FEMINIST SOCIAL SCIENCE LITERATURE: THE QUESTIONS OF FEMINISTEPISTEMOLOGY AND OBJECTIVE KNOWLEDGE

This paper aims at exploring feminist social science literature and the issues revolving around the standpoint theory, and situated knowledge. Standpoint theory holds significant importance in feminist scholarship as it challenges traditional mainly men’s perspectives, by emphasizing the influence of social position and identity on one's understanding of the world. Developed within feminist scholarship, standpoint theory argues that individuals situated in marginalized or oppressed positions (this being often women across cultures) possess unique insights into societal structures and power dynamics. While addressing some of the major debates in the area, the focus of this paper is to look critically at the plausibility of the feminist epistemology and the problem of objectivity, brought from the debates in standpoint theory. Objective knowledge also presupposed a unified concept of a woman or some kind of female experience, which has been questioned by the more constructivist scholars like Haraway (1991). The aim of the paper is to tackle some of the implications arising out of science, realism, objectivism, and relativism filtered through the prism of feminist social science literary production. While it appears that the endeavour for objectivity in knowledge is a necessary basis for rendering a feminist political undertaking meaningful, a careful analysis of some of the scholarly works on objectivity may prove somewhat dangerous to feminism in general as it might deconstruct the concept of a woman and female experience all together. Agreeing that the efforts and contributions of feminists in the area of epistemology are crucial in challenging traditional epistemological frameworks that have often marginalized or ignored the perspectives and experiences of women, this paper aims to critically reassess the attempts for preserving or building new doctrines of objectivity, and the potential consequences of such attempts for feminism itself.