Know your place

Fractured epistemic privilege among women in state organizations

Bibliographic Data

ID6453003
AuthorsTair Karazi-Presler (0000-0002-1738-4894, Gender Studies Program Bar‐Ilan University Ramat Gan Israel, corresponding author)
Year2024
Volume40
Issue1
Pages3-17
Publication date2024-09-11
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueSociological Forum (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0884-8971 • E-ISSN: 1573-7861
PublisherWiley (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1111/socf.13021
OpenAlexW4402499929
LanguageEN
References cited85

Based on 67 in‐depth interviews, this article explores how women in positions of power in two major organizational fields in Israel—the military and government ministries—develop different types of gender knowledge. In the military, an extremely and publicly gendered organization, the interviewees demonstrate gender reflexivity and pragmatic literacy of power relations. In the government ministries, which tend to conceal and even repress gendered power, the interviewees demonstrate (neoliberal) feminist consciousness and a limited ability to conceptualize power relations. The contribution of this article is threefold. First, it challenges the common view that gender reflexivity and feminist consciousness are causally related by emphasizing fractured epistemic privilege among women in different organizational contexts. Second, it demonstrates that women's survival practices produce gender knowledge, which in turn produces gender practices in organizational contexts. Third, it argues that different types of gender knowledge develop as a byproduct of the gendered power‐relation characteristics of each specific organizational context. Accordingly, this article offers a framework for analyzing emerging forms of gender sociopolitical knowledge in organizations as an additional dimension of gender inequality and a possible basis for transforming it

Epistemology · Political science · Privilege (computing · Sociology · State (computer science · Computer Science · Feminist Epistemology and Gender Studies · Gender Diversity and Inequality · Gender Politics and Representation · Gender Studies · Law · Philosophy

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