Making Meaning

Making Meaning

Making Meaning
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy. -Shakespeare Hamlet, 1, v any of the systems for understanding ourselves and our worlds are currently balanced precariously on the edge of a paradigm shift. This shift involves acknowledging the interconnectedness and reciprocalinfluence of the observer and the observed, mind and nature, and the impossibility of objectivity or control of all variables deemed irrelevant in an experiment. The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle and the sciences of complexity represent this perspective in the field of physics, as does psychoneuroimmunology in the fields of psychology, neurology, and immunology.
Feminist thought has been a crucial part of this intellectual revolution. In the last two decades, feminist thought and analysis have been able to breathe new life into many traditional academic and professional disciplines, from the humanities to the sciences to the social sciences, to name them in the ways that they are currently and artificially divided. Many feminist writers have demonstrated and documented the patriarchal nature of our society and the variety of ways in which patriarchal values serve masculine needs (de Beauvoir 1968; Friedan 1963; Millett 1970), even in such arenas as science (Bleier 1984; Keller 1985) and the clinical practice of psychology (Broverman, l. K., et al. 1970; Chesler 1972; Miller 1976; lrigaray 1985), previously believed to ,be, or at least presented as, evaluatively neutral and apolitical. In the most seemingly diverse fields, women's per- spectives and ideas have been shown to be absent or buried or credited to men. It is always difficult, if not paradoxical, to take note of what is invisible, but it is precisely this paradoxical quest-to make the invisible female perspective visible--that has been undertaken by feminist scholarship.