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Abstract
In this article I provide a brief overview of feminist standpoint theories, as well as how Native feminist theories complicate and enrich this political and epistemic tradition. Following this overview, I introduce Wayne Au’s conception of curricular standpoint theory as a contemporary and productive use of feminist standpoint theory to address the politics of curriculum. After outlining the affordances and enactments of curricular standpoint theory, I illustrate how curricular standpoint theory loses sight of its feminist genealogy and commitments. I argue that in order for curricular standpoint theorizing to be politically and pedagogically effective, it must remain accountable to both its feminist roots as well as Native feminist critiques. To gesture toward the generative analyses and practices Native feminist theorizing offers curricular standpoint theory and the field of curriculum theory, I outline several Native feminist theories of curriculum that demonstrate how curricular knowledge production can remain accountable to Indigenous peoples, lands, and decolonial struggles. Attending to Native feminist theories is epistemically and politically advantageous, as well as an ethical imperative for theorizing within settler nation-states on Indigenous lands. Beyond contributing to more vigorous and just modes of inquiry and knowledge production, I offer that Native feminist theories can also generate new ways of being and doing that counter colonial logics and further decolonial futures.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 I would like to thank Rubén Gaztambide-Fernández and the organizers of the Curriculum Inquiry Writing Retreat for supporting my scholarship. My deep gratitude to the reviewers and editors for their valuable feedback on this manuscript. Thanks also to Eve Tuck, Christy Guthrie, Oscar Navarro, and Casey Tiemann for reading and commenting on prior drafts of this article. I would also like to recognize my colleagues at the retreat for their questions, ideas, and encouragement. Any mistakes in this article are my own.
2 Harding (Citation2004b) emphasizes the plurality of standpoint theories to acknowledge how they “share a family resemblance and collectively contrast with dominant epistemologies, methodologies, and philosophies of science, yet importantly differ from each other in other respects” (p. 12)
3 Feminist standpoint theories emerged in the 1970s and 1980s, but I am citing the reprinted articles within Harding’s (Citation2004d) Feminist Standpoint Theory Reader as the introduction and section overviews provide a comprehensive and nuanced discussion of the theoretical landscape and controversies.
4 Harding (Citation1998) offers that the intellectual history of feminist standpoint theory emerges from Hegel’s reflections on an enslaved person’s knowledge with respect to the master/slave relationship, which Marx, Engels, and Lukacs later developed into a “standpoint of the proletariat,” but also offers a “social history” of standpoint which recognizes the potent critiques posed by social movements of prevailing knowledges systems and institutions (p. 149). Recognizing this social history is important, as linking the genealogy only to Marxism ignores the importance of activism, such as the women’s movement (Smith, Citation2004).
5 Harding (Citation2004b) summarizes some of the ways researchers have turned aspects of oppression into “epistemic and scientific resources”:
Dorothy Smith points to women's responsibility for daily life as a source of valuable critical questions and insights about the dominant institutions and the “conceptual practices of power” that the discipline of sociology provides for them. Hilary Rose argues that women's responsibility for their bodies and for emotional labor gives women a distinctive perspective on their own bodies and on the sciences. Patricia Hill Collins argues that Black women's distinctive activities in slavery, in the kinds of work Black women are assigned today, and in their ongoing struggles to support their families and communities gives them powerful critical perspectives on the limitations of mainstream sociology and the social institutions it services” (pp. 8–9).
6 This reader includes a lively debate published in the 1997 Winter issue of Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society in which Susan Hekman’s article, “Truth and Method: Feminist Standpoint Theory Revisited,” received pointed critiques from Nancy Hartsock, Patricia Hill Collins, Sandra Harding, and Dorothy Smith, and to which Hekman responded.
7 My use of the term Native feminist is informed by a variety of Native feminist theories (Arvin et al., Citation2013; Goeman & Denetdale, Citation2009; Jacob, Citation2013; Morrill, Citation2017; Smith & Kauanui, Citation2008). The term implies a plural notion of “Native feminisms rather than a singular feminism” (Ramirez, Citation2007, p. 33). I recognize the diversity of Indigenous women’s experiences (Grande, Citation2015; Ramirez, Citation2007), and that not all Indigenous women identity with the term feminist (Mihesuah, Citation2003). Quechua scholar Sandy Grande (Citation2015), for example, rejects the term feminist, describing herself instead as Indigenísta.
8 I use 2SQ as an acronym for Indigenous Two-Spirit and queer people (Simpson, Citation2017). I recognize that not all Indigenous LGBTQ people identify as Two Spirit. Further, as Hunt and Holmes (Citation2015) notes:
Simply adding Two-Spirit to the list of LGBTQ fails to fully account for the underlying systems of power and knowledge that continue to shape possibilities for solidarity between queer and Indigenous communities. For Two-Spirit people, addressing homophobia and transphobia is integrally connected to confronting broad systems of colonial power, which work to erase Indigenous ontologies of gender and sexuality. (p. 160)
9 For example, Joyce Green (English, Ktunaxa and Cree-Scots Métis descent) (Citation2007), describes how Native feminists have been disciplined and punished for expressing feminist concerns, accused of being “divisive [and] corrosive fo family and community,” and subject to questions of authenticity by those who view feminism as an imposed colonial and assimilative ideology (pp. 24–25).
10 I recognize that a variety of non-Native feminists foreground inclusive conceptions of women, including, as Sarah Ahmed (Citation2017) does, “all those who travel under the sign women” (p. 14).
11 “Country,” for Moreton-Robinson (Citation2013), refers “not only the tracks of land to which we are inextricably tied but it is also the term used to denote Indigenous people who have bloodline to that country through creator and ancestral birth” (p. 335).
12 Harding (Citation2004c) suggests the distinction between social and natural sciences is irrelevant because in natural sciences, scientists study “nature as an object of knowledge” (p. 133). While acknowledging the work of scholars like Donna Haraway who point to the “cultural character of nature as an object of knowledge” (p. 140), the point here is that Harding seems only to recognize the ways nature is mediated by different cultures, but not the social character of more-than-human communities.
13 See Collins (Citation1998) and Moreton-Robinson (Citation2000b) for similar analyses of on the limits of deconstructive methodologies.
14 One of Au’s goals is to bridge a divide he sees between postmodernist analyses of curriculum that foreground subjectivity and discourse and the call for more pragmatic and practical approaches to curriculum that are “grounded in schools” (p. 7), while also addressing “their respective epistemological weaknesses of disconnection from material reality (postmodernist/subjectivity) and false pretenses to non-ideology (postivist/pragmatism)” (p. 9).
15 Au is clear that social locations themselves are not generic, but rather, specific to particular inquiries, phenomena, and social relations (Citation2012, p. 70).
16 hooks' (Citation1981) engagement with Freire’s work represents Paris and Alim’s (2014) conception of “loving critique,” an account that is critical of the sexism and “phallocentric paradigm of liberation” in his theorizing (p. 49) while not dismissing the importance of his work to her own.
17 See the section “The Skirt. Again,” in Chapter 8: Indigenous Queer Normativity of Simpson’s (Citation2017) As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom Through Radical Resistance for a discussion of how core Nishnaabeg values support her critical engagement with questions of whether Indigenous women should be required to wear skirts in ceremony.
18 As Tuck and Yang (Citation2012) note, critical consciousness can also be a “settler move to innocence” and “waylay decolonization” by “allow[ing] conscientization to stand in for the more uncomfortable task of relinquishing stolen land” (p. 19).
19 This is in no way intended to imply Indigenous students are incapable of developing a critical consciousness; rather, Grande’s analysis makes clear the need for greater pedagogical attention to the complex interplay between belief and questioning/doubt with respect to Indigenous knowledges and traditions.
20 I should make clear here that by “colonial infuences” I do not mean traces of modernity. Indigenous knowledges and traditions are, and have always been, modern and dynamic, creatively adapting to contempory contexts and circumstances.
21 This argument does not solely emerge from Indigenous traditions. Collins (Citation1998), for example, explores how spirituality has been central for Black women’s personal and collective struggles toward justice.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Leilani Sabzalian
Leilani Sabzalian (Alutiiq) is an Assistant Professor of Indigenous Studies in Education at the University of Oregon. Her research focuses on creating spaces to support Indigenous self-determination in public schools, and preparing teachers to challenge colonialism in curriculum, policy, and practice.