Social Environment of Feminism - Essay Example

Thus, it must be noted that any dialogue is an exchange of opinions, but one of the essential parts of this process is also the presence of a certain party that is willing to articulate its position. In other words, speaking for others substitutes the real representatives and harms the interaction.

There are several elements of the above-mentioned process that were addressed in the essay in question. The first one is epistemic location. Alcoff suggests that it is crucial to fully understand the location of a person within the social environment to determine whether one can be a valid representative of ideas (7). In other words, what a person says might not fully reflect the real state of affairs and, therefore, this kind of information can contribute to the distortion of the general picture, contributing to the development of misunderstanding that inevitably leads to a conflict. What is more important is that the information that is being said by a person with the epistemic location that does not give one credential to do so can hardly be received as truth. Thus, it is highly doubtful that a person who does not belong to a group can correctly articulate its views, reflecting all the peculiarities of the position that is taken by it.

Another important element of the process of speaking for others is the negative impact that this practice has on the group of people that is being represented. Indeed, on the one hand, this process simply contributes to reinforcing the oppression of this group since it shows that the people are not able to speak for themselves which enhances the weak image of this group. On the other hand, surprisingly enough, but speaking for other silences this group of people, not allowing them to express the ideas that they have in a manner that they would like to use (26). This means that these people are deliberately excluded from the dialogue which harms the way they are represented in society.

As one can easily see, speaking for others might seem like an effective way to protect the interests of a group, but in reality, it does quite the opposite: on the one hand, it allows a person who does not have the right epistemic location to expressed information that may not be fully truthful and, on the other hand, it reinforces the oppression of the group in question by silencing its representatives.