ABSTRACT
Feminist epistemologists often find themselves working within an uneasy relationship to vexed questions about relativism: within an un-easiness generated out of the very act of identifying oneself as a feminist epistemologist. Contrasted with identification as an epistemologist simpliciter, the “feminist” modifier seems to locate such a theorist near to the edge of “the relativist trap.” As I show throughout these essays, epistemology, as it has been practiced in post-positivist, Anglo-American, professional philosophy, is about establishing necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of knowledge as such. Its singularity of purpose appears to be compromised once it speaks from or to specific interests, for its aim is, quite precisely, to leave such interests behind in order to produce an a priori, normative analysis of knowledge in general, impartially acquired and adjudicated. Discursively—rhetorically—the domain of professional epistemology is staked out in such a way that practitioners who would claim legitimate entry must disavow all relativist tendencies. Hence, in a quasi-ritual gesture, feminist epistemologists commonly set out the parameters of their projects with clear assertions that their goals and methods do not entail to relativism; and evaluations of their positions commonly address the extent to which they make those assertions good. Even the most sensitive and nuanced feminist analyses of the specificities 186of epistemic practices, committed to exposing the exclusionary and thus oppressive implications of “pure,” “universal” knowledge claims allegedly made from nowhere, pause to demonstrate that their contextualizing, historicizing, or localizing of “the epistemological project” does not consign them to the non-place of relativism. 1 Nor, as I shall argue, are they disingenuous or self-deceived in so doing.
