WORLD ALIENATION IN FEMINIST THOUGHT: THE SUBLIME EPISTEMOLOGY OF EMPHATIC ANTI-ESSENTIALISM

摘要

The alliance between feminism and postmodernism in the American academy has brought about a revolution in feminist epistemology. The early feminist epistemology of unmasking, of sorting through appearances to get to the real underneath, has been discredited as "essentialist." Feminist standpoint epistemology was an attempt to respond to this accusation by using social location as a "standpoint" from which at least local and situated knowledge could be articulated. More recently, many feminists have taken on the epistemology of the simulacrum. Here "the real" plays a part only as that which dissolves into the appearances themselves. Behind the appearances, if there were such a place, would be only an abyss of absence. With this revolution in feminist epistemology comes a wholesale displacement of the feminist project. Others have argued that the feminist political project is displaced in the alliance with postmodernism. On my view, the epistemological and political displacements accompany and instantiate an even deeper level of dispossession. The ultimate price we pay for the feminist alliance with postmodernism may well be a material displacement, in which we are dispossessed of our ability to inquire into and articulate our relationship to the earth itself. We find this planet we inhabit, this physical place that sustains us moment by moment, to be effectively shut out of what now passes as "good" feminist inquiry.