Blackwell Reference Online

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Dorothy Smith's influential feminist essay, “A Sociology for Women,” begins by calling attention to a “line of fault”: “a point of rupture in my/our experience as woman/women within the social forms of consciousness – the culture or ideology of our society – in relation to the world known otherwise, the world directly felt, sensed, responded to, prior to its social expression” (1987: 49). Insisting on the anchorage of consciousness in located bodily experience, Smith was pointing to the shift away from embodied experience into a governing conceptual, ideological mode of consciousness associated with the “ruling relations” of industrial capitalism (1999). She saw in most women's lives in that period a distinctive subjectivity, a “bifurcated consciousness” organized by women's household or reproductive labor and the supporting and applied tasks assigned to them, historically, in the occupational division of labor. As mothers, wives, community volunteers, nurses, secretaries, and so on, Smith argued, women engage with people where and as they actually live, “working up” individuals so as to fit them to the more abstract frameworks that organize institutional activity. Located thus, at the juncture of embodied specificity and ideological abstraction, women in such positions hold in their consciousness both ways of seeing and thinking. Typically, their movement from one to the other ... log in or subscribe to read full text