Feminist Epistemology

Abstract

Feminist epistemology seeks to expose and understand the epistemic salience of gendered social relations. Its interests lie in both descriptive questions concerning how gendered relations affect knowing, and in normative questions concerning how knowers can know well within social contexts shaped by gender, and how we can design robust and successful knowledge practices within such contexts. The relationship of feminist epistemology to social epistemology can be characterized in several different ways. Feminist epistemology can be viewed as a sub-field of social epistemology, in that it contributes to a certain collection of topics and debates that fall within social epistemology’s “loosely related family of disputes” and draws attention to the social dimensions of certain kinds of knowledge. In spite of substantial differences between particular versions of feminist epistemology, this tenet of situated knowing remains a key feature of a feminist approach.