Feminism’s intersection with Foucauldian analysis and concepts has changed the content and focus of the ‘power-knowledge’ debate within feminism. Understanding patriarchy—‘the knowledge project’—within feminism has become both more complex and diversified. In addition, the nature and application of feminism can be seen to mean different things to those inside and outside the academy. On one […]

Feminist poststructuralism, in focusing on the issue of power in subject positions and discourses, addresses the critiques that have been made of different branches of feminist theory, for their uncritical application of terms such as patriarchy and for their essentialist views of concepts such as ‘women’ and ‘oppression’. Poststructuralism can also, through its analysis of […]

The clearest statement of feminism’s postmodernist character comes from Jane Flax (1990b), who argues (that feminist theory is typical ofpostmodern philosophy and, as such, reveals many of its characteristics. Flax maintains that feminist theory has contributed to the debates and growing uncertainty within Western intellectual circles about ‘the appropriate grounding’, and methods for explaining and […]

The 1980s and 1990s saw the debate around the establishment of a feminist epistemology come under a numb er of pressures from within and outside feminism. The ‘totalising’ tendencies of earlier feminist theorising was challenged from within feminism by marginalised, colonised and indigenous women, who objected to feminist theories which failed to address their problems. […]

Feminists have sought to challenge conventional epistemologies by developing alternative paradigms. Within the social sciences, Walby (1990:16) argues that feminist challenges to mainstream social science have invoked a variety of approaches to knowledge. She maintains that some branches of feminism have argued that orthodox accounts are empirically incorrect on their own terms, while others have […]

The emancipatory goals and epistemological assumptions of second wave feminism based on the interrelationship between knowledge and liberation can be clearly traced to the liberal humanism of enlightened modernity. McNeil (1993:149) maintains that The women who gave birth to second wave feminism can be thought of as daughters of the Enlightenment in that they seemed […]

INTRODUCTION Feminism has been centrally concerned with the question of epistemology since its inception. Feminist writers/scholars have sought to challenge the basis and characteristics of epistemologies which posit a conception of ‘truth’, which is essentially ‘reality’ interpreted from a male perspective. In the necessarily intense and vigorous debate which has resulted—on the significance, nature and […]

The issues of subjectivity and experience within feminist theory have been deconstructed by poststructuralism and postmodernism. Feminist poststructuralism challenges feminism’s tendency to view both subjectivity and women’s experience as ‘unitary’, monovocal, and characterised by a unified discourse. Poststructuralism, specifically feminist poststructuralism, establishes ‘experience’ as contradictory and identity as plural. Yeatman notes that, even where ‘feminist […]

Poststructuralist theories thus reject the concept of the humanist subject, and feminist poststructuralism poses a radical challenge to essentialism. The ‘subject’ is no longer a fixed entity, a manifestation of ‘essence’ but ‘a “subject-in process” never unitary, never complete’ (Marshall 1994:108). This anti-essentialist position culminates, as Fraser (1992:66) contends, in a postfeminist stance where a […]

Feminist epistemological and methodological debates of the 1980s and 1990s have been both informed and transformed by feminism’s interrogation of postmodernism and poststructuralism. Chris Weedon’s Feminist Practice and Poststructuralist Theory (1987) sets out the relationship between feminism, poststructuralism and subjectivity, and comments that feminism and poststructuralism are both centrally concerned with the issue of subjectivity. […]