Gynocentrism....are you convinced by this theory?
...owing, so therefore our ways of obtaining, evaluating and forming knowledge is structured in a ‘male form’ of knowing, and that is abstract, impersonal and conceptual. Thus illustrating that sociology is masculine (i.e. conceptual, impersonal and abstract). In contrast to this abstract way of thinking and knowing, Smith saw women’s sociology as being more local, personal, particular, direct and a more real and true form of reality. She believes that as a result of gendered organization of the work place, all women are placed in similar kinds of duties which are more domestic and caretaking positions, and makes women more in connection to their local existence. This is unlike men’s common abstraction from local and bodily experience. Women are positioned differently and unequally in society and although they differ socially in class, race, etc, “Smith holds that women share a common gender experience” (Seiman, 2004: 212). She belieds that even though women’s lives may vary, that they still share common experience of being a women through participating similar duties like “cooking, cleaning, caring for the bodies of the children and men, and the routine material care of the self, child and adult, male and female, in sickness and in health. Accordingly, women’s lives are centred around domestic and caretaking tasks.” (Seidman, 2004: 212) This contrasts to men’s conceptual values of ‘abstraction, generality, anonymity’ that forms an ‘objectified knowledge’ that dominates the social sciences (Seidman, 2004: 213). Smith tries to illustrate that regardless of the differences of race, class, etc that women may have, they still share similar experiences of life all over the world, and as a result of these similarities, women have/share a common way of knowing. “The professional sociologist is trained to think I the objectified modes of sociological discourse… A sociology for women would offer a knowledge of the social organization and determinations of the properties and events of our directly experienced world.” (Smith, 2002: 319) Now, although Smith’s ideas of men and women may be very dogmatic and generalizing, I feel that her argument is quite convincing, in that women seem to have a similar/common way of knowing. If we look at the patterns of where women have been placed/positioned in the household, or workplace, etc, we can see how they were placed n similar positions like doing “clerical work, the word processing, the interviewing for the survey ; they take messages, handle mail, make appointments, and care for patients”…Women’s work mediates between the abstracted and conceptual and the material form in which it must travel to communicate” . Women deal much more with the actual concrete material and act in the actual material conditions upon which the conceptual mode of action of men depends. Even though this male engineered pattern has changed with modern times, it has moulded women’s ways of thinking in some way or another. While m...