Feminist Epistemology

Paper Summary:

This paper discusses how the nature of knowledge and human nature may be considered to be interchangeable, but how, in many places and at many times, the question of how we know what it is that we know about the world has not been a search for the nature of humanity, but a search for the nature of man. It examines how epistemology is not exempt from the fundamental sexism that is one of the defining aspects of so much of human history. It explores how human nature and the acquisition and accuracy of knowledge are linked and how conceptions of human nature and conceptions of knowledge are both gendered.

From the Paper:

"Masculine science, at least in the West (where the majority of science is produced and so where most of modern knowledge is also produced) creates a context for the production of knowledge in which is it possible (and even necessary) to argue that science (or "pure science") is a distinctly different activity from technology. Science doesn't kill people; technology kills people. Science, Fox Keller argues, can be seen to be an essentially aggressive act and aggressive in a particularly sexual way. And, moreover, this has been true since the beginning of Western civilization, since the practice of science began, although whether the sexuality referenced was homosexual or heterosexual has changed as has the degree to which such references are explicit or tacit."

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