Question What is feminist knowledge?

Accepted:
November 16, 2005

Comments

I'm not completely sure what you are asking. Presumably you do not want to know what it is that feminists know that others don't, though I could write you a book on that. I suspect what you're curious about is feminist theories of knowledge, or feminist epistemology. This is a book-length topic, too, but I'll try to say enough in a short space to give you an idea what is going on.

Feminist epistemology -- really, feminist philosophy generally -- begins with a simple observation: virtually the entire body of our received philosophical thought has been developed by men, and by socially privileged men at that. The question then arises whether this homogeneity among philosophers has resulted in some kind of bias or distortion in the theories produced. In philosophy, suspicion is heightened by the fact that our methodology relies heavily on "intuitions" that theorists presume are universally shared. What if they're not? (And by the way, there's excellent evidence, apart from evidence adduced by feminists, that some key philosophical intuitions -- judgments that form the basis of very influential philosophical theories -- are not universally shared. See, for example, question 13 and discussion: http://www.amherst.edu/askphilosophers/question/13 . Also, philosophers Shaun Nichols, Stephen Stich and Jonathan Weinberg have found cross-cultural variation in intuitions about knowledge -- you can access their paper at http://www.rci.rutgers.edu/~stich/Publications/Papers/Meta-skepticism.pdf )

Also, philosophers have tended to take particular kinds of knowledge as paradigm in their theorizing and to neglect others – theoretical rather than practical knowledge, scientific rather everyday knowledge. This pattern of focus might reflect both the gender and social locations of the theorizers, since it is only privileged individuals that have, historically, had the leisure and resources to engage in academic or scientific pursuits. How might knowledge have been conceived if theorizing had taken into account the kinds of knowledge possessed by women and by social subordinates – the kind of knowledge implicated in interpersonal relations and in practical engagement with the material world, "common sense" and "folkways"? Finally, the theoretical aims of much traditional epistemology have not been oriented toward particular philosophical questions that are of pressing concern to feminists, theoretical questions about the role of social relations in the construction of knowledge, and practical questions about the processes that confer epistemic expertise, and about the (still) low rate of involvement by women in academic and scientific inquiry, especially in philosophy.

Feminist philosophers differ in their answers to these questions. There is a broad consensus (of which I, myself, am not part) that holds that the way in which the knowing subject has been conceived within traditional epistemology embodies a "masculinist" perspective, specifically in its abstract, individualistic character. ("Masculinist" means that the perspective in question is not just that of any man, but rather of a man theorizing in the context of a patriarchal social organization.) Many feminist philosophers (again, not me) also believe that fundamental epistemological concepts, like "objectivity" and "rationality," have been conceived in ways that make it virtually contradictory to attribute these traits to women. (And many prominent philosophers, including Aristotle and Kant, explicitly denied that women had reason in the same sense as men did.) Some feminist philosophers (I’m in this camp) hold that traditional concepts and theories are not marred by masculinist bias, but that epistemology still needs to be re-oriented toward issues raised by feminist theory and practice, and that new insights about knowledge in general will arise as a result.

Whatever they believe is the outcome of the critical project of scrutinizing traditional epistemology for masculinist bias, most feminist epistemologists today have moved beyond that to more constructive epistemological projects. Some are trying to define "successor" notions of concepts like "objectivity" – notions that, according to these theorists, more adequately capture the perspectives and experience of all persons. Many are developing accounts of knowledge that make different assumptions about the knowing subject than the ones informing mainstream epistemology, and in particular, accounts that assume that knowledge is essentially social. Some are applying traditional philosophical methods or mainstream epistemological theories to neglected epistemological questions.

For more detail about the content of either the feminist critiques of mainstream epistemology, or about the constructive projects in feminist epistemology, a good place to start is Elizabeth Anderson’s entry on "Feminist Epistemology" in the Stanford online Encyclopedia of Philosophy: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/feminism-epistemology/

Question What is feminist knowledge? Accepted:November 16, 2005

Question What is feminist knowledge?

Accepted:
November 16, 2005