>>This argument is precisely analogous to the claim that a medical
>
> doctor could not understand the etiology of a disease unless the
> doctor personally experienced the disease.
>
> Not at all. If you are not a gay man who has been threatened with
> violence then you cannot know what it feels like. You can know
> that such incidents occur, but you cannot know how it feels.
I think we're talking past each other. Your point is valid; if I do not belong to an oppressed group, I can't really know how that feels. However, it is not necessary to personally know how the oppression feels to thoroughly analyze it as a social relation and develop strategies for overcoming it. I still think this is analogous to a medical doctor studying the etiology of diseases and working on a cure. Just as it's irrelevant whether or not the doctor personally suffers from the disease she's attempting to cure, it's irrelevant whether or not a social theorist/activist personally experiences some form of oppression she's attempting to undermine.
>> This assumption that a person cannot "know" something unless
>
> they personally experience it is one of the most pernicious
> misconceptions about knowledge that I come across as a college
> prof.
>
> You can have a some knowledge of it, but experience for me is also
> a good a path to knowledge and offers information unavailable from
> books and classrooms.
I know this notion of the validity of "immediate experience" is popular in our society, but it's a dangerous and misleading strategy for developing knowledge. Example: slaves in the antebellum South. We have clear historical evidence that some slaves accepted their position and did not consider slavery immoral. Based on these people's "personal experience", slavery was not a problem. Similarly, I occasionally have African American students who claim that they have never been victims of prejudice or discrimination. Regardless of what they personally believe and experience, they are in fact systematically discriminated against in our society. The popular notion that personal experience "is a good path to knowledge" in fact blocks these students from carefully and rigorously analyzing the relevant sociological evidence.
So this puts you on the horns of a dilemma, as I see it:
1. You can say these people's knowledge of their life experience is valid, in which case they are not oppressed, regardless of the objective data;
or
2. You can say these people are deluded or mistaken, in which case personal experience is not a reliable basis for knowledge about oppression.
Note that I do not claim that personal experience of oppression is trivial or unimportant; it is extremely important to the person affected by it. However, personal experience of oppression cannot be a logically coherent foundation for social research, analysis and action.
Miles