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Chapter Five Feminist Humility Epistemologies of Ignorance1 Epistemological choices about who to trust, what to believe, and why something is true are not benign academic issues. Instead, these concerns tap the fundamental question of which version of truth will prevail and shape thought and action. —Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought I In this chapter, we will see how the ontological humility we saw earlier in Frye’s work plays itself out in more recent feminist thought. We will first look at a thread of contemporary work in epistemology and science studies that focuses on so-called epistemologies of ignorance, and compare it with the earlier discussion of Heidegger’s work. Then we will consider feminist theorist Patricia Hill Collins’s work on the relationship between race and gender (which, as we saw, are explicit themes in Rowling ’s saga) and philosopher Ladelle McWhorter’s account of the shared history of race and homophobia in the United States. In these texts, ontological humility remains a significant, if tacit, element in moving toward constructive solutions for the problems created in the modern world by the arrogance of those certain of the Truth of what they know. The exact definition of “epistemologies of ignorance” is to some extent part of what is at issue in this section, but we can provisionally rely on the definition Nancy Tuana offers in her contribution to the volume of Hypatia devoted to that topic.2 There she summarizes her argument for the importance of epistemologies of ignorance by pointing out that “if we are to fully understand the complex practices of 111 112 Ontological Humility knowledge production and the variety of factors that account for why something is known, we must also understand the practices that account for not knowing, that is, for our lack of knowledge about a phenomenon (SI 2).” In the same article, Tuana offers a typology of ways of “not knowing.” The first three types, developed largely in the context of women’s health issues, are fairly self-explanatory: (1) “knowing that we do not know, but not caring to know” (e.g., male contraceptives, SI 4); (2) what “we do not even know that we do not know” (e.g., the physiology of the clitoris, SI 6); and (3) what “they do not want us to know” (e.g., the dangers of oral contraceptives, SI 9–10). The fourth type Tuana calls “willful ignorance,” which she defines as “an active ignoring of the oppression of others and one’s role in that oppression” (SI 10–11). Much of the work in this area with regard to race has been done by Charles Mills, whose work we will discuss later. The last two of Tuana’s types require a bit more explanation. The first of these is “ignorance produced by the construction of epistemically disadvantaged identities.” By this Tuana means to point to the fact that “our theories of knowledge and knowledge practices are far from democratic, maintaining criteria of credibility that favor members of privileged groups” (SI, 13). The classic example of this is Freud’s refusal to believe his female patients when they reported incestuous advances by their fathers, but the Harry Potter saga abounds with examples of the ignorance of Voldemort and others that grows out of their refusal to pay any credence to what is said and done by “inferior” magical beings such as house-elves, goblins, and, perhaps more notably, children. Dumbledore say, “That which Voldemort does not value, he takes no trouble to comprehend.”3 This kind of ignorance has an internal link to “willful ignorance,” since one way we can remain ignorant about oppression and our role in it is by discrediting or disallowing the testimony of those we oppress about their situation, as Mills also notes. The last of Tuana’s “types” of epistemology of ignorance she calls “loving ignorance,” by which she means “ignorance of what exceeds our knowledge capacities,” but Tuana calls it “loving,” with a reference to Frye’s account of “the loving eye” in the article discussed in the Prologue . Subsequent work by feminists of color such as María Lugones, in turn, uses the term in the specific context of the interaction between white feminists and feminists of color, where Tuana says it names “the realization that although much experience can be shared there will always be experiences that cannot” (SI 15–16). Cynthia Townley develops this theme in her contribution to the Hypatia volume, citing a controversial case...

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