Bifurcated Consciousness and Line of Fault Essay ⋆ Sociology Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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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).” She was pointing to the shift away from embodied experience into a governing, conceptual 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 labor and the 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’s bodily existence, performing essential but invisible work within organizations. In such positions, women hold in their consciousness both embodied and institutional ways of seeing and thinking. When attention is directed to this disjuncture, a “line of fault” opens the organization of social life to analytic scrutiny.

Smith first wrote of women’s bifurcated consciousness in the early 1970s (1974). Her injunction to “begin with women’s experience” parallels in some ways the writings of other socialist feminists of the time, such as Sheila Rowbotham, Sandra Harding, and Donna Haraway, as well as Patricia Hill Collins’s account of a ”black feminist thought” tied to a position as “outsider within.” Smith’s distinctive approach also drew from the materialist method of Marx, the social psychology of George Herbert Mead, and the phenomenology of Alfred Schutz. In later writings, she and her students developed “institutional ethnography” (Smith 2005; 2006), an “alternative sociology” designed to explore the disjunctures of life within textually mediated societies.

Bibliography:

Smith, D. E. (1974) Women s perspective as a radical critique of sociology. Sociological Inquiry 44: 7—13.
Smith, D. E. (1987) The Everyday World as Problematic: A Feminist Sociology. Northeastern University Press, Boston.
Smith, D. E. (1999) Writing the Social: Critique, Theory, and Investigations. University of Toronto Press, Toronto.
Smith, D. E. (2005) Institutional Ethnography: A Sociology for People. AltaMira, Lanham, MD.
Smith, D. E. (ed.) (2006) Institutional Ethnography as Practice. Rowman & Littlefield, Lanham, MD.