Abstract

Feminist theorists have often claimed that male-dominant knowledge frameworks make it difficult for women to stake knowledge claims, because traditional standards of rationality are not gender-neutral. There is some prima facie reason to think that this contention of feminists is absurd. If all knowledge is context-relative, as many contemporary philosophers assert, how it is possible to have a knowledge claim which is in some way at odds with its own grounding framework? But feminists assert that there are such claims. The task of this dissertation will be to illuminate and defend this contention of feminists, without sacrificing contemporary claims about the context-relativity of knowledge. This problem will be examined both as an epistemological problem and as a practical one. The social practices which might support such ambiguous claims will be examined; feminism will be situated vis a vis other modern critical philosophies; and both Dostoevsky and Mae West will be used as examples of successful claim-staking within alien frameworks