Sedimented Boundaries

A distinction is never an isolated conceptual incision; it is the condensed outcome of earlier separations sedimented through language, institutions, spatial arrangements and habits of perception. What appears to divide inside from outside, evidence from noise or centre from margin is therefore an architecture of accumulated difference whose durability derives from convergent practices rather than logical purity. Such boundaries are politically consequential because they do not merely describe reality: they stabilise it by distributing movement, legitimacy, visibility and access. A zoning category, archival descriptor or legal threshold allocates possibilities, deciding which bodies may circulate, which claims become intelligible and which forms of knowledge remain excluded. 

Haraway reframes vision as embodied and political, arguing that only partial perspectives yield accountable objectivity within power-laden knowledge systems.

In Situated Knowledges, Donna Haraway advances a radical reconceptualisation of vision as a material-semiotic practice, dismantling the epistemological fiction of disembodied sight. Rather than endorsing the traditional “god trick” of seeing everything from nowhere, Haraway insists that all vision is embodied, technologically mediated, and politically situated, thereby rendering objectivity a function of accountable positioning rather than transcendental detachment. As elaborated in the section “The Persistence of Vision” (pp. 7–9), visual systems—from biological eyes to satellite imaging—do not passively record reality but actively construct it through specific apparatuses of perception . This insight destabilises the assumption that vision guarantees epistemic neutrality; instead, it reveals how visual technologies amplify regimes of power, particularly those aligned with militarism, capitalism, and colonial expansion. Haraway’s illustrative examples—from microscopic imaging to planetary surveillance—demonstrate that all seeing is a practice of interpretation, embedded within historically contingent networks of meaning and domination. Crucially, she posits that “only partial perspective promises objective vision” (p. 9), thereby redefining objectivity as limited, locatable, and responsible knowledge rather than universal truth. The conceptual synthesis culminates in her assertion that feminist epistemology must reclaim vision not by rejecting it, but by re-embedding it within the body and its socio-technical extensions. Ultimately, Haraway concludes that true objectivity emerges through the ethical acknowledgment of one’s position within power-laden fields of vision, transforming perception into a site of critical accountability rather than epistemic illusion.