Feminist Theories, Epistemologies, and Critical Methodologies

Question 1

Positivism

Answer 1

Belief in the existence of single truth or objective reality that can be known using the right methods

Question 2

Feminist Critiques of Positivism in the Social Sciences

Answer 2

• Question the notion of scientific objectivity
• All knowledge is socially produced
• Challenged masculine bias in social science theory and research

Question 3

Feminist Epistemologies

Answer 3

• Multiple and contested
• No ”Women’s” Experience
• Subjective
• Positionality
• Reflexivity

Question 4

Feminist Standpoint Epistemology

Answer 4

• Contested
• Marxist
• Women’s direct experience
• “What people do limit and enable what they can know” (Harding)
• Who gets to decide what gets asked as a scientific question is an important part

Question 5

Patricia Hill Collins

Answer 5

• Sociologist, standpoint theorist
• Double vision (outsider within)
• Black women excluded from knowledge production, misrepresented in social science research

Question 6

Collins identifies three themes that emerge from Black women’s intellectual traditions and that reflect critical insights generated by shared experiences of oppression and domination

Answer 6

1. Importance of self-definition
2. Interlocking nature of oppression
3. Importance of Afro-American Women’s culture (to create and pass on self-definition and self-valuations)

Question 7

Epistemology

Answer 7

• Knowledge is power
• Who has knowledge
• Who creates knowledge

Question 8

Epistemological privilege

Answer 8

• Idea that margin occupied by women and POC is a better location for knowledge production than the center
• can analyze the structure of oppression and domination that constitute western patriarchal thought
• an epistemically privileged standpoint of women is not a given, but instead is attained through social, political, and theoretical struggle

Question 9

Outsider within

Answer 9

• love for black mothers

- epistemological privilege