Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-7cvxr Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-25T07:16:36.441Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Speculum of Ignorance: The Women's Health Movement and Epistemologies of Ignorance

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 March 2020

Nancy Tuana
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This essay aims to clarify the value of developing systematic studies of ignorance as a component of any robust theory of knowledge. The author employs feminist efforts to recover and create knowledge of women's bodies in the contemporary women's health movement as a case study for cataloging different types of ignorance and shedding light on the nature of their production. She also helps us understand the ways resistance movements can be a helpful site for understanding how to identify, critique, and transform ignorance.

Type
Research Article
Information
Hypatia , Volume 21 , Issue 3: Special Issue: Feminist Epistemologies of Ignorance , Summer 2006 , pp. 1 - 19
Copyright
Copyright © 2006 by Hypatia, Inc.

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Arditti, Rita. 1977. Have you ever wondered about the male pill? In Seizing our bodies: The politics of women's health, ed. Dreifus, Claudia. New York: Vintage Books.Google Scholar
Baldwin, James. 1963. The fire next time. New York: Dell.Google Scholar
Boston Women's Health Book Collective. 1973. Our bodies, ourselves: A book by and for women. New York: Simon and Schuster.Google Scholar
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. 1999. State‐specific maternal mortality among black and white women—United States, 1987–1996.Google Scholar
Code, Lorraine. 1987. Epistemic responsibility. Hanover: University Press of New England.Google Scholar
Collins, Patricia Hill. 1991. Black feminist thought: Knowledge, consciousness, and the politics of empowerment. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Davis, Dawn Rae. 2002. (Love is) the ability of not knowing: feminist experience of the impossible in ethical singularity. Hypatia 17 (2): 145–61.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dobson, Roger. 2003. Will men ever be on the pill?The Age. October 27. http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2003/10/26/1067103267041.htmlfrom=storyrhs.Google Scholar
Dreifus, Claudia. 1977. Sterilizing the poor. In Seizing our bodies: The politics of women's health, ed. Dreifus, Claudia. New York: Vintage Books.Google Scholar
Federation of Feminist Women's Health Centers. 1981. A new view of a woman's body: A fully illustrated guide. New York: Simon and Schuster.Google Scholar
Frye, Marilyn. 1983. The politics of reality: Essays in feminist theory. Berkeley, Calif: Crossing Press.Google Scholar
Gordon, Lewis. 1995. Bad faith and antiblack racism. Atlantic Highlands, N. J.: Humanities Press.Google Scholar
Halliday, Patricia. 2004. Conceptions of agency and responsibility in the language(s) of incest. Ph.D. diss., University of Oregon.Google Scholar
Haraway, Donna. 1991. Situated knowledges: The science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective. In Simians, cyborgs, and women: The reinvention of nature. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Haraway, Donna. 1996. Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.%20FemaleMan©_Meets_OncoMouse™: Feminism and Technoscience. New York and London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Harding, Sandra. 1991. Whose science? Whose knowledge? Thinking from women's lives. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
Harding, Sandra. 2004. The feminist standpoint reader: Intellectual and political controversies. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Herman, Judith. 1992. Trauma and recovery. New York: Basic Books.Google Scholar
Herman, Judith. and Harvey, Mary R. 1993. The false memory debate: Social science or social backlash? Harvard Mental Health Letter 9 (10): 4–6.Google Scholar
Hoagland, Sarah Lucia. 2001. Resisting rationality. In Engendering rationalities, ed. Tuana, Nancy and Morgen, Sandra. Albany: SUNY Press.Google Scholar
Koedt, Ann. 1970. The myth of the vaginal orgasm. In Notes from the second year: Women's liberation, ed. Firestone, Shulamith and Koedt, Ann. New York: Radical Feminism.Google Scholar
Latour, Bruno, and Woolgar, Steve. 1979. Laboratory life: The social construction of scientific facts. Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage.Google Scholar
Longino, Helen. 1990. Science as social knowledge: Values and objectivity in scientific inquiry. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Lugones, Maria. 2003. Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes: Theorizing coalition against multiple oppressions. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield.Google Scholar
Mills, Charles S. 1997. The racial contract. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
Moore, Lisa Jean, and Clarke, Adele E. 1995. Clitoral conventions and transgressions: Graphic representations in anatomy texts, c. 1900–1991. Feminist studies 21 (2): 255–301.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Morgen, Sandra. 2002. Into our own hands: The women's health movement in the United States, 1969–1990. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press.Google Scholar
Nelson, Lynn Hankinson. 1990. Who knows: From Quine to a feminist empiricism. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.Google Scholar
Oudshoorn, Nelly. 2003. The male pill: A biography of a technology in the making. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Potter, Nancy. 1996. Loopholes, gaps, and what is held fast: Democratic epistemology and claims to recovered memories. Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 3 (4): 237–54.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Proctor, Robert N. 1995. Cancer wars: How politics shapes what we know and don't know about cancer. New York: Basic Books.Google Scholar
Rathus, Spencer A., Nevid, Jeffrey S., and Fichner‐Rathus, Lois. 2002. Human sexuality in a world of diversity. 5th Ed. Boston: Allyn and Bacon.Google Scholar
Sacco, Lynn. 2002. Sanitized for your protection: Medical discourse and the denial of incest in the United States, 1890–1940. Journal of Women's History 14 (3): 80–104.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schiebinger, Londa. 2004. Plants and empire: Colonial bioprospecting in the Atlantic world. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Seaman, Barbara. 1969. The doctors’ case against the pill. New York: P. H. Wyden.Google Scholar
Seaman, Barbara. 2003. The greatest experiment ever performed on women: Exploding the estrogen myth. New York: Hyperion.Google Scholar
Smith, Dorothy. 1987. The everyday world as problematic: A sociology for women. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.Google Scholar
Spelman, Elizabeth. Forthcoming. Managing ignorance. In Race and epistemologies of ignorance, ed. Sullivan, Shannon and Tuana, Nancy. Albany: SUNY Press.Google Scholar
Tuana, Nancy. 2004. Coming to understand: Orgasm and the epistemology of ignorance. Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy 19 (1): 194–232.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wylie, Alison. 2002. Thinking from things: Essays in the philosophy of archaeology. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.Google Scholar