ABSTRACT
Susan Hekman argues that feminist standpoint arguments “entail the claim that women because of certain aspects of their makeup possess a privileged position which provides them with a unique perspective". Feminist standpoint theorists, she argues, oppose the idea that “ahistorical principles of inquiry can insure ever more perfect representations of the world". Moreover, as with de Lauretis’s eccentric subjects, from the perspective of a feminist standpoint, some of the overlapping social structures become visible. Fredric Jameson takes up feminist standpoint theories to argue that the experience of women generates new and positive epistemological possibilities. Standpoint theory, he argues, demands a “differentiation between the various negative experiences of constraint, between the exploitation suffered by workers and the oppressions suffered by women". Interpretation, Kathy Ferguson argues, relies on the “constitution of conceptual unities, such as the categories of woman or women.”
