ABSTRACT
This chapter concerns questions of feminist epistemology that emphasize materiality as a complex biosocial process associated with Mary O'Brien's dialectical reproductive materialism, especially as a feminist standpoint epistemology in the tradition of Nancy Hartsock. In O'Brien's analysis, biological processes are not fixed but dialectical and historical, hence Jeff Hearne's description of her methodology as reproductive dialectical materialism. For O'Brien, contraceptive technology alienates women and their reproductive processes, which must then be mediated as for men. This entails a change in women's experience of reproduction, in its overlapping biological psychological and sociocultural dimensions. The central argument of feminist standpoint epistemology is an appropriation of Marxist dialectical materialism, so entails the working out of the biology/society dualism in that particular approach. Feminist standpoint theory represents a negotiation of the two seemingly radically divergent traditions of Marxist and postmodern political theory. As a socialist feminist innovation, standpoint epistemology is unsurprisingly a synthesis of seemingly divergent foci on patriarchy, economic class and psychoanalytic/postmodern ideas.
