  While there are various forms of ignorance to be investigated (Townley 2011), one that has occupied a good deal of feminist attention is “invested ignorance” (Townley 2011) in which the ignorance is “systematically produced and sustained to misrepresent reality in ways that not coincidentally sustain patterns of… privilege” (Townley 2011, x). In their analyses of invested ignorance, many feminists have built upon Charles Mills’s work on racial ignorance, in which he argues that whites (or other dominant groups) have a positive interest in misrepresenting the world in ways that help support their dominant position (Mills 1997, 2007). Mills conceptualizes whites as engaged in a kind of cognitive dysfunction that serves their purposes by preventing them from understanding the social relations of domination in which they are engaged, making it easier to maintain that domination. His work connects closely with feminist standpoint theory in providing both an explanation of the patterns of belief-forming practices that can result in an ignorance of the social relations of domination on behalf of the privileged, and an explanation of the potential lack of motivation to correct such ignorance (Alcoff 2007).