JAC Volume 15 Issue 3

I should say, immediately, that I have never met Sandra Harding, though for some time I have followed the development of her version of feminist standpoint epistemology with keen interest and appreciation. Standpoint theory, since its early articulation as a specifically feminist historical materi­alism, has put an edge—a cutting edge—on feminist theorizing and its prospects for actually producing social change. Over the years Harding has moved edgewise, advancing gradually, painstakingly, toward evermore sharply-delineated arguments, which are presented in their strong form in Whose Science? Whose Knowledge?: Theorizing from Women’s Lives. Harding, along with a number of feminists working on and working through a materialist rhetoric, have succeeded in giving feminism much of its present advantage in the high-stakes game of high theory. Given this estimation of the subject, I did not hesitate to accept this invitation to respond to her recent interview.

I also have to admit that after reading the interview I felt compelled to watch the video of Romancing the Stone. I had to find out why scenes from the film, and its musical score, kept playing, rather annoyingly, through my mind while I worried through some of the issues raised in the interview. And worry I did, in spite of, or perhaps because of, the fact that the interview strikes a resolutely hopeful chord. It left me happy, almost—and on edge. Certainly, this odd coupling of Hollywood romance and intellectual conversation may only have been my comic self telling my serious self to lighten up—“Don’t worry, be happy,” as Bobby McFerrin says. Seeing no satisfaction in this easy exit, I decided to go through the door of the local Blockbuster Video, fully aware that I might be looking for insight in all the wrong places. As it turned out, I remembered the film with astonishing accuracy (astonishing, only because it is so forgettable), but memory had dubbed Romancing with the soundtrack to Raiders of the Lost Ark, which only intensified my desire to locate whatever particle of truth or misfortune might be found in this triple feature and the weird science that produced it.

Suffice to say, for the moment, raiding and romancing emerge in Harding’s thought as two specific forms of what she calls “cross-field appropriation.” Undertaken to advance strong feminist (antiracist, antiheterosexist) goals, raiding and romancing offer the additional boon of effectively rendering disciplinary boundaries porous and weakened. Yet living in this predictably brutal society (predictable, because of institutionalized discrimination and hatred) has taught me to respect boundaries of a certain kind—even struggle for them—and to see the damage done by their casual or willful violation. As we continue to puzzle out the myriad ways words make boundaries (margins, centers, peripheries) as well as the possibilities for boundary-crossing, -transcending, -dissolving, and otherwise moving the outside in, I think we might also pay some attention to edges—where things come together and things come apart. Raiding and romancing, I will suggest, are words with edges.

Romancing the Stone is Hollywood’s unsubtle and half-hearted attempt to spoof the genre of romance by featuring a heroine, Joan Wilder, who writes best-selling romance novels as “a way of living in another age.” Neither wild nor heroic when we first meet her, Joan is a neurotic girl-woman who is overly cathected to her cat, Romeo, and unable to provide for basic subsistence needs (toilet paper and tissues for blotting the tears her own writing causes). She has no social life (read: no man), she is the object of her editor’s pity, and she lives vicariously through the heroine of her novels: the very strong, the very capable, the very sexy Angelina who, unlike her author, is quite skilled in dealing with the real world of the Wild West—righting wrongs and killing bad guys (“bastards have brothers who seem to ride forever”). And Angelina always gets her man in the end, the one man who is “meant for her,” her destiny. Meanwhile, Joan writes and weeps and waits for her destiny to knock at the door.

The adventure, and the romancing, begin when Joan must travel to Colombia (which one of the bad guys calls a “Third World toilet”) to ransom her kidnapped sister with a cryptic map that purportedly leads to a hidden treasure, a huge emerald. Fate, Hollywood-style, brings her together with Jack T. Colton, a man with an unsavory past and a noble dream. In order to buy a sailboat to travel around the world all alone, Jack traps and sells exotic birds for export to the United States. But, after he repeatedly rescues Joan from an assortment of North and South American bad guys (bastards always have brothers), he sees a quicker route to the open sea when he finds, tucked in the recesses of her handbag, the map carrying the words El Corazon scrawled in red. The map, he says, leads to the heart—El Corazon—but, he asks, “the heart of what?” With that unanswered question, the plot thickens.

Perhaps the film’s only attempt at subtlety is its effort to keep that question open, and the question of who is romancing whom (or what). It manages, in a modest way, to keep both questions open until the very last scene. Despite all his mercenary intentions to romance the map, and the stone, away from Joan (he even wrestles a crocodile which has swallowed the stone), Jack comes through in the end and proves himself to be a good guy. With his new sailboat in tow, and some time later, Jack finds Joan in New York City where she, the “hopeful romantic,” waits. Joan has undergone at least a minor transformation (she looks different) in the course of her ordeal, becoming more like her fantasy heroine: she gets her man, and together, romancing their dreams, Jack and Joan sail into the sunset. Another happy ending; another heroic and marvelous achievement!

In the final analysis, the treasure map, El Corazon, may offer the best answer to the question of who is romancing whom. It might as well be a map of the feminine body—that is, as she has been constructed by male fantasies, myths, and representations. Jack, not Joan, solves the riddle of the map by folding it in a peculiar way to reveal (to Joan) an outline of a heart, the center of which marks the location of the treasure hidden somewhere beyond Devil’s Fork. The map indicates that the stone is buried in a cave beneath a rock formation called leche de la madre—mother’s milk. When Jack and Joan finally reach the location of the stone, he announces, “Mama, I’m home.” Home is where the heart is, naturally, and the heart turns out to be the heterosexual knot, the many facets of which this film can never make conscious. To this all too familiar mapping of the feminine body, let me couple the symbology, from Raiders of the Lost Ark, associated with the ark of the covenant, which contains the power and knowledge of God. Voilà! We get a string of associations that have made trumpets flourish, and not just in my own mind as I pushed through the door of Blockbuster Video. Both films line up these amazingly resilient associations in a logic that forms, and cuts the advantage for, a straight (white male) edge: it is enough to worry a body to distraction or death.

Moving now to another universe of discourse, I can point to the precise place in the interview where I now imagine my worries may have begun. Harding explains her rhetorical strategy for reconstructing philosophy, queen of the sciences, in this way: the idea is to take possession of “the key terms that have been the jewels in the crown of Western philosophy and of philosophic thinking in every discipline” (208). Objectivity, reflexivity, method, and even rationality: these are the jewels, the family jewels, so to speak, of philosophy and the sciences—indeed, of the West. These stones and their values, “deeply embedded in the institutions of the West that we’re proudest of,” map the terrain of the West—they are its major landmarks, the heart of the country—but through their strong, progressive versions, philosophy and the sciences can be folded, so to speak, and made to lead to new treasure.

Harding is not proposing to raid the kingdom and carry off its treasury. She knows that the queen and her cohorts are not likely to relinquish the family jewels to thieves—especially to a bunch of feminists, antiracists, and queers. I think she has something more like romancing in mind: romancing the jewels out from under the collective nose of philosophers and scientists, and away from their androcentric, Eurocentric, heterosexist origins. Polished, in the process, to a new and different brilliance (that is, transmuted into their strong versions) by feminist standpoint epistemology, these stones become the treasury of a new science. In what I consider, in all sincerity, to be a heroic and marvelous conception, Harding turns the tables on philosophy and the sciences and constructs a sort of feminist alchemy in which the idea of standpoint, revamped by postmodern philosophy, becomes the philosophers’ stone capable of transforming the West’s base materials into resources for producing a more “generally useful account of the world.”

It is a hopeful scheme, which is what we want in our theories, and one that seems to have a plausible chance of success precisely because it intends to trade on the advantage these proud jewels already possess. I am of two hands (at least) about this scheme. On the one hand, I agree with Harding: we must ‘‘conduct our intellectual and political struggles on the terrains where those struggles are taking place” (217). Harding makes me believe that feminist hands can dismantle the master’s house with the master’s tools; that they can build another house, a better house (more inclusive, less perverse), with those same tools and materials; that they must. On the other hand, while I am not what Harding has called an “epistemological separatist,” I know (and perhaps so does Harding) that the master’s tools are the master’s house; that the master’s tools in feminist hands are not different tools—stones, like hands, cannot escape their history—although they can be refined in their functioning; that these shameless stones have broken too many bones to warrant my reinvestment in the economy they shape. I also know that in an economy of scarcity, such as ours, history remains on the side of the strong and the rich, whose resourcefulness consists in making the necessary adjustments to maintain the advantage. It is this advantage, this edge, that worries me and leads me to wonder who is romancing whom.

Romancing is, in any case, a rhetorical art, fraught with dangers on every side. To romance the stones out from under the patriarch’s watchful nose, I already must have been romanced into believing I need these proud jewels. To spirit the stones away, I must speak his language (use and build on his definitions) so that he does not notice I have stolen his treasure. And if he does notice and challenges my actions, I simply give an alibi, a reasonable explanation: I am not stealing, only borrowing, and because I am one of the good guys I am giving back to him what he has always possessed—the crown of jewels, the one strong tool—but I am returning it stronger and better (more comprehensive, explanatory, inclusive). In the cunning movement of romance, how do I know that what I hold in my hands is feminist treasure?

To approach that question, to get a sharper edge on what makes feminist inquiry strong, we have to go back through the door opened by the idea of standpoint. Harding herself opens that door when, in what I think is one of the most crystalizing moments in the interview, she urges on us the task of “thinking about the historical lineages and the meanings our theories have” (213). Her latest work seems to depart in significant ways from what I will call, following her lead, a strong sense of a feminist standpoint. The feminist standpoint claims an epistemic privilege for women by virtue of the fact that historically the position of women of diverse races and classes is nevertheless structurally different from, and systematically organized in relation to, that of men. A primary object of analysis and site of struggle therefore must be the structuring mechanism itself—specifically, the sexual division of labor and the material activities orchestrated by it for women. The structural difference of women’s material lives makes available a privileged vantage point on white male supremacy. In other words, an accurate account of our racist patriarchal society is only available from one position—the (systemat­ically diversified) position of women.

In an important conceptual distinction that is in danger of getting lost in the current mix of critical vocabularies, feminist standpoint theories typically differentiate between “the position of women” and “a feminist standpoint.” The position of women must be transformed into a feminist standpoint through the kinds of engagement of heart and mind demanded by analysis and political struggle. A feminist standpoint is not “my life as a woman,” though it necessarily begins there. It takes shape in those moments where experience gets politicized by the hard edges of material life. It is an achievement, given neither by biology nor mere socialization, yet it recognizes that a woman is born and made—an embodied, female-sexed subject. Claiming and building on the epistemic privilege of women, feminist stand­point theory, at least in this strategically essentialist formulation, works to achieve not only a better account of social life but an objectively true one.

Not surprisingly, this strong sense of standpoint has been shattered by the heat of high theory—in particular, by radically anti-essentialist and postmodern theories of subjectivity—even though the material lives of women throughout the world have not changed substantially in the last twenty-five years and the few advances women have made are under a constantly renewed threat. Harding’s version of feminist standpoint theory has kept pace with the latest theoretical advances, arguing that because the category ‘‘women . . . refers to multiple and contradictory locations women do not possess epistemic privilege, in the strong sense, nor are they the unique generators of feminist knowledge. Harding goes further than this to claim for men the ability to speak, at least partially, “from the position of women” and thus to develop feminist knowledge for women and for men (207). Because we are all able, through strong inquiry, “to see ourselves as others see us” and therefore to produce generally useful knowledge, men are fully capable of mapping, if not the feminine body, then certainly the feminist body with their own distinctive theoretical contributions, for which they deserve credit. Limiting women’s epistemic authority even further, Harding says that female feminists do not have “the right to determine what kind of feminisms” men are going to have (220).

Harding’s defense of male feminism is, in my view, an unhappy development in feminist standpoint theory, one that pinpoints the crux of my worries: stated bluntly, men can get feminism, and feminism can finally get her man. Harding, in effect, puts a new spin on the concept of equal access. But I think there are objective limits to what men can know—objective limits to the access they can have to the position of women and to an understanding of themselves—precisely because they are not born and made female-sexed subjects in a racist patriarchy. Their contributions to knowledge will remain, until that symbolic economy is overthrown, merely theoretical. While I would agree that feminism is not for women only—men must struggle to achieve a relation to feminism as anti-sexist collaborators and to reconstruct masculinity for themselves—I urge men who seek a relation to feminism to learn to respect boundaries and to consider what I will call the objective inadequacy of male feminism. (In light of the fact that inadequacy is such a sore spot, so to speak, in the male psyche, this recognition would be a heroic achievement in itself.) Frankly, I have no idea why men do not routinely identi1~r themselves as feminists. After all, in the current critical scene feminism makes a good man sexy and a sexy man good. Still, the whole question of male feminism too often romances feminist attention away from the crucial struggles that would make a material difference in the lives of women, and for this reason I wonder whose question it really is. I think that, for the most part, it has been a question with a straight (white) edge.

Many female feminists, including Harding, have allowed a strong sense of standpoint lobe romanced away from them too easily and too soon—long before the work of changing the material lives of women has been fully initiated. A strong sense of standpoint is crucial to feminist movement because it gives an edge—a sharpness and precision—to our notions of position, positionality, stance, location, and experience, terms that are too often used interchangeably although they have different historical lineages and meanings. (This terminological confusion is yet another nagging worry.) Before this tool becomes mere dust in the archives of feminist thought, we might rethink the sense in which a standpoint is like a stone with many facets, each one a crystallization of the multiple, conflicting locations figured in the category “women.” Experience, albeit always mediated, is a confusion—a coming together in a fluid and dynamic way—of these locations such that it is often impossible (or all too easy) to meaningfully separate gender from race and class and age. Standpoint puts an edge on that experience (shapes the facets, sharpens each angle) and activates it in politically transformative ways. The place where all the edges come together—a topological impossibility, to be sure—is the only angle capable of producing strong light (knowledge and the transformation of material reality). The edges of any one of the facets, when used strategically, will give a necessary cut to the issues, but those same edges may also be used to shape a wedge to break the whole apart.

I pose the question of who is romancing whom as a rhetorical strategy for sharpening the edges of feminist inquiry in composition studies, and for maneuvering a dangerous situation to the limits of tolerance and safety in order to secure the greatest advantage—in global terms, the advantage for women and others living in hostile territories; in local (and immediate) terms, the edge I think feminism must secure vis-à-vis other domains of critical theory. The skill with which we use this question will be a measure (but not the only one) of contemporary feminism’s brinkmanship. The dangers for feminists cannot be handled through mere diplomacy, at least not in any simple sense—although the various border-crossings in recent theo­retical discourse sometimes try to reduce the sharp edges of ill will, ancient hatreds, and pure aggression to the folly of bad logic or bad manners.