Feminist Reason: Getting It and Losing It [1988]

Feminists have shown how such assertions of neutrality hide from view the use of a male norm for measuring claims of discrimination. Adopting such feminist critiques can deepen the meaning of equality under law. This chapter urges developing similar feminist critiques in contexts beyond gender, such as religion, ethnicity, race, handicap, sexual preference, socioeconomic class, and age. Feminist analyses have often presumed that a white, middle-class, heterosexual, Christian, and able-bodied person is the norm behind "women's" experience. Feminists have contributed incisive critiques of the unstated assumptions behind political theory, law, bureaucracy, science, and social science that presuppose the universality of a particular reference point or standpoint. Feminist activities themselves also reveal relationships between knowledge and power. The concerted and persistent search for excluded points of view and the acceptance of their challenges are equally critical to feminist theory and practice. The chapter shares the version of reality that has for the most part prevailed in the entire culture.