Documento sem título

labrys, études féministes/ estudos feministas
julho/dezembro 2015 - juillet/décembre 2015

Simone de Beauvoir observes in her Second Sex that one has to be a woman to philosophize as a feminist, implying that first-hand experience of patriarchal oppression is central to feminist theorizing. She also claims that solidarity among women is hard to achieve, given their socialized affinity to men of their community, race or class. Difference feminism has questioned the quest for such a solidarity as women’s seeming homogeneity is divided by caste, race, class and religion. Extending this argument to the Dalit feminist context- the latter is perceived to have little in common with mainstream feminism of privileged women. Gopal Guru for instance argues that the hierarchical relationship between them is also one of exploitation- in this instance, privileged women make professional use of the first hand experiences of those who are underprivileged, especially by caste hierarchy. The authenticity of women’s first person experience is often cited as the ground theorizing such difference and addressing hierarchy.

The extent to which the approach of difference can be reconciled with de Beauvoir’s feminism of commonalities between women needs to be interrogated. Further, as de Beauvoir’s own analysis and subsequent critiques by Joan Scott, Elizabeth Groz and Judith Butler reveal the standpoint perspective of first-person experience is problematic. One of the key problems is that it reproduces the ahistorical and disembodied concept of experience characteristic of empiricism. Since a gendered approach to philosophy is neither ahistorical nor disembodied, this should be reflected in experience. Yet as Scott notes, one cannot abandon the concept of experience in the phenomenon of differences and hierarchies among women; however, one needs to historicize it. This is especially the case when one takes the Dalit feminist perspective into consideration.

This paper is an attempt to rethink the notion of experience from an intersectional point of view that takes differences between women into account. It engages with the feminist debate concerning experience to respond to critique that Indian feminism has overlooked the lifeworlds and experiences of Dalit women. It argues that epistemologies that address the lifeworlds of women from unprivileged social perspectives – fractured by caste and class for instance- would have to reinterpret the notion of experience from historical, embodied and intersectional dimensions. It will begin by examining how treating experience as foundational to feminist theorizing has problematic implications given its neglect of body and history. In this context, it will scrutinize the feminist critique of experience with reference to Scott’s arguments. By way of conclusion, this paper will examine the possibility of connecting discourse with embodiment, history and experience to remedy what Hennessy has termed as the gap between women’s experiences and feminist theorizing. In doing so, it will examine the politics of representation in feminist theorizing.

“In order to explain the relationship between the discursive materiality of women’s lives and feminism as a counterhegemonic discourse, we need to understand more specifically how articulation occurs.”(Hennessy, 77)

“There were doubts in our minds; what will we get out of interviews with these women? Still (we thought) why not note down the experiences of those women who had ventured out of their homes for a specific purpose?” (Pawar and Moon, 38)

Experience has been the driving force of feminist thought from its early period to the contemporary. However, critiques by Scott (1992) and Butler (1993) reveal that first-person experience cannot be accorded a foundational role in an unproblematic way. It tends to deviate from the gendered narrative of feminism by evoking a ahistorical and disembodied concept of experience. Moreover, the authority of individual experience cannot be the basis of gendered solidarity, as experiences between women vary, often due to the intersections of community, race and class.

Differences amongst women constitute a challenge to feminist solidarity (de Beauvoir) grounded in experience, as women do not form a homogeneous group. Heterogeneity of experience apart, the relationship between first-person experience and its articulation in discourse is tenuous. For as a social movement, feminism depends upon representing women’s experience; yet women who occupy a hegemonic position on the mainstream of socio-political axes often articulate experience. Those with power- such as race, class and caste- tend to represent their own position and that of the socially vulnerable. As Guru argues in the Indian context, such a hierarchy is grounded on exploitation: Privileged women often make professional use of the first hand experiences of those underprivileged to which they have easy access and who they claim to represent (2012). Some key questions of representation include: Can those who are privileged represent the experiences of those who are not? To what degree is such representation valid? Can only those who ‘own’ their experience represent them?

This paper attempts to reclaim the notion of experience from an intersectional point of view, taking differences between women into account. It situates itself in the context of the feminist debate on experience to respond to the criticism that mainstream Indian feminism has overlooked the life-worlds of socially vulnerable women, especially those disenfranchised by caste. It argues that discourses about the life-worlds of underprivileged women – fractured by caste and class- would have to reinterpret the notion of experience from historical, embodied and intersectional dimensions. It explores the possibility of remedying what Hennessy has termed as the gap between women’s experiences and feminist theorizing (74) through practices of experience and representation.

Following de Beauvoir, it takes a woman to philosophize as a feminist, wherein first-hand experience of patriarchal oppression motivates and lends credibility to feminist theorizing oriented to social change (2010, 3-5). Experience gives women the agency to theorize themselves and the worlds in which they live. Foregrounding experiences from the standpoint of women became necessary because as de Beauvoir argues, women experience the world from their specific inhabited habitat of femininity- a situation in which they are often made aware of their gendered subjectivity. In contrast, a man does not experience the world from the specific location of masculine gender, but rather assumes that the singularity of his situation is universal; hence, a man does not theorize his condition as singular.[1] The appeal to experience thus, becomes a key aspect of feminist thought. It has been crucial to feminist writings across a wide spectrum of theoretical positions as Harding and Hintikka (1983), de Lauretis (1988), Harding (1991) and Hartsock (2006) and others reveal.

The gendering of disciplines such as philosophy, science, literature and the like (Foss and Foss, 39) is based on introducing the neglected dimension of women’s experiences. As a foil against the history of erasure, every woman is viewed as an authority of her own life, with a sense of self-worth. Consequently, feminist research believes in allowing equal worth to all experiences. Feminist research takes women’s lives, specifically their authority over their own experiences, as an empirical point of reference; but, it nevertheless distances itself from such experiences to interpret, theorize and critique at the discursive level (Hennessy 67). Experience captures the practices in which women are involved, so that its theorization is rooted in women’s praxis. Feminist thought does not fetishize women’s experience as an abstract essential concept; it rather historicizes, pluralizes and contextualizes experience within the theoretical framework of being committed to women’s equality in the enterprise of institutional research and knowledge ( Ibid).

Moreover, for feminist researchers experience is not a taken for granted given that is available with ease (Foss and Foss,39-40; Molinari and Sandell, 288-89). It arises through reflection and consciousness when women participate in movements for social change.[2] Conversely, feminist movements also gather and coalesce women’s experiences through their interpretations and narrations. The latter could take the form of first person narratives or dialogues. One could term these as ‘experiential expertise’ (Foss & Foss).

Following Hennessy, standpoint theorists such as Harding who endeavour to include women’s lives in scientific research have upheld the authority of such expertise. Although they do not refer to the term experience (since standpoint theory is also a critique of feminist empiricism), they do consider women’s lives as authorizing their theories(Hennessy, 68). Moreover, for standpoint theory, women’s lives are not merely descriptions, but have a normative tilt. Thus, there is an “objective positionality” (Ibid) that distinguishes them from the ambivalence of “discursive positionality” (Ibid).

Yet, ‘experiential expertise’ is not the raw sense data of empiricism, as it is committed to the position of feminist politics and requires contextual conceptualization. Moreover, since feminism is critical of the solipsistic subject, experience is not for the feminist a unique individual private property that is immediately given. Rather, it is in principle capable of being shared, since women’s collective experiences are at stake in transforming an androcentric academic world. In the academic context, well-entrenched knowledge systems cannot be sufficiently challenged by expressing personal testimonies or aspirations. Since such self-expressions attempt to introduce women as producers and creators of knowledge, their role has to be interpreted to speak to institutionalized systems of knowledge.

This in turn requires a professional researcher who can dwell on the experiences expressed in testimonies to mediate and filter them in the course of articulating them in more general modes. Hence, what Hennessy terms as “discursive positionality” introduces another kind of expertise in feminist research, namely the ‘presentational’[3], in which the researcher engages with the experiences of others and represents them- albeit from a third person point of view.

The ability to present and represent is valuable because the researcher brings the experience of women to wider audiences in institutional and non-institutional contexts. The researcher is formally oriented with critical and organizational skills to select, focus and discursively bring out the experience in question. The researcher also has the ability to place the experience in wider contexts with access to publication and funds (Foss & Foss, 40). Besides such formal skills the researcher also needs to cultivate the informal art of listening to the participant with “…a capacity for insight, empathy, and attentive caring…” (Foss & Foss, 41).

While listening, the researcher allows his or her participant to speak- without intervening in the process with judgments and personal bias (Foss & Foss, 40-41). By speaking, participants are able to think over and convey what they have experienced to the researcher who in turn theorizes it. The speaker too has a reflexive-reflective relationship with her experiences, where she or he can connect, refine and reorganize the experience while narrating it. Thus, while talking about his or her experience, the speaker simultaneously shapes it. The researcher – ideally at least- suspends his or her own subjective experiences to listen, interpret and cohesively articulate the experiential data of the participant in research. “There is no ‘authentic’ unpolluted female experience for these thinkers” (Molinari and Sandell, 289). Research is, thus, a process of collaboration between the participant speaker and the researcher who listens, a process in which both learn from each other.

Thus, feminist research on experience does not merely view it as data to be stored. Rather there is a conscious focus on testimonies so that they can travel across from noninstitutional contexts to institutional ones to correct the gender bias in research (Foss and Foss, 42). Feminist research improves women’s lives as its participants reflect on the quality of their lives, to interpret them and examine the choices that are opened. Thus, for instance, Gilligan’s twenty nine research participants arrived at their own meaning giving roles in the course of discussing their pregnancies with her (1982). Rather than just express themselves or state so-called facts, the participants developed a critical consciousness towards themselves in the course of narrating their predicaments.

As the above discussion shows, the divide between experience and presentation/representation is not necessarily wide. Personal experience needs presentational ability, which is constituted by language and interpretation to reach out to those who are not its subjects. Moreover, presentational expertise is one of continuous discussion, as well as, “negotiation and critical reflection” (Foss & Foss, 41) between researchers and their participants. However, the ideal conscious relationship between the experiential and presentational poles of feminist research does not always prevail. Presentational ability has to face several challenges when it is employed to represent the experiences of other women besides the researcher.

These challenges arise from gender’s historical and contextual intersection with other social matrices such as caste, class and race. These intersections introduce hierarchies and relations of power- often at an unconscious level-into the course of research. Feminist researchers in academic contexts are often privileged women who often taken upon themselves to represent experiences of those who are not. This is the outcome of the movement(s) itself that has had a largely homogeneous base of privileged bourgeois women in leadership positions, until recently. In the context of Western feminism, the fact that researchers in institutions are for a large part white, heterosexual women has been visibilized by “unorthodox”[4] feminists since the past two decades or so[5]. In a parallel Indian contex, the hidden bias in the mainstream feminist researcher’s privileged caste background in the course of representing experiences of women from socially impoverished ones has been exposed by interventions that take differences between women into account.[6]

What Hennessy has termed as the gap between women’s lived experiences and their theoretical articulations is one of the socially privileged feminist researcher who patronizes her participant/speaker while representing her and professionalizes research in doing so. This gap has to be addressed because feminist research is deeply committed to transforming women’s lives by rooting itself in them.

In order to remedy this gap, the late 1980s witnessed the Indian women’s movement making space (though deeply inadequate) for women’s narratives from underprivileged backgrounds. It introduced Dalit[7] feminist testimonies of gender often in the form of first person narratives (Rege 2008). Their everyday lives differ from non-Dalit women due to their labour being forced for the community rather than the family; their labour is not just monotonous, but is also stigmatized; they already work in the public sphere- albeit in socially frowned ways often in caste-based occupations, so the question of their entering the public realm in search of work is irrelevant (Geetha, 2012). First person narratives clearly play a role in expanding the canvas of feminist thought- particularly demonstrating how the challenges posed by caste identity reveal the absence of homogeneity among women- that women are different.

The feminist debate in the Indian context has acknowledged the intersectionality of gender and caste by foregrounding it as lived experience. The latter has been authenticated in several important texts. However, as Geetha (247) and Guru (2012)[8]note, experience cannot be the last word. It is the starting point for examining the nature of experience. Moreover, instead of sidestepping the uncomfortable problem of the implicit hierarchy of representing experience, the possibility of their egalitarian relationship needs exploration. For the experiences of Dalit women has meaning both for them and others for transformatory practices leading to an egalitarian social world. In this endeavour, the feminist philosophical debate on experience in the West can perhaps be brought into contact with difference feminism in the Indian context .

In the Indian feminist context, there has been a shift to the authenticity of first person experience to remedy the neglect of women from underprivileged caste groups. This assumes a one to one fit between women’s lives/experiences and their narrations (Hennessy 69). In reading the subject position of women exclusively and ‘authentically’ through their first hand experience- without putting the latter in larger contexts- one subscribes to a residual empiricist notion of experience as a bare sensation that is not mediated through culture or language – given its stress on the authenticity of women’s experience.

Such a gesture towards the “exceptional nature of Dalit experience” (247) is troubling because it does not situate experience in the larger context of structural violence; consequently, it shirks from the responsibility of dismantling the entangled hierarchy of caste and gender. Following Geetha, the personal testimonies by Dalit women are a resource for seeing how their subjectivity constituted in contexts of humiliation- which one might add are normalized- is also one of survival and resistance through ‘alliances’ that they work out with women and men from privileged castes (246). One can examine the extent to which Dalit women’s labour has been reinforced by the interests of privileged non-Dalit women so that there is a self-examination by the latter provoking a rethinking of ‘women’s work’ a central part of feminism. One needs to examine the relationship of exploitation between women who experience the world in diverse ways- a relationship that could be inconvenient, but would have to be nevertheless taken into account in the resistance to patriarchy. As Geetha maintains,

“Instead, what is continuously voiced is a register of angry lament and defiance, a voicing of experience, the rawness of which is called upon to attest to its truth” (246).

It is because of the difficulties of such authenticity that the appeal to personal experience has been called into question in feminist debates by thinkers as diverse as Scott (1992), Hennessy (1993) and Butler (1993). Their prime contention is that it does not take the heterogeneity of women into consideration (Scott, 68), for ‘woman’ becomes a universal objective category accessible through experience. Consequently, the dualism between male and female is foregrounded and other social categories that constitute female subjectivity- such as caste and class- are obliterated to overlook differences between women. Dalit women experience both caste and gender oppression – their caste location makes them more vulnerable to gendered violence (Rege, 2008). Further, as argued above the problems of Dalit women from the point of view of gender are not the same as those of women from privileged castes. Resisting dowry or asserting the right to reproduction were not obstacles for many of them, as much as the lack of access to government resources (Namala 2008, 463) or the resistance to closing country liquor (arrack ) store, which was not taken too seriously by the mainstream women’ movement (465). The differences between women was not even acknowledged by organizations such as the National Women’s Conference formed in 1982, which undertook an investigation of Dalit women only in 1994 (Ibid). All of which makes suspect the simplistic homogeneous sisterhood among women founded on a common set of experiences.

But then as critics of personal experience have argued these differences, which are deeply entrenched in a hierarchical order, cannot automatically create a critical consciousness of resistance through autobiographical repetition. By merely affirming the subject position of an oppressed woman in an objective way or expressing her agony, one does not question the specific social structures that reinforce such experience of oppression. On the contrary, the status quo can be reiterated through such a first person mode. These difficulties notwithstanding, one cannot allow the notion of experience to be brushed aside. Against this one could maintain (with Foss & Foss) that the utilization of personal experience has subversive potential in opening up new ways of theorizing women’s lives.

It overcomes the absolutism and hierarchy of the expert knower position, since experience is open to all. It reposes a sense of confidence in women that their point of view has a place in research. But these assumptions imply that the exceptionalism of the first person account be overcome by acknowledging the aspect of “presentational expertise”. Since experience is never bare, its capacity to be presented and represented – either in the first person or the third (through the researcher)-is inextricably woven with the very possibility of experience. It can only be communicated on such a ground.

Since, presentation and representation are closely linked to experience, the researcher and participant subject (who narrates personal experience) are not necessarily stuck in an unequal relation. Rather they can participate in the research process as equals (Foss & Foss, 42). The researcher may have skills that give the participant new insight on her narratives so that she arrives at a critical consciousness through new interpretations.

Yet the Socratean researcher has a vantage point in the relationship with the participant who supplies the content of experience. However, the problem is that it is tilted towards the researcher who plays the Socratean role of illuminating the experience of the participant. Further, the participant’s experiential expertise and the researcher’s presentational expertise are qualitatively different from each other. Since experience is not constituted by language, thought or culture, the problem of relating the two sets of expertise becomes acute.

This is also because experience itself is a singular event on this view to which the one who experiences has first person access. Indeed, as Guru has observed this hierarchy is central to the inegalitarianism of social science practice in India (2012). As he argues, the gulf between theory and experience in the Indian academy points towards an intellectual inegalitarianism. He diagnoses the persistence of caste privilege in this dichotomy between social scientists who do theory and others who labour for the collection of empirical data.

Guru argues that the prestige attached to theory in India emerges from privileged castes dominating theoretical work, while lived experience is confined to those who lack privilege. He argues that elite theoreticians in India were able to consolidate their position due to historical privilege, access to institutions and fellowships and the tyranny of language. Consequently, the experiences of their underprivileged colleagues became mere illustrative examples. Members of the oppressed castes, Guru maintains, got stuck with empiricism partly out of force and partly out of choice.

The absence of historical privilege confined them to mechanical, unpleasant and often brutal labour on a routine basis. This did not, according to Guru, give them time to reflect on their condition. They choose practical routes like poetry, formal politics and activist work (to collect facts and figures to prove atrocities) that were based on the framework of empiricism and ‘professionalized’ their interests (Ibid, 22). Guru notes that they also made a conscious intellectual choice towards poetry and empiricism for various reasons including:

(2)Privileged access to first person experience need not be theoretically spelled out

(3)Abstract thinking is socially irrelevant and alienating. Each of these assumptions compartmentalize Dalit lived experiences, which can be shared through theoretical intervention. Guru calls for a Dalit theory that overturns the caste hierarchy between theory and experience/practice by combining scholarship with social commitment.

Experiential agency mandates social vulnerable groups to move beyond the immediacy of unique experience to theoretically represent themselves. It is because they have not theorized their own experiences, that Dalit agency gets undermined with the patronizing tone of Brahminical scholars who speak on their behalf, underplay their discursive capacity by limiting them to examples used in their theories and remained outside the ambit of the lived experience of oppression. Mainstream Marxist and liberal categories did not theorize the specificity of Dalit experience (Guru,2005; Rege, 2005).

Feminist theory also took advantage of caste vulnerability of underprivileged women according to Guru, since women from privileged castes, the researchers, write theory by culling experiences of underprivileged women who narrate their autobiographies. Feminist theory is, thus, an expression of privileged and reification which is predicated on the divide between presentational expertise and experiential expertise.

The challenge posed by Guru is as follows: What authorizes the researcher to communicate the oppression of her participant? Similarly, how does a Dalit woman represent her oppression? The two questions have to be addressed as related so that the reified relation between them changes to one of equality. These allied questions are urgent for contemporary feminism where privilege amongst women allows some women to do theory and others to experience oppression. These questions require a reinterpretation of the notion of experience itself, where the notions of authority and ownership (which Guru assumes is necessary) associated with them are challenged.

Proponents of women’s experiences as the starting point of research, have not theorized the term experience adequately. Scott (1992)has gestured towards its alternative theorization of experience, by suggesting that experience has to be examined through the matrices of discourse and history. Thus, the notion of experience itself and the manner in which structures of power leave their traces on them have to be held together in any analysis. But then this account of experience veers in the direction of extreme constructivism, repeating the errors of the foundational approach in taking discourse and history as givens (Kruks 2001, 139). It also evokes an ahistorical subject of experience. One might add to Kruks’ criticism that the democratic gains of first person narratives are sidestepped in the direction of a high theoretical account, which leaves no room for non-elite women- such as Dalit women in the Indian context. Consequently, the possibility of the researcher and participant having an egalitarian relation is also left unexplored.

Scott’s (1992) critique of taking raw experience as the foundation of theory has however, demonstrated that one cannot attach notions of ownership, authenticity and authority to experience without qualification. Yet going beyond the feminist critiques of personal experience, without losing its democratic intent, requires that experience be reclaimed. Although feminist scholarship has drawn attention to the significance of experience, it has not quite paused to spell out the very notion of experience. A turn to Dewey (2001), which in the context of Dalit feminism’s critique of Indian feminism is motivated by the need to comprehend Ambedkar’s legacy[9], is instructive.

Dewey observes that the exclusive association of experience with cognition emerged with modern empiricism[10]. As a result it came to signify a subject’s first hand privileged unique access to a state of mind/feeling that could not really be shared with all. This is an objective passive model of experience, which Dewey terms as “sensationalistic empiricism” (idem:277) in which the acquisition of experience was a passive process of responding to the world as it impinged on the sense organs. It did not add anything to the world that it describes. A bare sensation cannot really provide justification for complex descriptions about the social world. Dewey makes the active practically engaged notion of experience the condition for passive experience and propositional knowledge, thus, relating the subjective and the objective. Yet if one wants to describe the world actively as Dalit women’s testimonies do, one should have propositional knowledge about people’s lives. This needs discourse, history and also embodiment.

In contrast, the ancient approach to experience was laden with the subjective and the practical "ways of doing and being done to" (Dewey, 2001: 275). Experience was understood in the context of culture and tradition as an active-passive phenomenon. An experienced person was someone who had the know-how or skilled knowledge in doing an activity in the world for a period of time. Such an experience, which is conservative, subjective, practical may not generate theory- for those who are engaged in it may not be able to verbalize it. Yet, it has the potential to do so, when one reflects on it- either from a first person or second person point of view. For Dewey then,

“The measure and value of an experience lies in the perception of relationships or the continuities to which it leads up” (146).

Returning to the feminist contribution, Dewey’s active experience is voiced by de Beauvoir in her notion of lived experience, which is influenced by Husserl and Merleau Ponty[11]. Although she takes the concrete lived/ experiential dimension of people’s lives as her point of departure, de Beauvoir does not treat the experiential dimension as that which is owned and authored by a single individual.

For her empiricism divides consciousness from its object/world (2004a). de Beauvoir’s own relationship to her participants in research was not merely one of presenting their experiences faithfully. As several passages in the Second Sex reveal, de Beauvoir account of women’s lived experience – from formative years (of childhood, adolescence), to adulthood (marriage, motherhood or sex workers)- is based on her relating her own personal experiences with the data she acquired as a researcher from other participants (2010). Hence, for de Beauvoir

“…the meaning of an object is not a concept graspable by pure understanding. Its meaning is the object as it is disclosed to us in the overall relation we sustain with it, and which is action, emotion, and feeling” (de Beauvoir 2004b, 270).

Taking de Beauvoir’s insight to the research situation, the researcher has to enagage with the data of the participant in research through the so-called subjective lens of empathy, care and feeling. Collaboration between the researcher and the participant becomes possible because they inhabit common spaces through embodiment. Experiences of the world become possible by “frequenting” it (2004a, 161). By residing in locations and situations or environments, one’s body thrown in with other bodies (of other people and other things) to be touched by them.Thus, by living (not objectifying) and experiencing one’s body in intersubjective (and not isolated) contexts the gap between subjects and objects is minimized. Rather than a subject-object distance, experience is an empathetic bond. It is, thus, an expression of care that has the potential to challenge a hierarchical order.

Thus, while listening to the narration of the lived oppression of a Dalit woman, the privileged feminist woman would lose her separate isolated subjectivity. She will be able to recognize agency in the voice of someone who does not have the access to categories of high theory. In doing so, the privileged feminist would also be critically interrogating her own relationship of power to the Dalit woman-in terms of the opportunities and access to institutions that are available to her due to caste/class privilege. In the course of recognizing her own implication in undemocratic social structures, the privileged feminist researcher would also learn to question and resist institutions that enable her by disabling her Dalit participant.[12]

A woman who articulates her trauma in public overcomes her own alienation from social structures to spell out a critique of institutions and her own aspirations. The critical relation between researcher and participant would then be acknowledged as one of conflict of interests, negotiaion and collaboration. This is because experience is never an incorrigible starting point- but is rather a dialectical process of collective articulation by persons who have conflicting social locations.

Experience as a lived phenomenon is never solely owned or authored by an individual. Hence, since the egocentric subject is abandoned in seriously listening to another’s suffering or narrating one’s own in public, one can speak about the pain of the other. For such an experience is never fully given nor is it authentic or complete. On the contrary, personal experience opens up other experiences. Hence, experience is a communication between the subject and the object- where the two are engaged. Embodied experience is also a reminder that there is a politics of experience- where the latter can never be an authentic given.

Lived experience as Dewey and de Beauvoir note, reveals that experience is both, objective and subjective, personal and collaborative, immediate and mediated, as well as, singular and universal. It is also a process of sensitization towards one’s own self and towards the other. For de Beauvoir the methodology of the researcher has to be heterogeneous in order to integrate the contradictions of the subjective and objective aspects of being in the world (2004b). She brings her own personal experience into contact with those of her participants to illuminate the condition of women. Thus, there is no ‘objective data’ of experience, on the contrary de Beauvoir connects the objective ‘presentational expertise’ and the subjective ‘experiential expertise’ through discourse. The fissure between experience and discourse that perplexes Hennessy can be dissolved if experience is acknowledged as neither authentic nor pure in the spirit of Dewey and de Beauvoir.

Lived experience is a web of the specific and the abstract in which both reason and affect play a role with “ethical, political as well as philosophical implications” (Bergoffen, 2004)[13]. Besides opening up the collaborative space for women’s discourse through the self or the researcher and the other or the participant it explored the ambiguities of concsiousness raising in the world at large, the possibility of violence in transforming society and responsibility among several other themes.

Extending Dewey’s and de Beauvoir’s perspective on experience to ‘presentational expertise’, the researcher and the participant are entwined in a world that is made common through their embodiment. Their experience is not a readymade given but an active process of collective agency which is embodied and temporal. Such a heterogeneous notion of experience allows for an egalitarian relationship between the researcher and the participant, who are not foreign to each other when they communicate, empathize and commune.   Thus, the shared nature of experience allows for the researcher to take the point of view of the participant and vice versa. It is precisely such sharing- which presupposes embodiment- that allows feminists to undertake the emancipatory task of resisting caste privilege – which hinders feminist emancipation.   Further, such sharing also makes it possible for men to be feminists.   Speaking for the other, as much as, speaking for oneself are interrelated processes that combine experience and presentation inorder to represent.

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Rege, Sharmila. 2005 (2003) “A Dalit Feminist Standpoint” in Gender and Caste ed. Anupama Rao, 90-101. Women Unlimited: New Delhi

Ambedkar” in her (ed) Against the Madness of Manu: B.R. Ambedkar’s Writings on Brahminical Patriarchy, 13-56. Navayana: New Delhi

Scott, Joan. 1992. “Experience” in Feminists Theorize the Political Ed. Judith Butler and Joan W. Scott, 22-40. Routledge: London and New York.

in Studies of Indian Dalit-Bahujan Women” in Intersections: Gender and Sexuality in Asia and the Pacific 34:

Notes

[1] de Beauvoir was writing in the context of 1940s in Europe before the advent of masculinities studies, which emerged as a response to feminism

[2] See Molinari and Sandell (1999) for an account of consciousness raising movements in creating a feminist consciousness about experience and a survey of the feminist debate on experience.

[3] The expressions ‘experiential expertise’ and ‘presentational expertise’ are derived from Foss and Foss (p. 40).

[4] This term counters the ‘feminist orthodoxies’ of mainstream privileged women. See Lewis and Storr (2005).

[5] For overviews see for instance, Lugones & Spelman (1983), Hennessy (100-138), Mohanty (1992)

[6] For a detailed account see Turner (2014), Pawar & Moon (2014), Guru (2005), Rege (2005, 2008, 2013)

[7] This term is currently used to signify groups and individuals who were formally branded as ‘untouchables’ in the Hindu social order. See Pawar & Moon (2014) and Rao (2005) for an account.

[8] Against Rege’s claim (2005), Guru does not privilege experience over theory. See Guru, 2012.

[9] Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar led people from the erstwhile ‘untouchable’ caste towards claiming their rights and resisting the caste system. He problematized gender in the context of caste and argued for the equality of women. He is also the architect of the Indian Constitution. See Rege (2013) for his contribution to gender awareness in India. John Dewey was one of Ambedkar’s teachers in Columbia University, where he studied.

[10] See his discussion in 2001, 145-157.

[11] Following Kruks there is a turn to the phenomenological account of experience, with an emphasis on de Beauvoir.

[12] The collection of testimonies and interviews in Moon and Pawar (2014) reveal how the participant of experience changes the researcher. Moreover, the researcher has to also labour to reach out to the participant.

[13] Although Bergoffen writes with reference to de Beauvoir, one could extend it to Dewey and the context of Dalit women’s lived experience in India.

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