The Conceptual Practices of Power: A Feminist Sociology of KnowledgeBeginning with women's experience, the author examines the field's actual practices of reasoning and conceptualization. She argues that standard sociological methods of inquiry make use of ideological practices, transforming the actualities of people's lives into a formalized picture lacking subjects and subjectivity. The method of Smith recommends anchors a Marxist materialism, based in people's activities, to a woman's stand-point based in experience. She uses this method in a radically original way to explore ideology and objectified knowledge as the conceptual practices of ruling. Smith is equally concerned with the application of sociological ideology to the human service bureacracy and the way institutions of mental health reconstruct women's lives. She provides meticulous accounts of the ways in which police reports, government statistics, hospital records, and pschiatric files are ideologically interpreted, transforming a person's life history in the process. In a revelatory chapter on the biographer Quentin Bell's account of Virginia Woolf's suicide, the author demonstrates how the text implicates the reader in the objectification of Woolf's "psychiatric problems." Highly critical of current sociological practices, The Conceptual Practices of Power both recommends and exemplifies the alternative approach that Smith presented in her earlier work, That Everyday World as Problematic, also published by Northeastern University Press. |
Contents
Womens Experience as a Radical | 10 |
The Ideological Practice of Sociology | 31 |
The Social Organization of Textual | 60 |
Copyright | |
8 other sections not shown
Common terms and phrases
actualities of people's actually happened/what analysis arises become chapter Chesler clinical concept connectives consciousness constituted constructing context course of reading described Dorothy E enter ethnomethodology everyday world experience explication explore fact facticity factual account feminist Figure formal G. E. M. Anscombe German ideology Gove and Tudor governing happened Harold Garfinkel Harriet's hospital ideological circle ideological practices individuals inquiry institutional interpretive knowers Leonard Leonard Woolf lived actuality Marx Marx's mediated mental illness method mode narrative clauses object objectified knowledge observable organizational participation particular patient police primary narrative problem procedures production professional psychiatric agencies psychiatric discourse R. D. Laing reader rela relations of ruling schema schemata sequence situation social relations social scientist society sociologists sociology standpoint of women statistics Statistics Canada structure suicide tell textual discourse textual realities theory tion transformative treated Virginia Woolf virtual realities Woolf's