Re: Walkerdine

Jay Lemke (JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU)
Wed, 08 May 96 12:30:42 EDT

A pretty tall order, which I regret I don't really have time
to do right now. Maybe others can help, and if I can I'll add
some notes when I get a chance.

I'm not sure it's most useful to read Valerie's work in contrast
with Piaget; many of her best insights are of a kind it never
even occurred to JP to think about. One of the most radical
differences is simply the importance of historical developments
in our own cultures for Valerie's views vs. the radical
ahistoricity of JP's (can't quite call him Jean, only met him
once!) biology-inspired theory. His developmental biology is
pretty sophisticated, and the environment plays a significant
role, but the end-points of development for him are, insofar as
they matter most, those that confirm the adaptiveness of a
culturally dominant epistemology to all human environments.
Common wisdom today has it that his final stages are in fact
culturally specific and not species-specific, but Valerie looks
at aspects of just what this means (historically developed
gender norms and attitudes in dominant cultures) which also
challenge the dominant epistemology itself. In effect this says
that the high points of Western rationality are suspect because
they are part of projects of patriarchal domination, and are
themselves _defined_ in such a way as to exclude (among other
categories) the female/feminine. Thus they can in no way
be thought of as universal, biological, species-specific,
or even adaptive (except for dominant males in a social order
they have historically shaped to support their domination).
This is not a critique of Piaget as such, but of a much bigger
set of assumptions that Piaget (and a lot of others, probably
including Vygotsky in relation to 'scientific' reasoning)
not surprisingly took very much for granted. JAY.

JAY LEMKE.
City University of New York.
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