Experience
by
The feminist movement maxim “The personal is political” underscores the connections between personal experiences and larger sociopolitical structures, but what this means in terms of not just what but how we know what we know is less clear. The formula has been understood to mean that our experiences are the wellspring of our most authentic politics, our most authentic truths, but what exactly mediates the movement between personal and structural? One of the tasks of feminist theories has been to challenge conventional epistemologies—ways of knowing, accumulating, and institutionalizing knowledge—in order to make more obvious that these are not the only ways of knowing and that these are often ideological in themselves. Or as Catherine Belsey asks, “To what extent is it possible to perceive the world independently of the conventional ways in which it is represented? To what extent is experience contained by language, society, history?” (1980, 13). The idea that experience comes from authentic knowledge is distilled from multiple liberal humanist traditions that assume a rational actor who can evaluate his interests in relation to others and then arrive at proper and proportionate action. But as many observers note, the problems with this set of premises are multiple. Liberal...
This essay may be found on page 87 of the printed volume.