Haraway argues for a new understanding of (scientific) objectivity based on a feminist understand of situated knowledges. She does this through the metaphor of vision: “Vision can be good for avoiding binary oppositions. I would like to insistent on the embodied nature of all vision and so reclaim the sensory system that has been used to signify a leap out of the marked body and into a conquering gaze from nowhere” (581). The all-seeing gaze suggests that one does not have to take responsibility for one’s perspective; embodied vision, on the other hand, encourages accountability. Feminist objective, then, “is about limited location and situated knowledge;” it allows us to “elaborate specificity and difference and the loving care people might take to learn how to see faithfully from another’s point of view” (583). Situated knowledges also allow us to make connections among different points of view and acknowledge that all views are partial (because all knowledge comes from a particular position). Because of this, we are able to be more critical about ours and others points of view. Furthermore, “[s]ituated knoweldges are about communities, not about isolated individuals…[They are] the joining of partial views and halting voices into a collective subject position that promises a vision of the means of ongoing infinite embodiment, of living within limits and contradictions – of views from somewhere” (590). Finally, they “require that the object of knowledge be pictured as an actor and agent, not as a screen or a ground or a resource, never finally as slave to the mater that closes off the dialectic in his unique agency and his authorship of ‘objective’ knowledge” (591). Haraway applies this agency to both the world and to bodies.
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