Graduation Year

2016

Document Type

Campus Only Senior Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelor of Arts

Department

Philosophy

Second Department

Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies

Reader 1

Jih-Fei Cheng

Reader 2

Scott Dion-Kakures

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Terms of Use for work posted in Scholarship@Claremont.

Rights Information

© 2016 Jing Gu

Abstract

In this project I outline the current discourse within feminist epistemology and elucidated its limitations of feminist epistemology particularly its lack of formal attention to the modes of theorization and, in complementarity, the generative potential of an analysis foregrounding materiality. The first chapter explores the theories that constitute the field of study and the relationships between both feminist empiricism and standpoint theory illuminate the conceptual concerns of feminist epistemology. Building from this, I present an analysis that examines the rhetorical and disciplinary structures that determine the kinds of arguments and methodologies that are possible within these frameworks. This argument simultaneously presents an analysis of theoretical formation as well as a critique of the lack of attention given to the rhetorical and formal scaffolds which render additional epistemic limitations perceivable. Lastly, I demonstrate a mode of knowledge production that centers materiality and body which exerts pressure on the very frameworks utilized in the analysis of materiality and embodiment. If materiality has the capacity to articulate relationships between knower and knowledges formed by the knower and formal elements of research has the capacity to render the limits of knowledges created from the research, then feminist epistemology should account for the formal and the material in its attempts to explicate the possibilities and limitations of epistemology.

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