Standpoint Phenomenology

Abstract

Unearthing and making explicit the conditions for human experience is the task of phenomenology. The methodologies deployed in service of this aim have traditionally focused on stripping away what is specific or idiosyncratic in a given first-person experience to reveal the shared, general conditions underlying that experience. My dissertation develops a new methodology that emphasizes the importance of experiential diversity in phenomenological analyses. I argue that many of the experiences specific to marginalized groups provide important insights into the pervasive and shared background conditions that structure experience—conditions that may be harder (perhaps impossible) to access from the dominant perspective that has been a common starting point for traditional phenomenological projects. I call this new methodology standpoint phenomenology. It includes two key theses. The thesis of situated phenomenology states that, because personal histories are often systematically different depending on one’s social location (e.g., being a man or a woman, being gay or straight, being Black or white), such location may also shape the kinds of phenomenological insights to which one has access. The thesis of inverted phenomenological privilege further states that a marginalized social location may provide a phenomenological advantage in some contexts, helping to uncover, for instance, the distortions and limitations of classical phenomenology.