple strands of action into a functional complex. Integral to the coordinating process are ideolo- gies systematically developed to provide cate- gories and concepts expressing the relation of local courses of action to the institutional func- tion (a point to be elaborated later), providing a currency or currencies enabling interchange between different specialized parts of the com- plex and a common conceptual organization coordinating its diverse sites. The notion of ethnography is introduced to commit us to an exploration, description, and analysis of such a complex of relations, not conceived in the abstract but from the entry point of some par- ticular person or persons whose everyday world of working is organized thereby.... Institutional ethnography explores the social relations individuals bring into being in and through their actual practices. Its methods, whether of observation, interviewing, recollec- tion of work experience, use of archives, textual analysis, or other, are constrained by the practi- calities of investigation of social relations as actual practices. Note however that the institu- tional ethnography as a way of investigating the problematic of the everyday world does not involve substituting the analysis, the perspectives and views of subjects, for the investigation by the sociologist. Though women are indeed the expert practitioners of their everyday worlds, the notion of the everyday world as problematic assumes that disclosure of the extralocal determinations of our experience does not lie within the scope of everyday practices. We can see only so much without specialized investigation, and the latter should be the sociologist’s special business.
The coordination of institutional processes is mediated ideologically. The categories and con- cepts of ideology express the relation of mem- bers’ actual practices—their work—to the institutional function. Ethnomethodology has developed the notion of accountability to iden- tify members’ methods accomplishing the order- liness and sense of local processes.iii^ Members themselves and for themselves constitute the observability and reportability of what has hap- pened or is going on, in how they take it up as a matter for anyone to find and recognize. Members make use of categories and concepts to analyze settings for features thus made observable. The apparently referential operation of locally applied categories and concepts is constitutive of the reference itself.iv^ When applied to the institutional context, the notion of accountability locates practices tying local set- tings to the nonlocal organization of the ruling apparatus. Indeed, the institutional process itself can be seen as a dialectic between what mem- bers do intending the categories and concepts of institutional ideology and the analytic and descriptive practices of those categories and concepts deployed in accomplishing the observ- ability of what is done, has happened, is going on, and so forth. Thus local practices in their historical particularity and irreversibility are made accountable in terms of categories and concepts expressing the function of the institu- tion. Members’ interpretive practices analyzing the work processes that bring the institutional process into being in actuality constitute those work processes as institutional courses of action.v Institutional ideologies are acquired by mem- bers as methods of analyzing experiences located in the work process of the institution. Professional training in particular teaches people how to recycle the actualities of their experience into the iiiHarold Garfinkel, Studies in Ethnomethodology (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1967). ivD.L. Wieder, Language and Social Reality: The Case of Telling the Convict Code (The Hague: Moulton, 1974). vDorothy E. Smith, “No one commits suicide: Textual analyses of ideological practices,” Human Studies 6 (1983): 309–359.
