ABSTRACT
Until quite recently feminist empiricism and feminist standpoint theory have offered epistemological positions that have been the basis for a phenomenal growth in feminist social science (Harding 1986). Empirical studies conducted from a range of theoretical perspectives (radical, socialist and liberal feminist) have all in some way affirmed the existence of women’s experience as a source of privileged understandings, if not the basis of an alternative social science. Now, however, the deconstruction of ‘women’ is having profoundly destabilizing effects upon feminist theorizing and research (Barrett 1991).1
