Feminist Standpoint Analysis

Feminist standpoint analysis is a critical epistemology and analytic strategy holding that all knowledge is socially situated, and that beginning inquiry from the everyday lives of marginalized people — historically women — yields a more complete and less distorted account of social reality than the supposedly neutral view from dominant positions. Developed by Nancy Hartsock, Dorothy Smith, and Sandra Harding in the 1980s, it argues that the marginalized see both the dominant order and its underside, and that this doubled vision, when methodically developed into an achieved standpoint, can ground a 'strong objectivity' superior to claims of value-free detachment.