ESPF Colloquium: Mariana Teixeira, Feminist Standpoint Theory and the relevance of Lukács’ Historyand Class Consciousness on its 100th anniversary

Since its first publication in 1923, Georg Lukács’ book History and
Class Consciousness and his theory of reification exerted a fertile
influence on many different areas of social philosophy and political
activism. Although Feminism is not commonly associated with it, the
affinity between the project of standpoint theory and Lukács’ Marxism
is remarkable: the idea that the proletariat might achieve a
distinctive, and potentially privileged, standpoint that allows (and
even compels) it to grasp capitalist society in its totality has a
parallel in the affirmation made by feminist standpoint theorists that
women might also attain a privileged perspective on the dynamics of
patriarchal societies. While this affinity is sometimes alluded to, it
is only rarely further developed and problematized. In this paper, I
address different versions of feminist standpoint theory with the aim
of exploring both the connections and the contrasts to Lukács’ theory
regarding their accounts of the “revolutionary subject” – the
proletariat, women. This discussion intends to illuminate the current
relevance of standpoint theories and the role played by their shared
central concern – i.e., the material conditioning of knowledge and the
potentiality of socially subjugated standpoints – in contemporary
scholarly debates and in the articulation of collective action.