Feminist Epistemology

Epistemology means the science of knowledge. In Greek, Episteme means knowledge and logia means science. It is the study of the nature and sc

ope of knowledge and justified belief. It deals with the means of production of knowledge as well as scepticism about different knowledge. It can be defined as the study and theory of the nature and grounds of knowledge especially regarding its limits and validity. Pamela Moss argues that Feminist epistemology provides a critique of old models and develops new alternatives for them. There could be no particular, unique epistemology which is accepted by all feminists. In fact there are many overlapping accounts of knowledge which have common characteristics and could be called feminist. A feminist epistemology involves “not only hearing women’s voices but also thinking about how gender as a set of social relations affects both men’s and women’s responses in the research framework”.

1. Women’s Experience as the primary Epistemological Source

In her book, An Introduction to Feminist Epistemologies, Alessandra Tanesini says that the theory of knowledge has a normative character. Epistemology presupposes that there is difference between what we merely take as knowledge and real knowledge. It thus focuses on the means for giving knowledge and how we can differentiate between the truth and false. Women’s experience as the primary epistemological source – 1. Normative and 2. Daily experience.

The feminist theologians are insisting that it is the experience and agency of women that should be given priority in biblical reading. Hence they seek not only to articulate the experience of contemporary women but also to search for the experience of biblical women. Women’s experience was often understood in universalistic terms, although it was articulated mostly with respect to white middle class women. The experience is as varied and as complex as are the women articulating it. Some might object against such a pluralization of women’s experience, noting that women also share some common experiences, such as giving birth or being raped, or battered etc. Nevertheless to essentialize these female experiences as feminine is to overlook the fact that even these experiences differ, since gender is always inflected by race, culture, class, age and ethnicity. Consequently women’s experience must be analysed in systemic socio political and theological terms. It is socially constructed and coded in kyriocentric language a coding that is dualistic an asymmetric: male-positive, female negative, white-positive, black-negative, etc. Therefore a reading of kyriocentric biblical texts reinforces women’s experiences of inferiority and second class citizenship as divine revelation.

Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza argues that a hermeneutics of experience critically renders problematic the social religious and intellectual locations not only of biblical interpreters but also of biblical texts and it does so in relation to global struggles for survival and well being. Therefore the feminist types of experience has the following four crucial components:

1. Experience is mediated linguistically and culturally.

2. The personal is political, and is not private.

3. It demands critical analysis and reflection.

4. Experience is a hermeneutical starting point not the norm.

 

2. Developing Tools of Feminist and Interpretation of History

Historical interpretation is the process by which we describe, analyze, evaluate, and create an explanation of past events. We base our interpretation on primary [firsthand] and secondary scholarly] historical sources. Historical Interpretation requires synthesizing (combining) a variety of evidence, primary and secondary (critical thinking). Historical thinking involves the ability to arrive at meaningful and persuasive understandings of the past by applying all the other historical thinking skills, by drawing appropriately on ideas from different fields of inquiry or disciplines and by creatively fusing disparate, relevant (and perhaps contradictory) evidence from primary sources and secondary works.