[4][5] Hartsock argued that a feminist standpoint could be built out of Marx's understanding of experience and used to criticize patriarchal theories.
Their location as a subordinated group allows women to see and understand the world in ways that are different and challenging to the existing male-biased conventional wisdom.
However, this is not saying that those who occupy perspectives that are not-marginalized cannot help in reaching a shared critical consciousness with relation to the effects of power structures and epistemic production.
For example, much of conventional science research produces knowledge understood through male-biased worldviews that isolate women from their own realities.
Strong objectivity builds on the insights of feminist standpoint theory, which argues for the importance of starting from the experiences of those who have been traditionally left out of the production of knowledge.
Strong objectivity acknowledges that the production of power is a political process and that greater attention paid to the context and social location of knowledge producers will contribute to a more ethical and transparent result.
[16] As a standpoint theory, black feminist thought conceptualizes identities as organic, fluid, interdependent, multiple, and dynamic socially constructed "locations" within historical context.
[17] Tina Campt uses standpoint theory to examine the narrative of the Afro-German Hans Hauck in her book Other Germans.
First introduced by Patricia Hill Collins, black feminist standpoint is known to be a collective wisdom of those who have similar perspectives from subordinate groups of society.
Black feminist standpoint theory aims to bring awareness to these marginalized groups and offer ways to improve their position in society.
Black women, on the other hand, have a better perspective (a different standpoint) from direct experience and can offer suggestions to help other marginalized groups of our society.
By this she means that black women have experienced enough from the inside to understand where they lie socially while also having enough distance from the dominant groups to offer a critique.
Mirza recognizes that black women are sometimes known as the "other" and offers her term saying they have a status as a "third space" between the margins of race, gender, and class.
This marked an important transition from years past when the only works to be published or put on screen were those of more dominant groups.
[20] Criticism of standpoint feminism has come from postmodern feminists, who argue that there is no concrete "women's experience" from which to construct knowledge.
Standpoint feminists have recently argued that individuals are both oppressed in some situations and in relation to some people while at the same time are privileged in others.
Their goal is to situate women and men within multiple systems of domination[22] in a way that is more accurate and more able to confront oppressive power structures.