Being reasonable, telling stories

Rita Felski’s “Being reasonable, telling stories” appears in Feminist Theory, vol. 1, no. 2 (2000), pp. 225–229, amid an exchange about feminist argument, social location, and shared political claims. Its title sets two activities beside one another rather than announcing an easy choice. Feminist thought has reason to question a supposedly neutral and universal “Reason”; it also needs accounts of situated lives. But experience does not interpret itself. The essay’s sharpest entry point is a demand that critics understand the theories they challenge before turning them into convenient foils.

In the author note published with the article, Felski says she broadly agrees with the direction of Sylvia Walby’s thesis while questioning some of Walby’s targets. She points to Donna Haraway, whose work takes objectivity and scientific procedure seriously, and to Iris Marion Young, whose position does not amount to an unqualified endorsement of theories of difference. This is more than a bibliographic correction. If a critique reduces an interlocutor to a position she does not hold, it can make a debate look simpler while weakening its argument. Feminist disagreement needs accurate representation precisely because its participants do not share one method or one account of political knowledge.

The title also opens a useful FemRes question: what can narrative and argument each contribute to feminist knowledge? A narrative can carry sequence, relationships, contradiction, and affect, resisting the flattening of a life into an abstract category. Argument can make premises visible, connect cases, invite counterexamples, and ask whether a claim follows from its evidence. These activities need not compete. Accounts of lived experience can force concepts to change; concepts can help identify patterns that one account alone cannot establish. Neither form is automatically emancipatory: a story can be treated as beyond criticism in the name of authenticity, while an argument can present a privileged standpoint as neutral procedure. Following the title into the journal exchange makes their mutual testing visible without ranking one form above the other in advance.

That tension matters when building a feminist archive. Testimony is not raw material that needs no interpretation, and academic language is not objective merely because it is abstract, measured, or well cited. Readers can ask whose experience is recognized as knowledge, when a situated account is made to stand for everyone, and whether the steps from particular lives to collective claims remain open to challenge. Felski’s correction of Walby’s characterization of Haraway and Young models a related discipline: criticize the argument that is actually there, and make disagreement more exact rather than less political.

Read the piece in its issue context: begin with Walby’s “Beyond the Politics of Location”, then compare Knapp’s “More Power to Argument” and Phoenix’s “Aspiring to a Politics of Alliance”, before following Walby’s “In Search of Feminist Theory”. These are adjacent contributions to a journal exchange, not evidence of a settled consensus. Felski’s lasting prompt is methodological as much as stylistic: let experience enter argument, and keep argument answerable to the lives it seeks to describe. See the publisher’s bibliographic record.