Critique and Postcritique
Elizabeth S. Anker is Associate Professor of English at Cornell University and the author of Fictions of Dignity: Embodying Human Rights in World Literature.
Rita Felski is William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of English at the University of Virginia and the author of many books, most recently, The Limits of Critique.
Elizabeth S. Anker is Associate Professor of English at Cornell University and the author of Fictions of Dignity: Embodying Human Rights in World Literature.
Rita Felski is William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of English at the University of Virginia and the author of many books, most recently, The Limits of Critique.
Styles of Reading
This essay argues that Donna Haraway’s negotiation of the “two poles” of the objectivity problem offers a way beyond the impasse of recent debates about method. In Primate Visions (1989), she outlines what she sees as the temptations of poststructuralist skepticism and scientific positivism. Refusing to succumb fully to either temptation, Haraway advocates a feminist epistemology that challenges the taken-for-granted nature of the real at the same time that it aims to produce positive knowledge about the world. Through her cultivation of a feminist version of objectivity, Haraway suggests that care and critique are not mutually exclusive and that the description of the world should not be understood as an endorsement of the status quo.
Sign in
Advertisement
