Harding, Sandra

Currently a professor of social sciences and comparative literature at the University of California, Los Angeles, Sandra Harding also serves as the director of the UCLA Center for the Study of Women. She earned her PhD in philosophy from New York University and spent the first part of her career at the University of Delaware, where she taught philosophy.

Well known and widely influential in connection with feminist standpoint theory, Harding has also played a pivotal role in feminist science studies. In the former arena, Harding stands out for acknowledging that embodiment bears different consequences for boys and men than for girls and women. From their distinctive forms of embodiment flow ramifications not only for the “social relations” typical of each gender but also for the “intellectual life” typical of each (Harding 1994:21). Yet scientific methodology presupposes that researchers are interchangeable (Harding 1991b:51). Both as a feminist critic of the institution of science and as a feminist standpoint theorist, Harding rigorously challenges that presupposition. Her work revolves around a productive rejection of that taken-for-granted tenet of the scientific infrastructure.

Harding's (1990:86) work emphasizes principled ambivalence, albeit implicitly most of the time. That concept serves her in a double-sided way. On the one side stand her methodological and feminist principles evocative of keen disenchantment with how science has been institutionalized. On the other side stand the ethical principles pivotal in Harding's work, namely, equality, diversity, and community (both scientific and feminist). She insists, for example, that “the subject of feminist knowledge …must be multiple and even contradictory” (1991b:284). Equality and diversity demand no less, and community presupposes such real-world subjects rather than their oversimplified theoretical counterparts.

Like other feminist standpoint theorists, Harding argues that women's diverse and often contradictory positions in various social worlds provide them with distinctive, significant insights. Although that argument broadly undergirds feminist theory as well as other feminist scholarship, she is particularly emphatic about how women's “self-contradictory identities and social locations” (1991a:103) can serve them as epistemological resources.

Harding's work also pays some attention to men's identities and even their feminism. Emphasizing the experiential, practical grounds of gender, she notes that commonplace notions about masculinity largely derive from how often men oversee things, while notions of femininity come mostly from women's caregiving (1990:98). She concludes that engaging in both kinds of practices promotes feminist values and knowledge. Much of her work implies that such practical inclusiveness promotes a kind of multicultural or border-crossing consciousness. Yet such consciousness is not easily won. She explores, for instance, how readily some Euro-American feminist theorists simultaneously “appear to overestimate their own ability to engage in antiracist thought but to underestimate men's ability to engage in feminist thought” (1991b:277).

Ever the critical thinker committed to incorporating the multiple contradictions built into both our everyday lives and our social theories, Harding brings to feminist theory a liveliness of intellect that has imploded academic stances toward gender, science, identity, hierarchy, and social theory itself. Her own overriding goal has been to overhaul science as well as social theory so as “to make sense of women's social experience” (1986:251) Given the pervasive use of gender as a basis of social differentiation and the [Page 357]division of labor in society, gender stands at the center of Harding's work just as it remains pivotal to how “humans identify themselves as persons, organize social relations, and symbolize meaningful natural and social events and processes” (1986:18).

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