Socialist Studies / Études socialistes 16 (1) 2022 18; https://socialiststudies.com/index.php/sss/article/view/27349
Dorothy E. Smith, the feminist marxist sociological thinker and writer, my mentor, feminist critic, and teacher was at the centre of a large international network of scholarship and activism that I was part of. She died in June, 2022.
I learned so much from Dorothy it is hard to know where to start. I first encountered her work through hearing her speak at feminist community discussions in Toronto in the late 1970s. Here was someone who was doing scholarly academic work but was also directly involved in community and movement organizing. I was also inspired by her 1977 pamphlet, Feminism and Marxism: A Place to Begin, A Way to Go which provided an important way of bringing feminism and marxism together.
During these years I was a left queer activist and was a fairly isolated student learning about and fascinated by various left wing and feminist approaches. But I did suffer from a major split in my consciousness between more abstract intellectual thought and development and more concrete community/movement and activist organizing. It was only Dorothy’s approach that allowed me to bridge this divide and overcome this disjuncture. Dorothy’s approach saved my life in the 1980s after I became a student at OISE. It allowed me to bring my experiences and knowledges as an activist into producing knowledge for queer people and for social movement organizing.
Dorothy and active supporters and co-participants like gay activist George Smith were able to allow me to make major connections between organizing against the anti-queer right wing (through Gay Liberation Against the Right Everywhere) and especially against the police repression of the bath raids (through the Right to Privacy Committee). The two central features of Dorothy’s work that directly affected me were the idea of sociology for oppressed people and the need for ethnographic investigation of ruling institutional relations organizing both oppression more generally and policing specifically. This was in opposition to “objectivity” and structuralism. In contrast, Dorothy offered a reflexive theory of knowledge. She demonstrated that the social was produced through the social practices of people. The focus was on social doing and accomplishment and how this was organized through institutional relations.
Her marxist feminist critique of sociological theory and methods led her to develop a sociology for (rather than about) women, which developed further as a sociology for people and came to be known as Institutional Ethnography. She drew not only on feminism, but also marxism and ethnomethodology which disrupts the “natural attitude” towards the social. She used a critical analysis of the social organization of institutional relations to develop a view of social relations of oppression and exploitation that could be used by social movements to transform the situations they found themselves in.
Dorothy’s speaking, writing and exploration was diverse and was never simply covered by her focus on Institutional Ethnography. A brief survey of her writing assists here. Her first book, The Everyday World as Problematic: A Feminist Sociology, was published in 1987. I was then a student at OISE and Dorothy was my Ph.D. supervisor and this provided an exploratory and alternative way of doing sociology. This was followed by other publications like “Femininity as Discourse” in Texts, Facts and Femininity: Exploring the Relations of Ruling, in which gender is explored as a set of social practices – in a way that is not essentialist at all. Then came the Conceptual Practices of Power: A Feminist Sociology of Knowledge where it became clearer how social power was organized and was mobilized through people’s concepts and ideological practices. Writing the Social: Critique, Theory and Investigations (1999), was for me in many ways her most insightful and powerful pedagogical book. I used this as a fundamentally important book in teaching graduate students over many years.
This book includes a marxist feminist critique of the major limitations of political economy, an exposition of the social construction of “political correctness” and a social relational analysis of language that allows for “telling the truth after post-modernism.” In it she was most clear about theory as something other than an abstraction, but rather a concrete exploration of social organization including the social character of language. Following this, Dorothy’s writing became more focused on further developing Institutional Ethnography including in collaborations with Alison Griffith and Susan Turner.
My learnings from Dorothy are centrally about producing knowledge for oppressed people from their social standpoints; the importance of analyzing social organization itself; learning how to turn the capacities of ethnography against ruling institutions in this society; and as already mentioned how to tell the “truth” after post-modernism, including the social, relational and active character of language. These learnings continued with the need to critique the limitations of political economy which limits and restrains feminists’ and oppressed people’s critique of marxism; the conceptual and textual practices of struggle; the dialogical character of social relations. Important instances of this are the need to use the expression “ruling relations” and not the reified concept of “the state”; the need to not reify/fetishize the social; and to focus instead on social doings and social accomplishments. This also entailed the need to see marxism as a critique of ideological practices; the need to critically take apart textually-mediated social relations and social organization and so much more.
Finally, Dorothy showed us how writing was about discovery, learning and was fun in a rich social sense. She showed me how marxism could be transformed by feminism and ethnomethdology (a focus on people’s doings and never taking the taken for granted for granted).
In my last encounters with Dorothy she was still having fun doing her work of speaking and writing in her 90s. I can only hope that more of us can experience these social relations of fun as we continue to develop our intellectual/activist lives.