Rethinking situated knowledge from the perspective of Argentina's feminist strike

Abstract

How has feminism impacted investigation and intervention, and ways of linking both practices? Here a first question emerges that we take as our premise: There are explicit connections between the movement of thought and social movements. That is, there is a direct (but not simple) relationship between what we can read, perceive,and conceptualize and the extent to which we are part of and/or connected to the dynamics of struggle that displace our understanding of what is taken as possible. As we know thanks to many feminist reflections, recognizing that connection, that dependence, implies letting go of the division between the subject who researches and the object that is made passive as the researched.But it also implies questioning what is called objectivity, which, as Donna Haraway has masterfully explained, is generally solved with the law of the father: Tat is, “always already absent referents, deferred signifeds, split subjects, and the endless play of the signifer” (Haraway, 1991, p. 184). It is not an issue of throwing out the notion of objectivity, but rather reformulating it in the wake of what this very text proposes: Feminist objectivity is situated knowledge. Our refections here are situated in the recent experience of the feminist movement in Argentina.