IN MEMORIAM: SANDRA HARDING (1935-2025)
Rosi Braidotti, Sarah Bracke, and Iris van der Tuin
In the history of feminist theory, there is a before and an after Sandra Harding. She has structured the language and the categories of feminist collective thinking, introducing the founding principles of what it means to think politically about feminist knowledge production. Harding revolutionized the notions of epistemological rigor, scientific objectivity, and accountability. She played a leading role in transforming feminist theory from the expression of activist politics and pains to the laboratory of robust and credible knowledge claims. In the course of time, Harding became all the more radical as she set the framework for what was to become a new institutional practice: feminist theory put to work in women’s and gender studies curricula, research, and publications.
In the 1970s, the language and the terminology of feminism emerged organically from the political practice of the women’s movements, with an emphasis on the personal as the political and the sexual politics of sisterhood. The very first overviews of feminist theory at the time still adopted the mainstream categories of political science, to define the different strands of feminism, such as liberal, Marxist, radical, anarchist, etc. Sandra Harding changed all this in the 1980s, when she defined the difference that feminist knowledge can make to everyone. In answer to the question: “what do you know when what you know is injustice and exclusion?,” Harding replied: you know how power is at work everywhere: in discourse, thought and science, as well as in society. She changed a personal and political query into epistemological terms, which are framed and substantiated by the lived experiences of the oppressed, then processed by activism, so that they end up reaching beyond their starting premises. This is a revolutionary moment.
In The Science Question in Feminism (1986), a foundational intervention in the development of feminist scholarship, Harding proposed the threefold (and by now canonical) distinction of feminist empiricism, feminist standpoint theory, and feminist postmodernism. This instigated a paradigm shift, based on a careful synthesis, and a critical evaluation of what is really at stake in feminist philosophy. In addition to casting a new light on the different knowledge claims that emerge from the margins, Harding also developed a methodology to assess them. The fundamental criterion of assessment is not identity-bound, she argued, but rather a careful evaluation of the extent to which feminist knowledge can contribute to the making of an accountable scientific claim, that can be replicated, shared, and verified by others. This meta-methodological gesture was put to the service of founding a new field of thought and research, driven by the women’s movements but capable of reaching out toward all the academic and scientific institutions.
Cultivated with rigor and passion by Harding and her generation of scholars, the feminist epistemological revolution transformed established scientific practices along the way. It achieved a significant double target: first, it provided scientific credibility and valid concepts to establish new academic curricula on women’s and gender studies. Second, it was further elaborated in the 1980s, as an epistemological foundation at large, by turning feminist standpoint theory into “science as usual.” This move enabled the translation of knowledge that emerged from the women’s movement into both institutional practice and into epistemological and methodological feminist tools. This allowed feminism to make a transformative impact upon the field of science and society as a whole. This happened in a historical moment when the rise of neoliberalism was making the production of knowledge into a contested and intensely politicized social issue. Power and/as knowledge moved center stage.
Harding approached epistemologies as “justification strategies,” that is to say as both conceptual and practical building blocks for alternative practices of knowledge and scientific research. Radical epistemologies need to account for their knowledge claims not by playing them back on identity politics but by investigating the politics of locations that underscore them. Locations are always grounded, that is to say, embodied and embedded, but also shared collectively. What feminist theory needs to do, argues Harding, is to account for the production of those knowledge claims by situating them in their contexts of discovery, and to devise methods and protocols that can justify them beyond the individual experience. All radical knowledge is a way of carefully distilling insights, information, and wisdom from the pain of exclusion, but what Harding taught us is that feminism has the force, the depth of coherence, and the methodological rigor to take on “Big Science” (as Laurie Anderson put it in her musical knowledge interventions in the 1980s). This is the transformative move that Harding accomplished: to turn feminist thinking into a critical site that appeals to the entire scientific community, as well as society, and encourages them to come to grips with the profound implications of the feminist revolution. In scientific terms, women’s rebellion has the power to introduce a paradigmatic shift away from patriarchal pseudo-universalism, driven by the axiom that the personal is not only the political but also the epistemological. Feminist knowledge and/as power now moves center stage.
Harding spoke truth to power for an entire generation when she asserted, with strong arguments at hand, that knowledge produced in the margins and deeply connected to a political movement actually increases the scale and depth of scientific objectivity and related research inquiries. Such a statement appeared paradoxical for the scientific establishment at the time: how could objectivity be strengthened by being de-linked from universal claims of scientific rationality and becoming attached instead to the lived experiences of masses of marginal thinking subjects? How could this process avoid resulting in fragmentation and even – horror! – cognitive relativism? Those were the heydays of postmodernism after all, and the critique of universal concepts was perceived as a threat to the unity of the sciences. Many well-meaning fellow scientists were worried about what was happening to the cherished ideal of scientific objectivity under the tidal wave of feminism.
Harding was at the head of the movement – the academic, conceptual, and political movement – to argue that scientific research, philosophy of science, and epistemological inquiry into the foundations of scientific truth were strengthened and made more solid by the feminist interventions. This led her to conceptualize the idea of “strong objectivity,” where the strength comes from diversity and pluralistic perspectives. For Harding, truth is not established by correspondence to a centralized – and often even transcendent – ideal of scientific reason. In Western culture that ideal is supported by the image of what her peer philosopher Genevieve Lloyd labelled, in 1984, “the Man of Reason”: “he” who ordains all knowledge claims on a hierarchical scale of negative differentiation from himself.
Against this patriarchal narrative, Harding argued forcefully that all subjects of knowledge should be placed on the same critical plane as knowledge-producers, in a horizontal ontology based on the immanence of the politics of locations.
This leads to a multi-perspectival notion of scientific objectivity, which becomes all the stronger for being able to include the voices of women and other subjects who are marginalized and oppressed – in society as much as in science. Conversely, scientific objectivity remains weaker if the researchers or thinkers disregard or neglect the importance of the grounded perspectives and the politics of location from which knowledge can emerge. In other words: the margins are also laboratories where new critical insights emerge and scientific inquiry becomes more relevant, credible, and grounded—if it develops the willingness and the methods to listen to them. Harding was committed to theorizing the social and collective dimensions of this connection between knowledge and the grounded locations of the marginalized subjects who produce it. Achieving stronger objectivity requires that scientists and scholars alike take the feminist method of the politics of location into account, in order to co-produce stronger—i.e., alternative—objectivity.
For the following four decades, Harding went on to elaborate this conceptual framework and refine the methodology, thus enriching the credibility of feminist science and knowledge claims. While Harding insisted on the importance of epistemological pluralism, her intellectual work remains most deeply connected to feminist standpoint theory. Whose Science, Whose Knowledge (1991) mapped out specifically how thinking from women’s lives emerged as a shared knowledge project during the 1980s, taken up in a phenomenological manner by sociologist Dorothy Smith, in a more Marxist approach by political theorist Nancy Hartsock and sociologist Hilary Rose, in lesbian theory by Adrienne Rich, and within Black feminism, thinking from Black women’s lives, by sociologist Patricia Hill Collins. For Harding, the core of standpoint theory, in the course of time, developed into two main pillars: first, an affirmation of women’s lived experience as a legitimate ground for knowledge, and hence of women as knowing subjects. Second, reflection on the extent to which being on the receiving end of oppression offers the potential for a more lucid perception of how power works. Thus, oppression is a vantage point in terms of reaching an adequate understanding of the experience of societal disadvantage, and it is more adequate epistemologically because it is grounded, material, and embodied experience. In this way, she theorized how the political is indeed the personal, and how both join forces to construct feminist knowledge.
Furthermore, although thinking from women’s lives—and processing this thinking through the intellectual activism of feminist methodology, in a rigorous manner that produces more adequate and reliable knowledge—is the epistemological bedrock that founded feminist theory, Harding never meant it to be located exclusively there. For Harding, this method of grounded and accountable knowledge production applied just as forcefully to different experiences and configurations of oppression.
From early references to lesbian lives and racialized lives as grounds of knowledge claims, Harding continued to pursue more systematically the nexus between science, race, and coloniality. She did so first in Is Science Multicultural? (1998), linking questions of knowledge, oppression, and social class and location in relation to the (post)colonial and racialized histories of science and technology. Harding has offered important contributions to the analysis of the colonial dimensions of Western science and philosophy by tracing the exclusions that are foundational to the construction of that “Man of Reason” we already mentioned. Harding questioned the idea of one allegedly universally valid, scientific, and technological tradition, reflecting on the consequences of such deeply Eurocentric narratives. More importantly, she investigated their impact on the making of academic histories and scientifically justified practices of exclusion. Harding invited us to sort out the implications of such prejudices for our academic fields and the research institutions of the Western world, allegedly committed to democracy and inclusion. By addressing, in such a systematic manner, the role of racialized and heterosexist bias in the making of scientific knowledge, Harding built important bridges across different academic fields. She especially reinforced the intersections of science and technology studies with issues of race, colonialism, and multiculturalism, and made a lasting impact on feminist technoscience studies. We especially want to praise Harding’s role in working toward amplifying and creating institutional space for science and technology studies scholars from the Global South.
As the interdisciplinary field of women’s/feminist/gender studies continued to institutionalize throughout the 1990s, the understanding of Harding’s feminist standpoint theory often got challenged. Some feminists took it as an endorsement of individual identity-claims, thus losing focus on the broader picture. Among the many critics of feminism, thinking through women’s lives often got caricatured, even attacked, and it became the object of successive simplifications. Not the least of these is the neoliberal appropriation of the concept and its reduction to mere individual empowerment and success. And throughout these multiple waves of expansion and revision, Harding continued to argue against the multiple reductions of standpoint theory and to insist: a standpoint is not just an identity claim—it is a social location; nor can it be reduced to the unmediated and hence essentialist expression of authentic women’s voices—it is a method that requires an epistemological process. Feminism is not about individual empowerment and success—it is a political movement for the collective quest of social justice through struggle and solidarity.
In other words: standpoints are achieved and articulated collectively, through political struggle and against oppression. This emphasis became even more relevant throughout the 1990s, when Harding witnessed the US reception of poststructuralist feminism, imported hastily from French philosophy. The core of postmodern philosophy was the questioning of the unity and stability of all categories, including those that proved foundational for radical political and theoretical movements like feminism. Harding, though concerned about the anti-foundationalism of poststructuralist feminism, was crucial in setting up the public and scholarly debates between standpoint theorists and postmodern feminists. This led to moving and productive intellectual conversations, notably with Donna Haraway, and to a deep and lasting affiliation between Harding’s commitment to feminist objectivity and Haraway’s understanding of situated knowledges. The consensus reached after these discussions laid the foundations for a materially grounded feminist scientific method. And the emphasis on materiality, corporeality, historicity, and locations, since Harding, has provided the common thread that runs across the different schools of feminist philosophy.
In the medium-term, one of the most powerful methodological implications of the epistemological break introduced by Harding’s intervention is a shift to interdisciplinarity and trans-disciplinarity as the preferred feminist approach. Feminist theories, in their institutional form and scale, moved further away from the traditional academic disciplines while continuing to borrow from their archive of knowledge and insights. Research from a gendered perspective challenges the primacy of traditional disciplines in a respectful but rigorous manner. Harding’s definition of “gender,” also from The Science Question in Feminism, is a case in point. She starts with a precise cartography: gender operates on an individual level (biology, psychology), on a social-institutional level (sociology), and on a symbolic level (cultural representations, the humanities). These are discrete but interconnected dimensions that in the university are studied by different disciplines. But a feminist approach needs them all to interact and collaborate more effectively. Feminist theory as a meta-methodological intervention consists in showing the asymmetrical power relations that structure the gendered power relations on all these interconnecting levels. Academic disciplines are not outsider the grid of power at all but rather instrumental to it. It follows therefore that, once primacy is given to gender, an interdisciplinary approach to research is required.
Furthermore, once the practice of science and knowledge production embraces the feminist intersectional standpoint theory and assumes a context of scientific inquiry inclusive of diversity, of non-academic women and other marginal and oppressed groups, a transdisciplinary approach becomes essential. Harding not only provided the epistemological justification for these developments, she was also in the forefront of their translation into practices and their implementation in publications and programs. All of us, the authors of this text, belonging to different generations, applied feminist standpoint theory to establish a credible epistemological framework for independent feminist research while integrating its conceptual tools and insights into academia at large.
We—the three authors of this text—see Harding as the source of an original and radical genealogy of feminist materialism that acknowledges social-cultural codes in the construction of subjectivity but also emphasizes the primacy of material locations and embodied, embedded perspectives. She shaped our work in many intergenerational ways– Rosi Braidotti’s nomadic feminism being a response to the need to find a balance between locations and changes, being rooted and flowing. Together with Maria Puig de la Bellacasa, Sarah Bracke traced and articulated the continuity between standpoint feminism and situated knowledges. Iris Van der Tuin brought the many materialisms together under the generative heading of the “new feminist materialism,” which was cartographically composed.
Harding’s epistemological approach, which allowed for a thorough scientific re-examination and classification of feminist knowledge, was timely and inspirational, just as we were entering the academic realm. It proved crucial to the foundation of the women’s and later gender studies program at Utrecht University, which is where the three authors of this text were located, as respectively the founding director of the program and her PhD students. Harding taught us how to make alternative knowledge from the lived, historically variable experiences of the oppressed and to make them count within the academic field and institutions. She contributed greatly to our academic practice of the materialist methods of the politics of locations, and the embodied character of standpoint theory, later consolidated into the epistemological consensus about the situated and yet dynamic character of feminist knowledge.
Harding was a generative feminist ancestor who lived up to our ideal of combining radicalism with excellence. In her lifelong pedagogical and institutional work, Harding pioneered frameworks and templates that set the standards for daily feminist scholarly practices both in society and in the world of science. She had a keen eye for the concrete details of the difficult task of thinking critically about the conditions of our academic practice.
Brilliant, imaginative, and always patient, Sandra Harding was a generous colleague who mentored generations of younger feminist thinkers with unfailing courtesy and affection. Harding provided a role model for all successive generations of scholars, in terms of the ethical, feminist practices she engaged in, throughout her personal and professional life. Rigorous and yet tender, she led by example and unfailingly stood on the side of solidarity, scientific truth, and social justice. We will endeavor to uphold her legacy in the times to come. She will be missed.
Rosi Braidotti is Distinguished Professor Emerita at Utrecht University. Her latest publication is Posthuman Feminism (2022). https://rosibraidotti.com/
Sarah Bracke is Professor of Sociology of Gender and Sexuality at the University of Amsterdam. https://www.uva.nl/en/profile/b/r/s.a.e.bracke/s.a.e.bracke.html?cb
Iris van der Tuin is Professor of Theory of Cultural Inquiry at Utrecht University and its Dean for Interdisciplinary Education. https://www.uu.nl/staff/IvanderTuin