思考のグラディション〈特集女性学の成立をめぐって〉

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This short essay is an attempt to answer the controversial question, "Are women's studies a science?" We should make sure at the outset of discussion that the question is doubly tricky. Firstly, it is designed to sound as if calling for a negative answer. Secondly, we cannot discuss whether women's studies are a science without discussing what a science means. In other words, the point at issue is the way we define the term"science,"for the difinition of science offers the final ground for judgment, whether positive or negative, over the issue we are now facing. With the rise of structuralism in the 1960s, we were led to redefine the term "science." In the climate of structuralism, a science was criticized for being a unitary system of thought which would arise from ordering established knowledges in the name of truth. Women's studies emerged as an attempt to set us free of the scientific systematization of knowledges conducted exclusively for and by men. In this sense, women's studies can be seen as an anti-science which aims to carry out what Michel Foucault calls "an insurrection of subjugated knowledges." It is up to an individual to hold to the traditional concept of science. The problem is to label women's studies as a non-science on the ground of the traditional concept of science. Actually, quite a few scholars have made this misjudgment. Their criticism reflects a self-protective response to what they cannot integrate into the realm of their science. It is a pity to see these scholars become stiff with a self-defensive pose. It is yet more regrettable that women's studies now seem to be carrying on the scientific systematization of knowledges as they are placed at the upper level of scientific hierarchy. Women's studies in the future should stay anti-scientific, not necessarily to confront the established science but to function as a method by which people can stay off fixed ideas and demonstrate flexible thinking. Women's studies are to be claimed as a new science which neither hierarchizes knowledges nor subsumes knowledges into a unitary system of thought. Given this, women's studies will open up a new vista where we will no longer reduce our sense of living to the ready- made frame of reference and where we will see the flux(not the structure) of our thinking spreading as gradations of thought.
神戸女学院大学の論文

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難波江和英
神戸女学院大学文学部総合文化学科

思考のグラディション〈特集女性学の成立をめぐって〉

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思考のグラディション 〈特集 女性学の成立をめぐって〉

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思考のグラディション〈特集女性学の成立をめぐって〉