Standpoint Epistemology and Situated Knowledge

Standpoint epistemology originates in Marxist theory's claim that a social group's material position within a system of production shapes what that group can and cannot readily perceive about the workings of that system, and was developed into an explicitly feminist epistemological framework in the 1970s and 1980s by theorists including Nancy Hartsock, whose "The Feminist Standpoint" (1983, in Discovering Reality, co-edited with Sandra Harding) adapted the Marxist idea of the proletarian standpoint — the thesis that workers' structural position gives them a potentially more complete or less distorted view of capitalist social relations than that available to the ruling class, whose own position gives it an interest in obscuring those relations — to the case of gender, arguing that women's structurally distinct social position, particularly around domestic labor and caregiving, could similarly ground a standpoint offering critical insight into patriarchal social relations not equally available from a dominant, male-centered vantage point.