What is Place of Speech?

What is a place of speech? Place of Speech is a term derived fromPoint of View Theory', widely publicized by feminist movement North American. It is a theoretical perspective of the feminist movement that argues that knowledge stems from an individual's social position.

In other words, the idea is that the person who suffers prejudice speaks for himself, without the need for a mediator, he is the protagonist of his own struggle.

The perspective denies that traditional science is objective and suggests that research and theory have ignored and marginalized feminist ways of thinking.

The theory emerged from the Marxist argument that people from an oppressed class have special access to knowledge that is not available to those from a privileged class.

Origin

In the 1970s, feminist writers inspired by this view began to examine how inequalities between men and women influence knowledge production.

The work was related to epistemology, a branch of philosophy that examines the nature and origins of knowledge and stresses that knowledge is always socially situated. In societies stratified by gender and other categories such as ethnicity and class, social positions shape what can be known.

The American feminist theorist, Sandra Harding, coined this theory to categorize epistemologies that emphasize women's knowledge. She argued that it is easy for those at the top of social hierarchies to lose sight of true human relationships and the true nature of social reality and thus downplay critical questions about the social and natural world in their activities academic.

Meaning

According to the theory, people at the bottom of social hierarchies have a unique point of view, which is a better starting point for studies. Although these people are often ignored, their marginalized positions actually facilitate defining important research questions and explaining social and natural problems.

This perspective was shaped by the work of Canadian sociologist Dorothy Smith. In her book “The Everyday World as Problematic: A Feminist Sociology (1989)”, Smith argued that sociology ignored and objectified women, making them the “Other”.

Objective Empiricism

Lugar de Fala theorists also question objective empiricism – the idea that science can be made objective through rigorous methodology.

When starting from the perspective of women or other marginalized people, it is more likely that the importance of the point of view is recognized and it creates embodied, self-critical and coherent.

Reviews

To address criticisms that Lugar de Fala is essentialist in its assertion that women's point of view is universal, theorists have focused on the political aspects of social position emphasizing a feminist point of view, not feminine.

Recent work was also careful not to group women and expanded the perspective of Lugar de Fala to cover the various points point of view of many marginalized groups (categories of race and ethnicity, class, sexual orientation, age, physical ability, nationality and citizenship).