Australian Indigenous women's standpoint theory

This blog post is in response to a reading by Moreton-Robinson for my Gender & Sexuality course at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia with instructor Margret Mayhew.

Source: Moreton-Robinson, A (2013) ‘Towards an Australian Indigenous Women's Standpoint Theory’, Australian Feminist Studies, 28:78, 331-347

This article discusses an Australian Indigenous women's standpoint theory. The author, Moreton-Robinson argues that Indigenous women's perspectives and experiences differ from other women's because of social, political, and historical conditions that produce oppression. Her aim in this article was to outline the key parts of Australian Indigenous women's standpoint theory by stating the importance and limitations of this theory with an overview of indigenous research in showing how the Indigenous knowledge and practices are used from a cultural perspective.

The discourses in this article states that indigenous and feminist scholars share an understanding that their knowledge and continuous struggle against predominate patriarchal conceptual frameworks. I think his "predominate patriarchal conceptual frameworks" stands for a Western ideals and social constructions that inserts itself as superior to other cultures such as those of the Indigenous. I identify the discourse of power in this reading to be held by these Westernized ideals, also known as the patriarchal knowledge and socialized way of living. The power in these Westernized ideals essentially influences how we as a society (and the Indigenous) define their knowledge, culture, way of living etc. The feminist theory was created to challenge frameworks such as the one Westernized ideals aforementioned.

One of the last points that I wanted to highlight about the text was that the complexity of the Indigenous women's standpoint theory was difficult for me to grasp because there isn't an actual definite definition for it.  However in the text it is understood to be a form of essentialism because to understand it completely one would need to be Indigenous. I felt like this was a point that I could relate to. As a minority female in the United States, I believe in order to understand my culture and experiences, one would need to do more than just research and collect data from studies--one would literally need to take a walk in my shoes to fully understand.

Here's a link to a short youtube video clip about an Aboriginal Woman's Perspective on being born Aboriginal and female. Enjoy!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cy1viZlVFnw