Epistemology Revisited: A Feminist Critique

Abstract

The Platonic legacy of Western epistemology has been severely attacked for its dominant exclusivist and coercive rationality in the discourses of anti-foundationalism and anti-representationalism, which have also given rise to several alternative epistemologies. The feminist discourse challenges the exclusivist and appropriationist logic of Western epistemology, or science, for being highly gender-biased and oppressive. Weininger’s remark that ‘No woman is really interested in science, she may deceive herself and many good men, but bad psychologists, by thinking so’ is one of such silencing masculine diktats that have deeper roots in the sexist, racist and classist biases. The feminists’ revolts against the power/knowledge dynamics and subsequent epistemological directions emerge from a reflexive undertaking into the nature and production of knowledge. The paper examines the objectivity debates within the feminist science circles in this regard and explores the space between the oppressive dichotomies of nature/culture, core/peripheral, absolute/historical to articulate an alternative epistemology in the feminists’ larger political program of social justice.