My Experience of Community

Last updated on: December 8, 2013 at 6:56 pm by Guest Contributor

My Experience of Community 2013-12-08T18:56:00-05:00 Guest Contributor

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For many feminists, experience is crucial. Experience has long been associated with feminist epistemological theories which suggest that reflection on and analysis of one’s experiences offer crucial insight into society. In the history of the women’s movement, this insight and analysis has many times translated into direct action to change the way our society functions.

Experience too has been problematized by various postmodern and postcolonial feminist theorists. They rightly point to the situated-ness of all experiences along class, race, gender, ethnic, religious and other lines. (For more on these ideas, one could read Postcolonialism, Feminism & Religious Discourse edited by Laura E. Donaldson and Kwok Pui-lan.) The context of each and every experience is different. It would be unwise therefore to assume that experiences produce adequate knowledge about societies and how they function. For example, the experience of white middle-class British women living in India during the British occupation is very different from her indigenous contemporary and completely different from lower caste men and women of the same time period. It is important to remember here that patriarchal privilege rears its head and favors some people’s experiences over others, often codifying an experience as “the experience.” When we talk about experience then we should acknowledge that there is no such thing as a generic experience. In fact, some post-modernist feminist thinkers think that situated-ness can color experience so much that our experiences may not even be reliable descriptions of the way society functions.

Nevertheless, I still find experiences important because I understand them to be our primary mode of embodiment. For many feminists, including myself, there is no thinking without physicality and, for me, experiences are what bring the mind and body together. Yet, they do more than this. Experience functions in three ways. First, as embodied creatures, humans experience the world. Second, as social creatures, humans use their experiences to understand the world (i.e. what they are experiencing). Finally, coming around full circle, humans, as embodied, social creatures, use their understanding of experiences to create different, and, more importantly, better experiences of the world around them. Here are where ideas like justice and equality enter into the picture.

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