Me Man! You Woman!

How blind one is as one muddles through life. I am not talking about you, but me.

For instance, think of the word ‘gender’. Typically, our gender is a part of our self, our identity. You know, in which human beings are divided into two clear-cut groups, women and men.

As we go though our daily lives, 'Gender’ will influence our practices of inquiry and our justifications for coming to this or that conclusion.  And ‘Gender’ does influence our conceptions of knowledge in the following ways:. 

• How you acquire knowledge?
•  How you attribute it?
• How do  you justify it?

Yet the knowledge you have  might not be as value free as you think it is.  For out there in the big, bad world, there are dominant conceptions which govern our thinking. And these conceptions have been instituted by those guardians of how we see the world. And these key holders of knowledge have their interests which, naturally, they wish to preserve.

One of these areas of knowledge that has been instituted is our conception of gender.

Judith Butler has intimated that what society has done in regard to gender has been to hoodwink us, by creating historical and anthropological positions, into a set of beliefs. A mindset, so that we understand gender in a specified way..‘..as a relation among socially constituted subjects in specifiable contexts. (Me man, you woman)  Charitably she claims that over time this was '...an unwitting regulation and reification (making real) of gender relations'.

But was it so unwitting, or was done by male stealth to hold onto power?

There are many, at the cutting edge of feminism, who believes this is the case and the point to what men have done with their dominant knowledge practices? They point to how men have disadvantaged women by:

• excluding them from inquiry
• denying them epistemic (knowledge) authority
•  denigrating their “feminine” cognitive styles and modes of knowledge,
•  producing theories of women that represent them as inferior, deviant, or significant only in the ways they serve male interests,
•  producing theories of social phenomena that render women's activities and interests inconsequential
•  producing knowledge (science and technology) that is not useful for people in subordinate positions or that reinforces gender and other social hierarchies.

But is the argument by the latest wave of feminism right?

The central concept of feminist epistemology (knowledge) is that of a situated knower, there is someone in a situation. He deduces the way to power is to be a knower. Soon there a lot of other like-minded knowers (men) who form a consensus. And deem this situation they are in to be ‘knowledge’; even though it is just reflecting the group’s particular perspectives and interests. The consensus, even though a true consensus can never be attained and will always remain on the horizon, is now established into a standpoint and generally accepted view by the populace,

So how to challenge this, what for many, is a deceit?

We endeavour to re-educate ourselves, and re-evaluate the ideal of objectivity, defining the proper roles of social and political values in inquiry, evaluating ideals of objectivity and rationality, and reforming structures of epistemic (knowledge) authority. And we do this through education.

But judging by the schools my children have gone to I see little hope there. One thinks of  Nietzsche’s dictum, ‘we need to educate the educators’..’

But what would success look like with this kind of thinking?

 Judith Butler again:’...we might stop reinforcing a binary view of gender relations in which human beings are divided into two clear-cut groups, women and men.’

She proposes that we open up the possibility for a person to form and choose their own individual identity. In other words, rather than being a 'fixed' attribute in a person, ‘gender’ should be seen as a fluid variable which shifts and changes in different contexts and at different times.

Hmmm. Now could I interrupt the banality of football chatter down the pub tonight with this kind of stuff.                                                                                                                                                                     “What I would like to talk about lads, is well...you know....well..'
'Get on with it!
'Well....how.we see ourselves as men.’
‘You what! Are you trying to be funny or something?’

Think. I will pass on that idea.