Counting Zero: Rethinking Feminist Epistemologies (in Feminist Encounters, Fall Issue 2017) (original) (raw)

Feminist Epistemology: An Exposé

The text of a talk I gave a talk to the philosophy society at Birkbeck College, University of London on feminist epistemology on March 23, 2017. The talk was mainly a critique of the feminist theory of domination and power as outlined by Catharine MacKinnon, but also deals with feminist epistemology: consciousness raising, standpoint theory and postmodernism as well as Miranda Fricker's epistemic injustice.

A Decolonial Critique of Feminist Epistemology Critique

Feminisms in Movement, 2023

Espinosa-Miñoso, Yuderkys (2023). A Decolonial Critique of Feminist Epistemology Critique. In: Lívia De Souza Lima/Edith Otero Quezada/Julia Roth, Feminisms in Movement (79-90). Bielefeld: transcript Verlag. https://doi.org/10.14361/9783839461020-004 Book DOI: https://doi.org/10.14361/9783839461020-004 Online ISBN: 978-3-8394-6102-0

The Grammar of Knowledge: A Look at Feminism and Feminist Epistemologies

Šolsko polje

The aim of the article is to reflect indirectly first on all the contributions in this volume, and second to help fix the present line of thought onto feminist epistemologies. Some postulates of feminist epistemologies are presented. The key question of feminist epistemology as a field of inquiry is defined according to Iris Van Der Tuin (2016) – it involves “the epistemic status of the knowledge produced by privileged and marginalized subjects”, and the reflection about the intersection of knowledge and power. There are ethical and moral implications here: the challenge and responsibility to recognise power relations. If a knowing subject is understood as epistemically inferior, this has a negative effect on how they are understood in non-epistemic contexts (Fricker, 2017). Feminism, in other words, is an epistemological project (Bahovec, 2002).

Feminist Encounters (Vol 1, Issue 1) : 'On Feminist Epistemic Habits and Critique'

This special issue opens with an article by Ellen Mortensen assessing Rita Felski’s (2015) account of critique and her alternative postcritical position. Mortensen focuses on the question of mood and does this from the viewpoint of affirmative affective thinking, paying attention especially to the notion of mood within Deleuzian affect theory. The next two articles give historical interpretations on the formation of feminist epistemologies. With a personal and autobiographical account, Nina Lykke’s article concentrates on dis/identification, ‘cruel optimism’ and everyday utopianism as instances of feminist epistemic habits, but also as structuring themes for feminist thought. Elina Vuola also on her part engages in a re-reading of academic feminism, but from a very different point of view compared to Lykke: Vuola discusses the epistemic habit of exclusion within academic feminism focusing on religious feminisms. In Vuola’s text the critique becomes ‘cure’, ‘correcting’ or reconstructing versions of a particular theoretical development. Three articles deal with feminist epistemic habits of de/constructing dualisms. In order to problematise the binary between poststructuralist and new materialist feminist work, Sari Irni examines as her case study the history of steroid hormones, rethinking the relations between natural sciences and politics. She pays special attention to Helga Satzinger’s (2012) ‘politics of gender concepts’ and suggests that in particular in relation to steroids a feminist critique is required which does not reproduce, but bridge the binary mentioned. Monika Rogowska-Stangret and Malou Juelskjær investigate temporalities and possibilities of thinking through new materialist theorising and concepts in order to examine conditions of the im/possibility of living live-able (learn-able, teach-able, and response-able) academic lives in current political climates. Addressing the temporal ontologies that drive and haunt university life, they deal with the notion of ‘slowing down’ as a response to the ‘fast neoliberal university’. They make visible epistemic habits from the context of our everyday lives and practices and show the challenge in engaging in critique, proposing an ethics of a pace of our own. The third text in the cluster of articles all engaging with the question of dualisms, is written by Liu Xin and deals with another set of binaries, namely both specificity and universality, and unity and plurality discussing especially the question of origin. Based on the (Irigarayan) idea of the impossibility of counting zero, Liu Xin suggests a form of feminist critique similar to what Trinh T. Minh-ha (2016) has named ‘lovecidal’. The last group of articles close in quite different ways around the question of feminist politics and knowledge production. Katariina Kyrölä investigates the knowledge of Black feminist thought in the music videos of Nicki Minaj and Beyoncé through the notion of disidentification, Kyrölä takes feminist criticism as her object in asking what kind of racialised, sexualised and gendered power relations and affects are articulated in the habit of asking: ‘whether the videos and artists are – or are not – feminist or empowering’? In their article about Valerie Solanas’ controversial SCUM Manifesto, Salla Peltonen Mio Lindman and Sara Nyman and read the politics of philosophy as the grammar of patriarchy, claiming that the SCUM Manifesto text has critical, philosophical and political significance they also point to certain difficulties of judgement that characterise feminist and queer critique. Like Kyrölä also the authors of this article highlight the importance of asking ‘non-habitual’ questions, refusing to apply a ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ in reading Solanas, but considering the Manifesto as a highly relevant, queer philosophical text. In addition to the articles the special issue contains two separate interviews with Robyn Wiegman and Heather Love on current debates about critique and postcritique, addressing especially the question of epistemic habits. Assessing the state and status of critique in feminist, gender and queer studies Wiegman and Love both historicise and contextualise the ongoing debates. They address the impact of neoliberalism, and the changing academic practices, linking it to personal investments. Furthermore, they also reflect on the psychoanalytical and affective aspects of critique. Considering habitual gestures and habits of feminist academic knowledge production, and the questions, reflections, viewpoints and thoughts expressed and discussed in the published texts, that we think are particularly important within current feminist analysis, we hope that this special issue contribute to the surely intensifying debate about contemporary critique/postcritique.

Feminist Epistemology: Its Epistemological Import

A survey on the concern of feminist epistemology shows that Feminist Epistemology is an outgrowth of feminist theorizing about gender and traditional epistemological concerns. Feminist epistemology postulates an experiential kind of knowledge. The central theme of Feminist Epistemology is situated knowledge. In achieving their pursuit, feminist employ three paradigms namely feminist empiricism, standpoint, and feminist postmodernism. But what difference does feminist epistemology offer? This is the concern of this work.

Feminist Epistemology and Social Epistemology: Another Uneasy Alliance

APA Studies on Feminism and Philosophy, 2024

In this paper I explore Phyllis Rooney’s 2003 chapter, “Feminist Epistemology and Naturalized Epistemology: An Uneasy Alliance,” taking guidance from her critique of naturalized epistemology in pursuing my own analysis of another uneasy alliance: that between feminist epistemology and social epistemology. Investigating some of the background assumptions at work in prominent conceptions of social epistemology, I consider recent analyses of "epistemic bubbles" to ask how closely such analyses are aligned with ongoing research in feminist epistemology. I argue that critical feminist insights in political philosophy are called for here, especially those that focus on multiple politically salient relationships and also emphasize practices of personal transformation as inseparably bound up with broader movements for social transformation. Insofar as feminist epistemology continues to carry another world in its heart, I argue that it will continue to rest uneasily with any effort to align it with—let alone subsume it within—the still emerging field of social epistemology.

Feminist Epistemology as a Local Epistemology: Helen E. Longino

Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume, 1997

I ntroductory remarks. The very idea of feminist epistemology It hrows some philosophers into near apoplexy. Partly this is social and psychological: an aversion to the revisionist challenges of feminism abetted by a healthy if residual misogyny. Partly this is intellectual: how could a politically and intellectually partial form of inquiry have anything to say about epistemology, which is or ought to be about very general questions concerning the nature of knowledge? The former is worth noting, but not discussing; the second, however, goes to the heart of what feminist epistemology is. This essay pursues one line of thought in feminist epistemology with a view to sorting out the relation between it and general epistemology, and between it and other approaches in feminist theory of knowledge.