Sociology from Women's Experience: A Reaffirmation

Abstract

The discussion of my work by Pat Hill Collins, Bob Connell, and Charles Lemert is generous and very much appreciated. My difficulty in responding is that each develops a critique from a very different theoretical stance.' Lemert brings to bear his interest in what he describes as the sociological dilemma of the subject-object relation, and the postmodernist critique of modernity and its unitary subject. Pat Hill Collins draws on the tradition of critical theory, strikingly informed by her experience of and commitment to recovering the suppressed feminist thought of black women. Connell works within a Marxist tradition and with specific concerns about the relation of sociology to political practice. Also, each constructs her or his own straw Smith. Lemert reads the project of an inquiry beginning from women's experience as a sociology of women's subjective experience. Collins reads into my project her objective of creating a transformative knowledge. Connell confounds beginning from experience with individualism, and interprets my rather careful (and critical) explications of the conceptual practices of power as an abhorrence of abstractions in general. In response I will clarify how I've understood and worked for a sociology beginning from women's experience. It is not, I insist, a totalizing theory. Rather it is a method of inquiry, always ongoing, opening things up, discovering. In addition, to reemphasize its character as inquiry relevant to the politics and practice of progressive struggle, whether of women or of other oppressed groups, this essay refers to some of the work being done from this approach.