What opinion has to do with power
Everyone has a voice, but not everyone is heard. The voices that prevail
are called ‘hegemonic’. The creation of hegemony has little to do with
democracy and everything to do with power. It is not a question of who has
something legitimate or important to say, but always of who has sufficient
resources and influence in a society to define their opinion as legitimate or
important. The hegemonic perspective is considered neutral. Anything that
deviates from it is seen as an exception and ascribed to others. The
hegemonic view claims not to represent a specific point of view, position
or life experience, but rather to represent things as simply ‘the way they
are’.
An example: the media in the Western world is dominated by white
male journalists. Nevertheless, the news never announces: ‘Today you will
hear the news from a white male perspective.’ ‘White’ and ‘male’ are not
explicitly named; they are regarded as general, neutral and non-specific.
Another example: if a married couple are heterosexual, their sexual
orientation isn’t mentioned; if they are homosexual it is.
The question of hegemonic voices is associated with the concept of
which truths prevail. Here we come to the Standpoint Theory, whose most
important proponents are Donna Haraway and Sandra Harding. They
maintain that a voice – or standpoint – cannot be objective or neutral, or
exist outside a specific social context. Here is an example: in science –
and in children’s books to the present day – the idea that prehistoric people
hunted mammoths was long considered to be fact. Prehistoric people, or,
more concretely, prehistoric men, set off on dangerous mammoth-hunting
expeditions. But in fact this image was created in the nineteenth century at
a time when hunting was no longer essential for survival, but was simply a
status symbol. In their interpretations of prehistory, archaeologists
neglected unspectacular types of food procurement such as gathering
berries and roots, or trapping small animals.
This is not to say that men did not sometimes slay a mammoth. But it
distorts the fact that they mainly collected berries. Here, the historians
were not objective, but confirmed the stereotype of men as brave fighters,
warriors and family breadwinners, as if this were a law of nature. Bottom