In her 1986 book, The Science Question in Feminism, Sandra Harding works to disrupt and destabilize Western conceptions of ‘science’ and ‘mathematics’ as value-free and purely objective enterprises. Harding criticizes cursory understandings of feminism which reduces its overarching goal to solely seeking equal standing to men in the sciences. Harding then links uses of science and technology to sexist, racist, homophobic, classist state projects. 

Arguing that effective, feminist interventions must not only address the systemic inequalities at play in Western scientific disciplines, Harding goes one step further by uncovering relationships that connect the value-free discourses of science to another world that is obscured, ignored, and erased by Western science – “the world of emotions, feelings, political consciousness”. Harding further states that, “Part of the project of feminism is to reveal the relationship between these two worlds – how each shapes and forms the other. Thus, in examining the feminist criticisms of science, we have had to examine the worlds of historical particularity and of psychic repressions and fantasies that constantly intrude, only to be insistently denied in the scientific world view.” (245)

I found Harding’s analysis of the foundational shortcomings of Western science here to be particularly powerful. I consider the remainder of my review here as an interrogation of the underlying forces that separate “the world of emotions, feelings, political consciousness; of the individual and collective unconscious; of social and historical particularity explored by novels, drama, poetry, music, and art” from the world of Western science and mathematics that positions itself as a “totalizing theory… that anything and everything worth understanding can be explained or interpreted within the assumptions of modern science” (245). 

Last week, my grandmother died on the other side of the world from me. 

Why?

Well, a Western scientist or a medical professional would point out the fact that at the age of 76, my grandmother was nearing average Keralan female life expectancy, that my grandmother developed perioperative myocardial injury in the intensive surgery that led up to her death, that she then had a heart attack causing her heart to stop beating, her lungs to stop taking in air, the electricity in her brain forever ceasing to crackle. 

Obviously, that isn’t really a complete answer to the question I asked. From what I gleaned from this text, Harding’s feminist critique is that Western knowledge systems are built to take us only so far, taking us a mere ten feet in front of the starting line. 

So, why did my grandmother die on the other side of the world from me?

A postcolonial feminist and critical race theorist would point out the fact that my grandmother was born four years before India overthrew the United Kingdom, that her grandfather converted to Christianity to ensure his koodumbam would survive under British control, that the rigidification of the caste system during colonialism led my grandmother to disown my mother when she married my father, that my parents’ twinned fears of caste discrimination and the dearth of economic opportunity that haunts postcolonial states sent them flying to the metropole, crossing over to the other side of the world. 

But even this is not a complete answer to my question, my friends. It takes us much further, brings us much closer to the truth, yes, but it does not, cannot answer the full meaning of my question. For that, I turn to my people’s rich philosophical, religious, and cultural traditions. Because of course, my grandmother’s death is not the end of her existence. She was a complicated woman with many more lessons to learn. If there’s anything I’m sure about, it’s that that that woman has many more life cycles ahead of her – and that we will be connected in each one of them. 

Harding’s point here is that given the violent histories of Western configurations of knowledge, no singular epistemology or discipline can illuminate the entirety of human behavior and existence, and any epistemology, discipline, or ontology that purports to do so should be scrutinized within an inch of its life. It is an important contention, one that clearly holds a multitude of implications and applications for all of our work. I would encourage us to move even closer to the finish line, to step forward from Harding’s call to link her two worlds of science and “emotions, feelings, and political consciousness” by understanding the multitude and interrelatedness of worlds that inform our work, our communities, our lives. After all, as a feminist, I cannot see my grief is not separate from my life or my work. My grief is my work.