This is just an extended disquisition and
supplementation to our discussion in class today on the ‘normatives’ in society
based on ‘Androcentrism.’ Please find below a wonderful rundown on the term ‘androcentrism,’
excerpted from 50 Key Concepts in Gender
Studies by Jane Pilcher & Imelda Whelehan.
Here we
go!
Androcentrism
Deriving from the Greek word for male, androcentrism literally means a doctrine
of male-centredness. Androcentric practices are those whereby the experiences
of men are assumed to be generalisable, and are seen to provide the objective
criteria through which women’s experiences can be organised and evaluated.
Some
writers, particularly those influenced by psychoanalytical theory, prefer the
terms phallocentrism or phallocentric,
in order to draw attention to the way the phallus acts as the symbolic
representation of male-centredness.
A related concept is that of phallogocentrism. Deriving from the work of Derrida and
Lacan, this term describes those ideas centred around language or words (logos) that are masculine in style.
Postmodern feminist writers such as Cixous argue that phallogocentric language is
that which rationalises, organises and compartmentalises experience and it is
on this basis that terms ending in ‘ism’ (e.g. feminism) may be rejected (Brennan
1989; Tong 1998). An early use of the term ‘androcentric’ was made by Charlotte
Perkins Gillman who subtitled her 1911 book, ‘Our Androcentric Culture’.
In feminist analyses, most societies, historically and in the present, exhibit androcentric
tendencies whereby their culture, knowledge, organizations and institutions
reflect and reproduce the dominance and power of men. As Smith writes with
reference to the modern Western context, ‘The problem is not a special,
unfortunate and accidental omission of this or that field, but a general,
organisational feature of our kind of society’ (1988: 22). One simple
illustration is provided by the androcentric use of language. In Britain up
until at least the 1980s, ‘mankind’ and ‘men’ were widely used in a generic
way, instead of the more gender-neutral ‘humankind’ or ‘people’. Similarly, the
pronoun ‘he’ was routinely used in preference to ‘she’, or even to ‘he or she’.
Feminist analyses have problematised the generic use of masculine nouns and
pronouns, arguing that such linguistic practices both reflect and contribute to
the marginalisation of women and are symbolic of their status in general.
Several writers have addressed the issue of the ways in which the ‘male standpoint’ (Smith 1988) or the ‘male espistomological stance’ (Mackinnon
1982) is evident in academic theories and research. In general terms, the
consequences of the ‘male standpoint’ are that findings from men-only research
studies have been generalised to women, and that areas of enquiry have focused
on issues important to men’s interests and experiences,
while those important to women have been overlooked. As Maynard (Maynard and
Purvis 1996) explains, the perception that what counts as knowledge derives
from masculine interests and perspectives has been the impetus for the
development of women’s studies. In its critique of androcentric knowledge,
women’s studies has shifted from an early concern with ‘adding women in’ to
pre-existing fields of enquiry (leading to studies of women and paid work, or women
artists, for example), to focusing on previously ignored topics of importance
to women (such as motherhood, or sexual violence), to devising new concepts and
theories with which to analyse women’s experiences.
A classic example of feminist
work in response to the androcentricity of academic theories and
research is provided by Carol Gilligan (1982). Gilligan’s work engages with
psychological theories of development, in relation to morality and the self–other
relationship. She criticises the repeated exclusion of women from
theory-building psychological studies and their tendency to adopt the male life
as the norm. Gilligan argues that the androcentrism embedded in psychological
research has led to a disparity between academic theories of ‘human’ development
and the experiences of women, a disparity seen to be caused by women’s development
rather than the faulty research and theory itself. In her own research,
Gilligan includes the group previously left out in the construction of theory
(that is, women) and aims to show the limitations of androcentric psychological
research for an adequate understanding of the development of men, as well as of
women. Arising from studies of men’s moral development, morality has been
constructed as being concerned with justice and fairness, and moral development
has been seen as the understanding of rights and rules. In this moral code, the
individual self is paramount and personal achievement, autonomy and separatism are
orienting values. On the basis of her research, Gilligan argues that women’s
morality and self–other relationships may differ. In women’s constructions,
morality tends to be centred around an ethic of care, of responsibility for
others, so that moral conflicts or problems must be resolved with a view to
maintaining relationships with others. In this moral code, self and other are
seen as interdependent and relationships with these others are seen as central
to life. For Gilligan, her findings reveal the need for development theories in
psychology to be revised, so that their analysis of the characteristics of
moral conceptions in both women and men is more expansive.
Initial criticisms of
androcentrism, in all its many forms and guises, have been supplemented by an
increased critical awareness of the partiality of some feminist-produced
knowledge itself. In the 1980s and 1990s, feminist critics argued that feminism displayed a
tendency to centre white, middle-class and heterosexual femininities at the
expense of other femininities (for example, Ramazanoglu 1989b; Maynard and Purvis
1996). Developments in masculinity studies have also pointed to the diversity
of men’s status and position in society, a diversity which belies the notion of
a unitary androcentric culture whereby all men have a privileged standpoint
over all women (see Connell 1987, 1995). Morgan (1992) has shown that
androcentrism in sociology meant that, not only were the experiences and
interests of women overlooked, but that the research and theorising on men
lacked a critical awareness of them as gendered beings.
FURTHER
READING
Image: theradicalnotion.com
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