ABSTRACT
I begin a discussion of the agents or subjects of epistemology from the assumption that the category has no fixed or historic content, i.e., that it was not fixed once and for all by Cartesian (or any other) epistemology. By current lights it is persons, embodied and situated in specific social and historical contexts, who know, with both their embodiment and “situations” relevant to their knowing. According to feminist epistemologies, such situations need to be specified using the analytic category gender, a category whose “content” and meaning are dynamic and multileveled and one whose relationship to other categories and social relations (e.g., class, culture, and race), as well as to knowledge, remains both contested and central to feminist theory. 1
