ABSTRACT
Section IV includes readings that build on the insights of both postmodern and standpoint theories to construct new knowledge about the recurring questions of feminist theory. The readings address the topics of bodies, emotions, identity, diffe rence, connection, location, and transnational social justice. We borrow the term, “Imagine Otherwise,” from the works of two feminist scholars: Avery Gordon’s Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (1997) and Kandice Chuh’s Imagine Otherwise: On Asian Americanist Critique (2003). In Ghostly Matters, Gordon critiques both “traditional” positivist modes of inquiry and the postmodern turn in the field of sociology. She proposes a new methodology and a new epistemology to take into account “ghosts and haunting” as part of a sociological imagination.1 Ghosts, according to Gordon, are those on the periphery who have been marginalized by social power relations, and, she argues, transformation in knowledge production can occur only through our confronting these ghosts: “To study social life one must confront the ghostly aspects of it. This confrontation requires (or produces) a fundamental change in the way we know and make knowledge” (1997: 7).
