ABSTRACT
The feminist challenge to mainstream epistemology and related approaches in philosophy of education has been warmly welcomed by some and cursorily dismissed by others. This chapter discusses how and at what educational cost recent feminist work in epistemology serves to challenge those liberal approaches to education that rest on ‘forms of knowledge epistemology’. Feminists of many different stripes argue that subjectivity-blindness perpetuates ‘the hegemony of masculinist epistemology’. Even so, from the vantage of feminist epistemology, caring theorists turn a blind eye to crucial aspects of subjectivity by failing to place themselves and their ideas in the critical field. Feminists who advocate performative pedagogy reject traditional teaching as well as the standard views of reflective teaching and critical pedagogy on the grounds that all presuppose the possibility of one self coming to know and understand other selves.
