Toward a Feminist Epistemology

Abstract

This essay explores the concepts of and subjectivity from a feminist perspective. It criticizes contemporary feminist theory that identifies all with a point of view and explores the possibility of as a methodology that saves without the traditional empiricist pitfalls. section addresses contemporary feminist efforts to collapse the border between subjectivity and objectivity, to dismiss objectivity altogether, or to create a universe with borders. It focuses on Catharine MacKinnon's recent work. section postulates dialectics as an alternative to empiricist and considers feminist theorists who do deal with dialectical method. third section is a discussion of the structure of Hegelian and a brief comparison with Anglo-American empiricism. Section 4 is a discussion of the feminist potential of the structure, as distinct from the substance, of Marxian dialectics. Feminist theorists have struggled with the question of whether a feminine nature exists, distinguishable from the nature of man. debate raged during the first wave of feminism in the nineteenth century and has returned to stir up undercurrents in the second wave. In the early 1970s feminist wariness of a world dichotomized into private and public presupposed fundamental similarities between male and female nature. The personal is political signaled a call to break down the barriers between private and public and to redefine politics to include female experience. Little thought was given to the possibility that women were naturally different from men in an immutable and politically significant way. More recently, feminists have begun to question the validity of that early androgyny theory which assumed certain similarities between men and women. Current theory runs a range from radical and separatist feminism to conservative or social feminism, drawn together by a common thread that postulates that women are after all different from men. Whether the source of that difference is biologically or socially determined remains largely unquestioned, subordinated to a general celebration of a feminist universe with soft borders, a universe characterized by cooperation rather than competition, nurturance rather than aggression. Depending upon academic discipline, feminist