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The Feminist Critique Of The Dominant Social Scientific Approaches

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3) What are the contributions of Smith and Collins to the feminist critique of the dominant social scientific approaches?

Sociology, its thoughts it methods, conceptual schemes and theories have been based on and built up within the male social universe, even when women have participated in its doing. There is thus a disjunction between how women experience the world and the concepts and theoretical schemes by which society’s self-consciousness is inscribed. The worlds of men have had and still have an authorit over the worlds that are tradionatlly womens and still are predominately womens [the worlds of house hold, children, the neighborhood]. Women do not only in habit these worlds but the mast majority of women are the primary …show more content…

One is located within the body and the other passing beyond it. For a man, the organization of work in managerial and professional circles depnds upon the alienation of subjects from their bodily and local existence. Under the traditional regime, a man sees a women as generally providing for the logistics of his bodiliy existence. Womens work in and around professional and managerial settings perforsm analogous functions. Womens work mediates bwteeen the adstracted and conceptual and the material form in which it must travel to communicate. Women mediate for men at work. Alination in a form is happening here, a relation between the work indiviuals so and external order oppressing them in which their work contributes to the strnght of the order that oppresses them. This is the situation of women in this relation. The more successful women are in mediating the world of concrete practices so that men do not have to become engaged or conscious of, the more complete mens absoretion in it and the more effective it authority. The governing consciousness sominate the consciousness of the subordinate, suppressed, bsent, bu abosultely essential ground for gerning conviousness of women. The genered organization of the two worlds of men and women estranges them, silences the localy situated consciousness by silencing women. Women stand point discredits sociologys claim to constitute an objective knowledge independent of the sociologists situation. Smith is not proposing an immediate

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