Haraway, D. (1988) ‘Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective’, Feminist Studies, 14(3), pp. 575–599.

Donna Haraway’s “Situated Knowledges” offers one of feminist theory’s most incisive reformulations of objectivity, rejecting both the disembodied “god trick” of universal vision and the disabling relativism that treats all claims as merely equivalent. Her argument begins from the science question in feminism: how can one criticise masculinist, colonial, militarised and capitalist knowledge systems without abandoning the possibility of truthful accounts of the world? Haraway’s answer is partial perspective: knowledge becomes more, not less, objective when it acknowledges its location, embodiment, mediation and limits . Vision, therefore, is not innocent transparency but a situated practice shaped by bodies, instruments, technologies and power. The case study at the centre of her essay is scientific seeing itself, from microscopes and satellites to biomedical imaging, whose apparent omnipotence disguises the labour, politics and prosthetic apparatuses through which worlds are made visible. Yet Haraway does not romanticise subjugated standpoints; views from below require interpretation, responsibility and critique, rather than automatic innocence. Her most radical synthesis appears in the claim that objects of knowledge are not passive resources but material-semiotic actors, participants in the production of meaning and fact. Consequently, feminist science must be accountable, conversational and world-building: a practice of joining limited visions into more responsible collective accounts.