ABSTRACT
This chapter outlines one of the strategies of attack available to feminist theory in its challenge to many of the founding presumptions and methodological criteria governing knowledges by examining some (re-)explorations of the body. It draws out some implications of accepting the role the body plays in the production and evaluation of knowledge. The crisis of reason is in part a consequence of the historical privileging of the purely conceptual or mental over the corporeal; that is, of the inability of Western knowledges to conceive their own materiality and the conditions of their production. The chapter explores that the argument feminist theory could be divided into two broad categories. The first is committed to the introduction, analysis, and affirmation of "women" and "the feminine" as viable objects of knowledge. A second broad approach within feminist theory grew out of this disillusionment, the recognition that knowledges cannot be neutral or objective.
