ABSTRACT
I have argued that Woman and experience always lead to essentialist arguments, and that theories of knowledge based on women's experience are not reflections of women's lives. In my discussion of standpoint theory, I have tried to show how feminist theory's attempts to isolate and identify a subject and to base an attendant epistemology on her experience(s) or her daily life has been unsuccessful. Such theories actually tell stories about women selectively interpreted through recourse to a little examined and undertheorized feminist lens. The understanding of Woman they portray is, therefore, a normative one. Throughout this book, I have made the related claim that particular constructions of Woman and experience operate in tandem to push feminist understandings of personal politics (as well as other important concepts like liberation, violence, and power) in particular directions, and then to maintain that these directions reflect a truth about female reality.
