Chapter 9: Women Knowing/Knowing Women: Critical-Creative Interventions in the Politics of Knowledge

Lorraine Code

Women knowing/knowing women: critical-creative interventions in the politics of knowledge Concentrating on interconnections between gender and epistemology, particularly in the Anglo-American world since the beginning of second-wave feminism, this chapter traces a history of departures from a view of epistemology as an a priori normative inquiry which could fulfill its mandate only by producing apolitical, impersonal, experience-remote analyses of necessary and sufficient conditions for knowledge ‘in general.’Feminist epistemologists have demonstrated how a gender-sensitive, avowedly political inquiry can produce knowledge good of its kind and epistemic standards stringent enough to enable knowers to participate intelligently in the world, both physical and human. Moving through the early taxonomy of feminist empiricism, standpoint theoryand postmodernism to the multiple directions feminist epistemology has subsequently taken, the chapter concludes by outlining the promise of new conceptual frameworks generated out of such modes of inquiry as agential realism, situated knowledges, naturalized epistemology, ecological thinking, and the ...

Users without subscription are not able to see the full content on this title. Please, subscribe or login to access all content on this website.

• Buy The Book