The Feminist Question in Realism

Critical Realism and Feminist Standpoint Theory

Drawing on the work of Roy Bhaskar, critical realism pushes for an explicit ontological program in the social sciences. Bhaskar ([1975] 2008) calls on social scientists to ask what the world must be like in order for their observations and theories to exist. For Bhaskar (p. 17), science must account for two dimensions: “a transitive dimension, in which the object is the material cause or antecedently established knowledge which is used to generate the new knowledge; and an intransitive dimension, in which the object is the real structure or mechanism that exists and acts quite independently of men and the conditions which allow men access to it.” Our theoretical descriptions assume a real state of things, and different social things exist and behave in particular ways at historically specific moments (Rutzou 2016). Most critical realists see part of their project as slaying the giant of positivism, or at least disconnecting observable events from the assumption that they reflect causal laws. Bhaskar ([1975] 2008), along with other science studies scholars, argues that the regularities we perceive in the world are the result of scientific intervention, not of the world itself. Despite this rejection of closed systems and of the scientific experiment as mirror to reality, Bhaskar and other critical realists insist that there are real structures and mechanisms in the world. We must retain this insistence, Gorski (2013b) argues, if we are to commit to the sociological task of providing causal explanation.

Thus, critical realism maintains that we must ultimately separate epistemology from ontology in order to do science: social things really do exist outside of our knowledge of them (Porpora 2015). Knowledge of objects and objects of knowledge are two “very different types of things” (Lawson 2003:167). Structures and mechanisms have powers even if we do not believe in them. To elaborate an earlier example, whether or not “men’s rights” groups believe that gender inequality exists has no bearing on whether gender inequality actually exists. We could all decide tomorrow that gender inequality is no longer an issue, yet it would continue to operate. Furthermore, social structures and their effects exist at different levels of reality. Bhaskar ([1975] 2008, [1979] 1998) argues that there are multiple domains of ontology: the empirical (our experience of the world), the actual (events), and the real (the deep dimension, from which the other levels are generated) (see also Decoteau 2017a). Importantly for many critical realists, this “depth ontology” means structures have unexercised powers, as well as causal powers we cannot perceive.

For critical realists, the level of the real is part of the intransitive dimension of reality, which means it is not subject to immediate change via our concepts. Like gender inequality, the intransitive dimension of social life grows out of our actions, knowledge, and history; we give it causal power over time such that it becomes less attached to our recognition of it. The transitive dimension, on the other hand, refers to our models, theories, hypotheses, and concepts (Bhaskar ([1975] 2008). The separation of these two dimensions is a rebuttal of constructivist views about the inseparability of knowledge from reality. As New (2005:57) writes, “[T]he world which our concepts and theories are about . . . is not entirely constituted by the process of reference. The world is already differentiated, complex, and stratified in ways which our concepts may or may not adequately express.” Critical realists are divided over whether this differentiation reflects essences—the world is already carved up into pieces—or whether ontological structures are transient historical products that change in relation to other structures, as in an assemblage (Decoteau 2017a; Rutzou 2016). The important idea for sociologists, as Decoteau (2017a) puts it, is that social structures are ontologically real, even though they are socially constructed and gain objectivity only through a historical process of reification. Social structures thus come to have emergent powers that are transformable over time by agents (Bhaskar [1979] 1998; Decoteau 2016; Gorski 2013b).

Furthermore, the social is ontologically heterogeneous. As Steinmetz (2004) argues, because the social is an open system, it is important to distinguish ontologically between events, mechanisms, and their conjunctures, because events that seem unrelated at one level may be linked in another stratum. Many critical realists are thus interested in the concept of emergence, such that social structures are emergent realities with their own powers, irreducible to smaller things (like individual action) (Gorski 2013b). Critical realism argues for the existence of social reality, but not a social reality that is singular, stable, or always observable to us.

Not all explanations of the intransitive realm are equally valid, however. For Bhaskar ([1979] 1998), the limits of “naturalistic” explanation are epistemological and relational. Knowledge is situated and can only provide a partial account of the world (Lawson 2003), but some theories are simply better than others (Porpora 2015). As New (2003:58) puts it, “wrong conceptualizations [of social ontology] eventually become practically inadequate,” such that they lack external validity and fail in their explanatory value. Critical realists claim we can be epistemic relativists without believing that all assertions about the social world are equally valid (New 1998). How such adjudication actually proceeds—other than the bad concepts falling away eventually—is not always clear. Critical realists’ conceptualization of epistemic relativism can perhaps be thought of as a very soft form of standpoint theory, but one that needs a great deal of elaboration to be viable. Feminist standpoint theory provides a more robust framework for conceptualizing the accuracy, power, and politics of causal accounts.

Critical realism’s interventions are set up between the poles of positivism and strong social constructivism. Both paradigms are called out for, on the one hand, disregarding questions of ontology in favor of constant conjunctions of observable events (positivism), and on the other hand, collapsing ontology into epistemology via concepts like discourse and performativity, making ontology itself relative (social constructivism). As Siebers (2001:746) puts it, “the real has fallen on hard times” and critical realists want it back. These poles of positivism and social construction provide a clear path for critical realism to take the middle ground, but this depiction risks caricaturing both positivist-leaning social science and, more my concern, constructivist accounts. This setup does, however, provide ample material for engagement with feminist theory, especially around standpoint epistemologies. Feminist standpoint theory (pioneered by Marxist, postcolonial, and critical race feminists) asserts that knowledge is constructed within a social location and historical context, that knowledge is always partial, and that certain social locations—when politically activated—enable a fuller view of reality. Both paradigms are committed to partial knowledge, but critical realism centers ontology, whereas standpoint theory centers epistemological questions. ¹ This is not to suggest that both paradigms cannot attend to realism and epistemic distortion—indeed, it is my contention that they can and should—but rather that their critiques of positivism enter from distinct ontological (critical realism) and epistemological (feminist standpoint theory) angles.

To introduce this engagement between feminist theory and critical realism, allow me to tell another, not unrelated, story about positivism. In her 1997 book, Donna Haraway reviews classic work in science studies to reintroduce us to the figure of the “modest witness” and his role in modern science. The modest witness is the generic male observer of scientific experimentation, the (literal) audience to the scientific method who establishes it as rational and valid. He watches the experiment take place and confirms that the results are legitimate. Shapin and Schaffer (1985) teach us that this is exactly how scientific knowledge and empirical regularities have been produced, through “objective” witnessing. Haraway (1997:23) excavates the witness for his role in constructing a particular kind of objectivity: “The man—the witness whose accounts mirror reality—must be invisible, that is, an inhabitant of the potent ‘unmarked category,’ which is constructed by the extraordinary conventions of self-invisibility.” The modest witness is male—women are absent in the making of science. ² The modest witness is also white, in contrast to the Others who un/mark him as a reliable observer: “To be unmanly is to be uncivil, to be dark is to be unruly: Those metaphors have mattered enormously in the constitution of what may count as knowledge” (Haraway 1997:30). Having a body would “pollute” the modest witness’s accounts, so his corporeality is invisible. Not only does this prop up masculinity and whiteness as the “neutral” observers to science, but it also, according to Haraway, establishes the categories of race, gender, and class as perpetual scientific objects. For Haraway and other scholars of science, “the emergence of technoscience and the emergence of ‘the social’ are simultaneous, historically constituted events” (Rajan 2012:1).

Modest witnessing thus establishes mirror-like positivism and constructs science as quintessentially masculine and white. For Haraway, like critical realists, the positivist lie of neutrality, of the transparent relationship between ontology and scientific method, looms large. Also like critical realists, Haraway is committed to science, to seizing its tools to craft more accurate and equitable knowledge. Unlike critical realists, however, Haraway points out that systemic erasures constitute science itself. Positivism does not simply sideline subjugated groups; rather, subjugation is built into the very foundations of science. Men are positivism’s rational commanders, women and people of color its objects. For critical realists, the collapse of epistemology into ontology is untenable; for feminists and postcolonial scholars, identifying epistemological situations is the only way to root out the oppressive foundations of Western science.

A key component of these oppressive foundations is the scientist’s claim to be able to access Truth. Feminist critics have long contended that scientific moves toward “truth” are about power rather than progress, and that the feminine has been excluded from what counts as truth in science (Haraway 1988, 1997). Rather than finding truth in the world, we can find truth in the process of what purports to discover it (Sprague 2006). Truth can only ever be defined multiply, from a particular social location, and is rooted in a community effort of some kind: “Since knowers are specifically situated in distinct locations, truth implies a working consensus on practical activity. Since human activity changes the world, truth is always historically specific and changeable” (Sprague 2006:52). This unfixed, epistemological account of truth stands in contrast to positivist claims of neutrality, empiricism, and universality, as well as critical realist approaches to truth. For critical realists, truth is not typically defined as a universal (since structures and mechanisms are contingent, changing, and layered); rather, it is something the world holds, which can be partially reflected in a knowledge claim (Assiter 2005; Bhaskar [1975] 2008; Porpora 2015). Asserting truth means something has external validity in a hard, ontological sense. In this way, critical realism offers a realist conceptualization of truth, whereas feminist standpoint theory approaches truth epistemically and sociologically, centering the primacy of experience as key to any truth claim. This discrepancy between paradigms is important when considering bodies and ideology, as both challenge any notion of transparency between truth and knower.

It is in part for these reasons that feminist theory turns to the knower as a key figure in its postpositivist interventions. Epistemological debates center around the relationship between the knower, the known, and the process of knowing (Sprague 2006). For feminism and critical realism, one of the key differences lies in the knower: “For critical realists . . . every knower has the same potential access to the known . . . there is nothing systematically organizing the relationship of groups of knowers to the known” (p. 41). This elision of the social positioning of the knower in critical realism is important, and it plays prominently in the debates between critical realist Tony Lawson and feminist standpoint theorist Sandra Harding in the journal Feminist Economics. Lawson and Harding seem to agree on much, but they split over the strength of their realist assertions and the systemic -isms built into scientific knowledge. Harding (1999:130) argues that power structures should be central to questions about realism and methodology: “When dominant groups refuse to ‘see’ what appears obvious to marginalized groups, changing the topic to how standards are set for what should count as knowledge, good method, objectivity, or rationality can appear to offer the marginalized a likelier chance of success.” Questions of realism must involve questions about epistemic positioning. Lawson (1999) sort of agrees, but he wants a more humanist and less politicized formulation, arguing for a fundamental, shared basis for human knowledge production that would allow for universals. For Harding (2003), such a position is suspect and reveals that critical realism is not reflexive about its own social, political, and intellectual positioning.

Despite what Lawson (1999) and other contemporary critical realists (e.g., New 2003) often claim about feminist theory, the project of theorizing scientific knowledge as situated is nothing if not realist. Standpoint theorists argue that there are more reliable ways of knowing about oppressive structures, that suggest that such structures exist and can be known. Part of the point, of course, is that feminists know such structures are real because they live within and around this violence and seek to undo it. As Code (1993:40) noted, “Feminists know, if they know anything at all, that they have to develop the best possible explanations—the ‘truest’ explanations—of how things are if they are to intervene effectively in social structures and institutions.” For feminist epistemologists, the intervention of situated knowledges is bound up in challenging presumptions of scientific objectivity, neutrality, and the ideological trick of “natural” social categories. Such an intervention—which involves a strong critique of science, similar to Bhaskar’s ([1975] 2008) own critique—does not require relinquishing the real world to an inexhaustible mass of perspectives. On the contrary, feminists have made sustained efforts to theorize materiality in conjunction with epistemology and performativity. As Haraway (1988:578) wrote, we must continuously refuse the notion that, “they’re just texts anyway, so let the boys have them back.” Feminists must trespass into the real, she argues, if we are to know what is really there.

That such a path would be trespassing is significant. Realists have long maligned feminist and queer theorists for their insistence on epistemology over ontology, but few acknowledge that this insistence is necessary under historical conditions in which subjugated groups are denied the authority to know. Postcolonial scholars are particularly revelatory on this topic. Spivak’s (1988) famous question “Can the subaltern speak?” raises precisely this issue of witnessing and knowledge production. “Between patriarchy and imperialism, subject-constitution and object-formation, the figure of the woman disappears, not into a pristine nothingness, but into a violent shuttling which is the displaced figuration of the ‘third-world woman’” (Spivak 1988:306). “Third-world women” are positioned as objects to be understood, rather than subjects who can understand (Mohanty 1988). There is a double displacement for women of color and non-Western women, whose lives are homogenized and made tragic, their social realities rewritten in imperialist terms. This kind of erasure is not just absence, but violence. As Dworkin informs us in the opening quotation, to know about a particular social reality only matters if others will hear you.

For feminist theorists, the epistemological is devastatingly tied up in the real—dominant means of knowing are never far afield from the structures of power in which they are ensconced. This does not mean science is futile; rather, science must be reflexive and pursue critical accounts (Bourdieu 2004; Harding 1986, 1993). Sandra Harding is perhaps the best-known feminist standpoint theorist, in part because she remains equally committed to questions of epistemology and reality. Harding (1999, 2003) agrees that there is social reality (although not a singular one), but argues that some social locations are better than others for understanding and explaining that reality. Those positions do not arise organically but are a reflexive accomplishment. Harding (1993:69) argues that objectivity requires a reflexive engagement with knowledge practices and sociohistorical location: “Strong objectivity requires that the subject of knowledge be placed on the same critical, causal plane as the objects of knowledge.” Social theory and its authors must be submitted to analysis (Reed 2011).

But Harding and other feminist standpoint theorists go beyond the claim that science must be reflexive about itself. Drawing on Marx and Lukács, one of the core claims of standpoint theory is that subjugated social positions enable fuller, more accurate views of the social. Lukács (1971:72) argued that only the proletariat could separate itself from dominant ideology enough to see the totality: “As the bourgeoisie has the intellectual, organizational and every other advantage, the superiority of the proletariat must lie exclusively in its ability to see society from the center, as a coherent whole.” Feminists have drawn from this key insight to theorize epistemic stratification alongside structural stratification. As Harding (2003:155) writes, “There are some positions in society from which it is more difficult than others to understand how a particular macro feature of society works.” Knowledge is relative to social location.

Standpoint theorists thus insist on starting with women’s experiences to provoke different kinds of questions. Smith (1987), for example, argues that women’s position in the private sphere creates a bifurcated consciousness, such that they have to know men’s and women’s worlds in order to survive, giving them a fuller view of social structure. Women’s social location outside the “relations of ruling” gives them a privileged perspective on power, but only if they develop that consciousness into knowledge. In this sense, standpoints are achieved, not given (Hesse-Biber 2014). This emphasis on perspective and power, however, need not suggest a wishy-washy social ontology. Rather, feminists expose the promise of modern science—to produce knowledge “without fingerprints”—as a ruse (Harding 1993). The feminist theoretical position denies the possibility of a universal knower, but this unmasking does not forestall a realist commitment:

It is necessary to achieve some match between knowledge and “reality,” even when the reality at issue consists primarily in social productions such as racism or tolerance, oppression or equality of opportunity. A reconstructed epistemological project has to retain an empirical-realist core that can negotiate the fixities and less stable constructs of the physical-social world, while refusing to endorse the objectivism of the positivist legacy. (Code 1993:21)

The unmasking of the privileged knower—who can claim universality despite his situatedness—need not result in a reactionary cry that science is impossible, that knowledge is dead, or that we are awash in a sea of individual viewpoints. Rather, standpoint theory argues persuasively that better stories about the world are told by or through the perspectives of people most affected by structural violence. Marginalization here is a grounding concept—a suggested starting place—but not the end point of standpoint theory. As Harding (1993) points out, Hegel was not a slave and Marx was not a worker, yet both saw the benefit of this “underneath” vision for conceptualizing the social order beyond the ideological trappings of the powerful.

This turn to marginalized social positions does raise some problems. Are subjugated positions really so innocent (Haraway 1988)? Are they beyond the reach of ideology (Narayan 2004)? Does one’s birth into a particular social situation make one a better knower, without social theory or analytic training? Probably not. In their responses to critics, feminist theorists argue that we cannot simply add something called “women’s knowledge” to science to make it more inclusive: “It is simply not possible to supplement knowledges by adding women to an otherwise neutral or objective knowledge: knowledges have not just ‘forgotten’ women. Their amnesia is strategic and serves to ensure the patriarchal foundations of knowledges” (Grosz 1993:206). Assuming the innocent ideological position of the subjugated is a bad strategy, as is simply “adding women” to the scientific mix. Standpoint theory addresses both of these concerns with its emphasis on boundary-crossing and embodiment, contributions that I argue can help critical realism complicate its posited bifurcation between epistemology and ontology. In the following sections, I first explore standpoint theory’s insistence on boundary-crossing as the real advantage of subjugated knowledge (Sprague 2006), and then I move to the question of bodies. In the end, I consider the ways feminist theory can be strengthened through Bhaskar’s attention to the ideological dimensions of social ontology.

Boundary-Crossing Epistemologies

Standpoint theory is often critiqued for being subjectivist, for attributing a magical and emancipatory type of knowledge to the oppressed. Along with Sprague (2006) and others, I offer a different reading of standpoint theory that privileges a strategy of analytic disjuncture rather than romanticizing the knowledge of particular groups. To bolster the standpoint project, we must therefore theorize a realist standpoint against the grain of foundationalist, naïve subjectivism. Feminist standpoint theory, I argue, should be read as offering a strategy of boundary-crossing at the level of the epistemological, theorizing difference and power imbalances in the conditions of knowledge production that can (but need not) generate new and better ontological considerations.

Sprague (2006) writes that methodologists tend to read standpoint theory as either (1) an argument for “handing over” authority to research subjects, ³ or (2) reducing questions of knowledge and power to the subject or group, essentializing women as a homogenous group of subversive knowers. However, a close reading of standpoint theory indicates that epistemic privilege goes to social locations, not subjects. Sprague (2006) and others (e.g., Collins 2000) argue that a standpoint is not the same as “spontaneous consciousness.” Standpoints are developed rather than inborn, achieved through tacking back and forth between marked categories and the unmarked universal (Sprague 2006), and then politicizing such knowledge in communities of other knowers (Assiter 2005; Collins 2000). Smith (1987) discusses standpoint not as a perspective, but as a method that responds to an absence in authoritative knowledge. Epistemic privilege, in fact, comes from being able to identify the points at which social differences are cleaved. “If the subject and object do not arrive already delineated, but rather gain their specificity only within experience, then epistemic inquiry cannot begin from differences in subjectivity; it must instead examine the conditions that generate difference” (Pitts-Taylor 2016:145, emphasis added). One must be able to root out the way categories of knowledge slice up the world into incommensurable chunks and use those as a resource for understanding social ontology.

To avoid subjectivist readings, one must not collapse standpoint into identity. Haraway (1997:199) provides an instructive definition of standpoint: “A feminist standpoint is a practical technology rooted in yearning, not an abstract philosophical foundation.” A standpoint is a structural position that must be seized and forged into a tool for analytic ends. There is, after all, no straightforward relationship between social suffering and oppositional consciousness (McNay 2008). Standpoint theory centers difference as the foundation of better knowledge (Sprague 2006), using inequality as a resource for knowledge production. Harding (1993:66) writes that beginning with “contradictory social positions” is the key to feminist knowledge production. Mohanty (1988) calls for theorizing the contradictions between globally located positions to produce knowledge that is more reflective of lived realities, rather than of Western precepts. It is precisely the disjuncture between knowers, or between knower and known, that is utilized as an instrument for better knowledge. This centering of difference as a knowledge strategy, rather than an obstacle, is a key insight that can be used to subvert the naturalist tendencies of critical realism (Peter 2003).

For feminist theory, the critical realist elision of knowers’ relation to the world is suspicious. Critical realism tends to assume a relative transparency between knower, known, and knowledge. Realism assumes, more or less, that “theory . . . points directly to the underlying structures, mechanisms, or forces of the social world. It is general, coherent, and referential” (Reed 2011:49). For critical realists, there are certainly differences between the quality of explanations (Porpora 2015). What critical realists have largely ignored, however, is that bad forms of knowledge are organized by power imbalances. Little in critical realism can help explain how the relationship between the knower and knowledge may occlude or enable an understanding of real social causes and mechanisms.

Furthermore, for critical realists, multiplicity of perspective is often equated with the impossibility of producing scientific knowledge at all (e.g., New 1998). For feminist theorists, on the other hand, it is precisely because the modest witness favors universals and transparency that he is a bad knower. That he does not cross a social boundary, that he cannot exploit difference and reflexivity as resources, means the knowledge he produces is flat and ideologically saturated. Because he will not see the epistemological breaks that cleave his vision from others’ visions, his analysis will have fewer ontological rewards. It is for this reason that Smith (1987) insists on starting inquiry with a knower who is embedded in practical, everyday activities—this knower crosses boundaries between the material and the conceptual, between the private and public, between embodiment and abstraction, all of which make her a savvy knowledge producer (Naples and Gurr 2014). This knower seizes a standpoint outside the organization of social consciousness (Smith 1987) and uses it to make claims about forms of power that appear natural and inevitable.

As Haraway (1997:36) reminds us, simple reflexivity will not be a cure for the modest witness. We have to do something more “relentless” if we are to cross boundaries in science: “The point is to make a difference in the world, to cast our lot for some ways of life and not others. To do that, one must be in the action, be finite and dirty, not transcendent and clean. Knowledge-making technologies . . . must be made relentlessly visible and open to critical intervention.” Part of Haraway’s claim here is that knowledge production is tied to political and ethical position taking, a claim that critical realists tend to agree with (Gorski 2013a). Haraway also argues, however, that the categories that carve up the world must be rendered intelligible through the knower’s strategy of crossing boundaries, of seizing the differences between structural positionings. Exploiting such differences helps us see what is there. For ethnographers, this exploitation of difference may involve learning to “see otherwise” (Decoteau 2017b), from the perspective of one’s interlocutors, to capture glimpses of social reality from others’ subject positions. Only by taking up the perspective of those in a different epistemic community can one account for the causal mechanisms at work there (Decoteau 2017b).

Patricia Hill Collins (2000) is probably best known for her contributions to the boundary-crossing aspects of epistemology. Drawing on Dubois’s concept of double consciousness, Collins argues that black women in the United States must live two lives, hiding their community-defined standpoint from dominant groups, while wearing a mask of conformity in (white) public life. This gives black women an “outsider-within” perspective, rooted in their positioning in the labor market and adjacent social structures. This position provides a unique vision of the self and the social world: “As outsiders within, Black women have a distinct view of the contradictions between the dominant group’s actions and ideologies” (Collins 2000:11). Again, contradictions between standpoint, experience, and hegemony provide a privileged (although partial) view of domination. To transform this lived experience of contradiction into “black feminist thought,” one has to continuously pivot the center of analysis. Black feminist thought is not inhered in an essence of black womanhood; it is a strategy of crossing social gulfs that can result in a new perspective on domination.

Rather than obstacles, the transitive dimension can offer resources for seeing and theorizing the intransitive. This is the essential insight of feminist standpoint theory, an analytic lever that I contend critical realism, to its detriment, ignores. Our concepts may always fail to grasp the deep heterogeneity of reality (Pitts-Taylor 2016), but the trappings of those concepts—indeed what they obscure—can provide tools for understanding hidden causal mechanisms or unexercised structural powers (Decoteau 2017b; Gorski 2013b). Steinmetz’s (2004:394) work on critical realism, for example, argues for comparing historical cases across events and generative mechanisms: “Within open systems like the social, any event is the product of a multiplicity of generative mechanisms interacting in unpredictable ways.” For Steinmetz, comparison across dissimilar historical events provides tools for illuminating buried powers. Crossing boundaries at the standpoint level offers a similar set of resources, much in the way Decoteau (2017b) describes: by “crossing over” into the episteme of her research subjects, she is able to see the ontological forces shaping their actions. For researchers, “the ability to see invisible causal forces (like microbes and witches) requires a shift in epistemic perspective” (Decoteau 2017b:72). This is not a comparison, but a strategy of switching epistemological registers for analytic gain at the ontological level. Bourdieu also writes about the power of this epistemic break. For Bourdieu (2004:222–23, quoted in Steinmetz 2004:391), the goal is “to construct a scientific truth that is capable of integrating the vision of the observer and the truth of the practical vision of the agent.” Like standpoint theory, strategies of boundary-crossing in realist ethnographic or historical research generate a deeper, more accurate picture of social reality. Boundary-crossing at the epistemological level requires an integrative and contingent approach to social ontology.

A basic contribution of feminist theory has been to show that social actors’ situatedness in social structure generates various (often divergent) epistemic conditions (Pitts-Taylor 2016). In critical realism, such multiplicity is often rendered an obstacle—even an insurmountable one—for generating knowledge at the ontological level. Instead, unity between knower and the object of knowledge is assumed or hoped for. The ground for the sign is stable, and social entities are presumed to have a coherent structure that our theories can eventually reflect (Reed 2011). Feminist standpoint theory, in contrast, insists on difference, boundary-crossing, liminality, and abjection as grounding points for knowledge. Realist feminist Alison Assiter (2005) argues that “postmodernists” are so wary of false generalization and universals that we cannot recognize our shared humanity, which leads to antagonisms. Assiter calls for unity over difference, for smoothing over the jagged edges of social contradiction. At the level of knowledge production, however, this may miss that understanding deep causal mechanisms and hidden structural powers requires trespass, not equivalence.

The Body Problem

I didn’t mean the word performance in opposition to the “the real”; I’ve never been interested in any sort of con.

Standpoint theory demands some sort of corporeal account, because standpoints are embodied as well as achieved. In fact, feminists have challenged positivist assumptions of universality by theorizing the body (Longino 2010; Pitts-Taylor 2016). One of the most difficult divides between feminist theory and critical realism, however, comes not from Bhaskar himself, but from naturalistic interpretations of his work, which tend to locate the physical body as a grounding point for the social. For feminist theory, the body is typically understood to be inscribed by or constructed through culture, shaped by symbolic violence, and historically variable. The body is “a differentiating condition, one that multiplies rather than universalizes” (Pitts-Taylor 2016:53). Critical realists often see feminist and queer theorists as too wishy-washy about the body, overly invested in its cultural inscription or disciplining, afraid to acknowledge its raw physicality (Assiter 2005; New 2005; Smith 2011). Indeed, some strands of poststructuralist feminist thought focus only on the body as discourse, and such theories have been critiqued (from a realist standpoint) for their lack of attention to the intractability of the material world (Pitts-Taylor 2016; Siebers 2001; Wilson 2015). Yet standpoint theory requires precisely this type of material engagement with the body, although the body is always understood in relation to social structure and practice. As Wilson (2015:29) writes, there are no modes of embodiment that are not both cultural and biological: “All worlds are alloyed; no subject is purebred.” Understanding bodies as alloys of structural, personal, and intersubjective features is a feminist insight that can usefully complicate critical realism’s insistence on the sharp cut between epistemology and ontology.

I will take the work of Caroline New and Alison Assiter, two feminist critical realists, as a starting point for this discussion of realism and bodies. Against the tide of most feminist theorizing, New (2005), and sometimes Assiter (2005), argue that biological sex is an ontological condition for gender. They concede that gender overdetermines sex—social processes provide the content of gender—but they argue that biologically dimorphic sex is a causal mechanism for gender. New (2005:65) writes that “sex is ontologically prior to gender, and is one of the many mechanisms the workings of which shape gender orders.” Assiter (2005:125) argues that biology provides the basic unifying trait underlying the social category of “women”: “There is . . . a minimally necessary set of bodily or biological features present in every female, features the presence of which enables us to identify the person as female. . . . These form the ‘real essence’ or the nature of the kind ‘female’ in something closely akin to a Lockean sense.” For Assiter and New, the particular cultural traits associated with each gender—nurturance versus aggression, intellect versus emotion—are not fixed by sex characteristics, but gender categories depend on a sexed foundation, in an evolutionary sense. This foundation is not inert but possesses causal powers: “[S]exual difference is real, an extra-discursive property of human beings, and . . . male and female bodies have different causal powers. Since reproduction is always socially salient, complex gender orders have emerged which regulate sex and gender, rendering them culturally intelligible” (New 2005:54). In the end, gender emerges from biological sex.

This quasi-bio-evolutionary story of the sex/gender distinction reads in sharp contrast to much of queer and feminist theory, which tends to theorize sex as an effect of the gender order, focusing on the symbolic aspects of embodiment. For queer theorists like Judith Butler (1990), the body is the site of gender’s structuration, such that subjects perform the gender order through their bodies. For Butler, ideas about biological sex are written by gender, and the discourse of “natural” sex reifies hetero-gender, fortifying the lie of essential femininity and masculinity. As in Bourdieu’s (2000) theories of habitus, the body—its habits, its displays, its orientation toward the world, its meanings, its relationships to other bodies—is an effect of social structure. Critical realists such as New (2005), Assiter (2005), Porpora (2015), Smith (2011), Archer (2000), and Gorski (2013a) read such theories of performativity as denying the body’s physical existence and depriving the subject of her agency. But performativity can be read as a theory of both discourse and materiality. As Pitts-Taylor (2016:35) writes, “Performativity addresses matter’s constitution through intra-action in the world, its inherent relationality, and its dual ability to be transformed by and to affect events.” Embodiment is both material and shaped by social circumstance. For example, disability theorist Tobin Siebers (2001) analyzes the body as a physical reality that shifts in its affordances, depending on social and historical circumstances.

Debates about the discursivity or materiality of the body are long standing in feminist theory, and too complex to rehearse in detail here (see Bordo [1993] 2004; Howson 2005; Pitts-Taylor 2016). Such debates tend to map on to liberal versus deconstructionist divides in feminist politics. In response to deconstructionist theorizing about gender and embodiment, for example, Downs (1993) asks, “If woman is just an empty category, then why am I afraid to walk alone at night?” Exhausted by feminist deconstructionist and intersectional theorizing, feminist thinkers like Downs (1993), New (2005), and Assiter (2005) want an account of the “reality” of gender, rooted in either the sexed body or lived relations like violence. From a realist perspective, such a question certainly has merit. But as Wingrove (1999) asks, why must the deconstructionist approach be read in opposition to realism? How could we deny that embodiment is material and that language shapes the body? Why would understanding “woman” as a falsely unified category grounded in discourse make us unafraid to walk alone at night? Wingrove (1999) insists we have fleshy, active bodies that are simultaneously claimed by the powers of language and culture. Indeed, as Butler (2004) and other queer theorists point out, the violence of categorical thinking related to gender/sex is deeply tied to physical violence against actual bodies, to the impossibility of forging a livable life without a normative body. Despite what realist critiques sometimes suggest, queer theory is based not in an abstract, unyielding urge to deconstruct, but in the violence of having a body that falls wrongly or sideways or injured into existing categories. The body is physical and sensory; it is historically located and specified by relations of power and inequality; and it acts in the world by virtue of its physical capacities and its social location. As these theoretical debates suggest, the body will continue to resist attempts to shuttle it definitively to one side of social analysis or another, and good theories should not ask us to choose.

Indeed, that things like bodies are socially constructed and real is precisely what critical realism should allow us to understand. Yet, when it comes to gender, many critical realists seem intent on locating “reality” in the sexed body (e.g., Gorski 2013a; Smith 2011). But why would the sexed body be the source of causal powers? Why not patriarchy or gender structures? Why is this social ontology mired in genitals? What happened to critical realism’s complex conjunctures of social structures, as when theorizing capitalism and social revolutions? In the case of gender, it seems the hidden causal mechanisms are hormones and evolutionary urges to reproduce, whereas political theorists locate causal powers in class structures and other historical-political forces. Rather than locating gender in contemporary social life, these “realist” theories fix the body in ahistorical space, rooting gender in a species dimorphism that fails to account for complex, observable social practices associated with sexuality, reproduction, and the division of labor. Sociologists are in danger here of confusing the physical body with an ontological grounding for gender, a confusion that obscures the multiple forms of power operating in the maintenance of gender orders. Furthermore, allowing the body to be the causal source for gender affords sexual dimorphism far too much power in explaining the varied social complexity of gender. Bodies do, after all, transform in relation to gender systems. Women are not born knowing only how to “throw like a girl” (Young 1990), and men are not born sitting with their legs spread to take up space on public transit.

Rather than locating bodies on the side of ontological grounding and universality, critical realists would do better to analyze bodies as material artifacts of social structures. This does not mean bodies are not also biological things that have capacities built into them. Rather, any attempt to explain social reality through reference to the body as an ontological source will slip up, because our system of meaning related to the body (especially the sexed body) overwrites such efforts. To theorize the body symbolically does not exhaust the body or transform the body into pure text: it helps explain how and why certain bodies become vulnerable to structural and physical violence in patterned ways. The body will simply never offer us a neutral starting point, saturated as it is with meaning. This does not foreclose realist theorizing about gender and sexuality. If we locate social ontology in concept-dependent structures and intersecting causal powers associated with capitalism, heterosexuality, and race, rather than attempting to affix gender to the foundation of genitals, we will be (and have been, e.g., Connell 1987, 2005; Choo and Ferree 2010; Glenn 1999; Martin 2004; Risman 2004) more successful in our theoretical work. These analyses work because they locate subjects in the social world, allowing bodies to bleed and break, to become vulnerable, to unite in protest with other bodies, to make different kinds of love, and to transform their capacities in relation to structure.

All of this matters for understanding the relationship between social reality, knowledge about reality, and knowers themselves. Because some critical realists understand the body as a unifying, grounding condition of the human—rather than a differentiating condition that is the outcome of social processes—they ignore the embodied situation of the knower. But bodies are central to knowing. Standpoint epistemology even attempts to deal with the physical body in its theories. Haraway (1988) uses the metaphor of “vision” in her work because she argues that our epistemological perspectives are tied to our bodily capacities of perception—the content of a perception is tied to the eye itself. This does not suggest an epistemology located only in the visual; rather, it points out that one can never achieve an Archimedean standpoint, because all knowledge is rooted in bodily constraints (Downs 1993; Haraway 1988). No one can legitimately claim to comprehend “the whole,” because no one can exceed the boundaries of bodily experience, knowledge, position, and perspective. We must “live within limits and contradiction” (Haraway 1988:590) when we acknowledge embodiment. Understanding the relationship between embodiment and knowledge production keeps our claims humble and located: we must account for partiality and fallibility and avoid the dangers of homogeneity, coherence, and transparency promised by positivist or naïvely realist conceptualizations of “truth” (Harding 1986).

The embodiment of standpoint, however, does not suggest we are fixed to our points of reference. As standpoint epistemology’s boundary-crossing claims help us see, sites of knowledge can shift, and privileged perspectives are often produced through such shifting. Siebers (2001:738), in a realist argument, posits that disabled embodiment itself is a condition of transformation that requires new terms of recognition: “Blind hands envision the faces of old acquaintances. Deaf eyes listen to public television. Tongues touch-type letters home to Mom and Dad. Feet wash the breakfast dishes. Mouths sign autographs. Different bodies require and create new modes of representation.” Such shifting interactions with the world—tied to senses and social relationships—offer different insight into the nature of social reality. This is the claim of standpoint theory: falling outside the norm and being required to tack back and forth between margin and center, or between normative and non-normative epistemological positions, offers the possibility for more accurate knowledge. Comprehending the body as embroiled in social structure, rather than as the ontological base, helps sharpen critical realism’s claim that we can access social ontology via social scientific means. To do so, however, we must recognize our own and other social actors’ encounters as embodied—in our relation both to knowledge and to each other. Understanding embodiment as shared, social, and intersubjective, however, requires a less individualistic notion of standpoint theory than is typically offered, one that recognizes epistemology as centered in communities of knowers rather than in individual structural positions (Assiter 2005; Collins 2000). Telling an origin story of bodies runs the risk of subtracting them from ongoing social processes, denying their centrality in the status of credible witness, and stripping away our own embodied action from the knowledge production process.

Ideology and Contradiction

Although critical realists assume knowledge is partial, they typically do not assume there is anything systematically skewed about the relationship between a scientist’s access to reality and social reality itself (as in causes, mechanisms, or structures) (see Peter 2003; Lawson 2003; Porpora 2015; Sprague 2006). However, this was not necessarily true for Bhaskar. Although contemporary critical realists often sideline it, Bhaskar’s interest in ideology via Marx is an important feature of his work. Because of critical realism’s grounding in a Marxist tradition, some theorists take seriously Bhaskar’s theorization of ideology and even its implications for standpoint theory (e.g., Collier 2005; Porpora 2015). In general, however, critical realists tend to ignore the obfuscations generated via ideology, thereby ignoring the relationship between knower and object. I use ideology here to help sync feminist theory’s interest in ideological distortion with realist social explanations, allowing us to adapt feminist theory and critical realism slightly to make them work together. We can unite critical realist insights around enduring social structures with feminist insights around representational distortion and embodied disjuncture. In the quote that begins this article, Dworkin suggests that questions about social reality must always be tied to questions about who can give credible testimony to reality. This does not mean there is no reality, but any conceptualization of it is a power-laden accomplishment. Theories of social life must take into account that a key component of social inequality is the failure to grant certain social groups credible witness status. Questions about social reality are not abstract; they are lived and embodied.

Standpoint epistemologies argue that theorizing the social location of the knower helps us understand social processes precisely because the gaps between the knower and object of knowledge can be seized, making this relationship reflexive. In Reed’s (2010) terms, accounting for the relationship between the context of investigation (the knower) and the context of explanation (the social reality under investigation) is critical to social scientific practice. For Reed, the context of investigation is social theory—the sociological training in which researchers are embedded—whereas for standpoint theory, such context is typically understood as a set of structural inequalities. In either case, there should be some attempt to get at social reality, while acknowledging that such reality inheres in what Reed (2011) calls “landscapes of meaning.” This dual commitment to meaning and reality can be a shared project for critical realism and feminist theory.

After first discussing Bhaskar’s claims about realism and ideology, I will then provide an example from my research on domestic violence to demonstrate how theorizing ideological contradiction and epistemic complexity can be a resource for realist causal explanation. I want to arrive at something like what Pitts-Taylor (2016:35) proposes: “A phenomenon includes the entities under investigation, the scientific tools and practices that touch them, the knowledges that inform them, and the material changes that measures make.” Scientific objects are real, but they shift beneath our gaze and transform through the actions of agents (Decoteau 2016). Social things have an animating life of their own, and we must investigate how that liveliness interacts with the analyst’s mode of engagement (Gordon 1997). Our “knowledge-making practices” become part of the real world we seek to describe (Barad 2007:26), which need not suggest an undoing of that reality.

In his second major work, The Possibility of Naturalism ([1979] 1998), Bhaskar became preoccupied with the differences between theorizing the social and natural worlds. When analyzing social structures, he argues, representation is always a factor. Indeed, Bhaskar ([1979] 1998) claims that the process of knowledge production may be causally and internally related to the production of social objects: there is “causal interdependency” between the ontological and epistemological. To keep both factors in tension, Bhaskar (p. 77) discusses ideology as an internal feature of social ontology: “[T]here are bound to exist misrepresentations of reality in reality. And among such misrepresentations will be some which are necessary for what they misrepresent. . . . [The phenomenal forms of social life] are themselves internally related to (that is, constitute necessary conditions for) the essential structures that generate them.” Structures, perception, and ideology are in a contingent and necessary relationship to each other. Structures generate ideology as an alibi of sorts, and those ideologies become an internal feature of structures themselves, such that distortion at the level of knowledge is integrated into social ontology. For the reproduction of capitalism to succeed, the structures of capital must produce ideological distortions about their real operations.

For Bhaskar, social structures contain contradictions at the most fundamental level, and those contradictions involve meaning. Structures are therefore alloys of ontology and epistemology. Feminist and queer theory are invested in the analytic exploitation of the contradictions inherent in such alloys. The body is useful empirically and theoretically for understanding these contradictions. As Decoteau (2013, 2016) illustrates, the habitus reflects deep structural contradictions—between ideology and structural domination, or between converging structures—and those embodied cleavages provide evidence for they hybrid nature of structural arrangements. Feminist and queer insistence on embodied contradiction thus provides a useful means of approaching ontology. When brought together, reconstructed versions of feminist standpoint theory and critical realism offer robust sociological resources for theorizing enduring, structured forms of power alongside the epistemic inequities and occlusions they produce. To illustrate this point, I turn to an example from my empirical work on domestic violence.

In the early 1980s, a young photographer named Donna Ferrato was beginning a project on polyamorous couples in New York City. One evening, Ferrato was photographing a couple in their home when the husband became angry with his wife and began to scream at her, holding her up against the bathroom sink and striking her multiple times. Ferrato began snapping photos, believing it would stop him. It did not. In a Time Magazine piece in 2012, Ferrato notes, “I took the picture because without it I knew no one would ever believe it happened” (Sun 2012). For Ferrato, this set of images would become the first of thousands in which she documented the lives of domestic violence victims and perpetrators. In these photos, Ferrato is visible in the mirror, both in the center and in the background of the scene. In the second photograph, she appears between the violent scene and the reflection of the violent scene, her own image spliced by the corner of the mirror.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Image 1.

Donna Ferrato, 1982, Saddle River, NJ.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Image 2.

Donna Ferrato, 1982, Saddle River, NJ.

To observe and document this social phenomenon—hidden beneath ideological layers of masculinity and the heterosexual nuclear family—Ferrato unavoidably finds herself between the reality and its representation, literally at the nexus between the subjects and their mirror image. Ferrato is located multiply in this encounter: she is an observer of the events, she is commanding the method of documentation (the camera), she is intervening in the situation by documenting it, and in so doing she finds herself permanently placed in the center of her representational project. Like any photograph, these tell us both more and less than what is there. We cannot see the context of this man’s violence, for example, or the vulnerabilities in the woman’s social situation, her negotiation tactics, or her options for escape. Even Ferrato’s exit plan is unclear to us. What we can see, though, is something typically invisible to us: the place of the analyst in the representation.

Drawing critical realist and feminist contributions together, I want to ask, what happens if we enter through Ferrato’s spliced/multiple image to ask ontological questions? Which aspects of social structure become newly available to us when we follow this fracture in the analytic scene? Domestic violence is a tricky phenomenon to capture analytically (and was especially so in the early 1980s) because it is, by definition, saturated in secrecy, shame, and the erasure of victim credibility. Identification of “the real” in this case seems nearly impossible: multiple shrouds surround the event itself, the victims’ ability to talk about their experiences, and the structures of male violence. Knowledge of domestic violence is necessarily bound up in its historical denial and minimization; as Gordon (1997) notes, when the real is shrouded in this way, we need a new kind of knowledge to lay these social forces bare, to “expose” them (literally, in this case). The “problem of representation” here is not simply philosophical, it is a problem of domination (Gordon 1997). The way we approach knowing this phenomenon and its causes is tied to the shadowy and ideologically saturated nature of the thing itself.

When Ferrato uses her camera to bring something hidden into view, she literally cannot get herself out of the scene. Indeed, it is her presence in the photographs that makes the images so jarring. The mirror—perhaps the quintessential technology of reflexivity—is embedded into the photo itself, capturing the observer (Ferrato). We are forced to reckon with the encounter between Ferrato, the couple, and the camera. Indeed, I want to argue that, despite the alarming nature of the violence captured, Ferrato’s image in the mirror is the “moment of animation” (Gordon 1997:108) for the photos, because her presence in the scene forces us to acknowledge the power of the expert witness. It is not just the violence that sets this scene, but its location in the suburban family bathroom, such that we see how the violence disrupts the private sphere of the home, how it transforms the promises of heterosexual family life into a terrifying victimization. The photograph calls the hidden nature of intimate violence and its ideological silences to the fore by intruding into that space. Ferrato’s image animates the scene by reminding us that she usually is not there, she does not belong, she interrupts the scene. Still, she must be there if we are to believe this happened, since victims are noncredible subjects. Making female victims noncredible is central to the structure of male violence (Ferraro 2006; Stark 2007). The photograph lends authority where it is typically denied, but it also provokes deep uneasiness about the role of the analyst in such a scene. The victim is made silent, so the photograph must speak: this is how male violence operates, through such a silencing. This structural reality can only be grasped by reading the photo and Ferrato’s spliced image alongside the flesh and blood referents of violence in the scene.

Drawing on the resources of standpoint theory, we can use Ferrato’s place within the scene, her methods of documentation, and the representation to arrive at a deeper understanding of male violence. This violent event may have occurred whether or not Ferrato had been there to document it; nonetheless, Ferrato becomes deeply embedded in both the scene and its representation, and the reality of male violence becomes forever embedded in what such a representation will or will not allow us to understand. When we fix our eyes on the husband, we also see his reflection, interrupted again by the image of Ferrato’s body and her camera. What the photograph captures so profoundly is the silencing power of male violence, and the necessity of expert translation to make violence against women real and legitimate. To understand social reality as run through with such representational and embodied interruptions should be viewed as a goal, not an obstacle.

Critical realism, drawing on Bhaskar’s theorization of ideology, is instructive here, and can help reach past feminist theory’s focus on representation toward complex causal accounts. As New (1998) argues, feminist theory should make arguments at the level of the real to theorize inequality, because we are always dealing with multiple arrangements of interrelated structures and mechanisms. Theorizing domestic violence involves attention to violence (the level of event) as the result of a set of deep structural arrangements and epistemic processes. By situating epistemological and ontological issues together rather than separating them, we can see that interpretations of domestic violence act back on the structure of male violence, transforming lived relations. When Ferrato’s photos were taken up by policy makers and the feminist antiviolence movement in the 1980s, they helped posit a new set of explanations for abuse: rather than a private family problem, abuse became ripe for public intervention, a criminal act pulled under the purview of the state. These interpretations disrupted the ideological trick of peaceful, “natural” gender relations within the private family and transformed the institutional infrastructure surrounding male violence.

Critical realists’ emphasis on the ontological depth of social structures helps elucidate these shifts. Interpretation shifts the internal ideological relations of the structure of male violence, which shifts the relationship between events, social investigation, and the deep real. Because the ideological scaffolding of abuse is subject to manipulation, so is the ontological structure of male violence. Ferrato captures a disturbing, visceral moment of violence—she takes a picture of patriarchy. ⁴ But the photograph only came to have causal power because of its interpretive context. If we were convinced that the violence was the victim’s fault, the transformative power of the photo would have been erased. Social actors had to seize upon this representation, the disjuncture between ideologies of hetero-masculinity and its violent reality, and use it to make structural change. Ferrato’s photos circulated in popular magazines, newspapers, even Congress. This representational project helped transform both the ideology and the structural mechanisms of male violence, but only when its terms were activated in a particular, collective way. As Assiter (2005) argues, reality is shaped and reshaped by communities of standpoints, groups of knowers who come together in historical locations. Standpoints, then, are multiple and collective. Ferrato does not operate in god-like singularity to uncloak an anchored reality (Assiter 2005; Code 1993; Smith 1992); rather, she contributes to an epistemological infrastructure that then reshapes the structure of male violence. Furthermore, the photo has many possible interpretations, but not infinitely many (Code 1993); the event and its underlying structures put boundaries on what we can possibly say about it. The contradiction that Ferrato’s photo brings into view—between the ideology of a peaceful private home and its violent events—gives us access to some of the ontological mechanisms underneath.

Most researchers are not as directly involved in an encounter as Ferrato is here. But most of us do enter into some sort of situation when we conduct research. Barad (2007:53) argues that knowledge only results from direct engagement with the material world, such that the transitive dimension (our scientific representation) is a “trace of multiple practices of engagement,” rather than a “snapshot” of reality. These encounters inform our practices of interpretation and make the operations of social forces accessible to us. Thus, structures of violence involve interpretive distortions that can be seized upon for analysis or social change. Ferrato’s position outside the fold of violence, between the reality of male violence and its representation, becomes essential to this project of seizure. This photo revealed that something important had been hiding behind the ideology of the heterosexual nuclear family. Ferrato knew the victim would never be afforded the status of credible witness to this event, so she took that status upon herself, exposing the ideological trick of gender and the private family. Attending to what is missing, distorted, or occluded can provide resources for theorizing deep levels of social ontology.

Conclusion

Linking feminist theory’s epistemological project—its focus on bodies, boundaries, and difference—with a critical realist commitment to strong ontological claims about a heterogeneous social world brings us closer to a realist mode of sociological explanation that attends carefully to epistemic power. My goal here was not simply to rehearse the discrepancies between two theoretical paradigms, but to argue for the analytic advantages of reading them alongside each other. Indeed, rather than reading critical realism as simply an ontological proposition, and feminist standpoint theory as simply an epistemological one, I tried to show how their respective strengths can build synthetically toward a more robust theoretical program that takes epistemic power seriously as part of ontological claims-making. However, such a reading requires a looser ontological emphasis than critical realism typically grants; and it requires more attention to underlying ontological mechanisms and structures than standpoint theory typically engages. By avoiding caricatures of either theoretical agenda, one can simultaneously attend to real, enduring, structured forms of power alongside the epistemic inequities and ideological contradictions they produce.

For sociologists, reading feminist theory and critical realism together can offer a robust postpositivist agenda. While critical realism critiques positivism for its faulty metatheoretical premises and its ignorance of structural causes, mechanisms, and powers, feminist standpoint theory rejects positivism for its systematic erasure of subjugated knowledges, its inattention to the power of social categories to make social things seem like natural things, and its establishment of the scientist as a god-like authority. Crafting better accounts in a postpositivist (nonpositivist? [Steinmetz 2005]) social scientific era is clearly a shared goal. However, I have shown that sociologists must tread carefully with the hard ontology-epistemology barrier that critical realism proposes. There are risks to the metaphors of foundations and strata that critical realism works with: social things like bodies are often cast as physical grounding points rather than interactive social products. Ultimately, centering the forgotten realm of ideology in critical realism alongside epistemic encounters helps ameliorate some of these problems, by making social scientific inquiry more attentive to the contradictions and erasures produced by powerful social forces. Power can occlude and distort, and in many projects of feminist inquiry, the investigator must pull a social phenomenon out of its existing “landscape of meaning” (Reed 2011) and change its terms in the social sphere in order to make us “see” it at all. These projects of epistemic transformation do not simply shift our knowledge communities; they also transform the phenomena themselves. This complex epistemological rubric involves both action and analytic positioning, structural interruptions and politics, and it is inseparable from the metatheoretical questions that haunt the phenomenon itself.