The politics of the gaze: A dialogue between Karl Mannheim's sociology of knowledge and Donna Haraway's high tech feminist epistemology

Abstract

This work intends to outline a critical dialogue between two social theories of paramount importance in the scope of the sociology of knowledge, namely, the systems of thought undertaken by Karl Mannheim and Donna Haraway. Although anchored in different epistemological perspectives, both intellectuals are concerned with a similar problem that could be well described under the label of gaze policies – the delicate entanglements that take place between the dimensions of cognition, power and visibility in the structuring of social life. Thus, the theoretical approaches of Haraway and Mannheim will be compared in order to make explicit the points of proximity and distance between them in view of the capacity of the American feminist's thought to potentiate the provocations distilled by the Hungarian sociologist.