AfricaBib 
bibliographic database
| Previous page | New search |
The free AfricaBib App for Android is available here
 Periodical article |
 Leiden University catalogue |
 WorldCat |
| Title: | Feminist Epistemology and Representation: The Impact of Post-Modernism and Post-Colonialism |
| Author: | Gouws, Amanda |
| Year: | 1996 |
| Periodical: | Transformation: Critical Perspectives on Southern Africa |
| Issue: | 30 |
| Pages: | 65-82 |
| Language: | English |
| Geographic term: | South Africa |
| Subjects: | feminism Women's Issues Law, Human Rights and Violence Equality and Liberation Status of Women research |
| External link: | https://d.lib.msu.edu/tran/294/OBJ/download |
| Abstract: | Feminism's concern with gender inequality in South Africa has led to challenges on a metatheoretical level of foundationalist epistemologies to show how partial and historically situated knowledge has passed as ahistorical and universal truths. Yet, in an attempt to correct these metatheoretical inadequacies feminism has created universal truths all of its own, and in terms of the constitution of the subject has often excluded women of colour. In this article the author analyses three different epistemological traditions which are important for feminism: the feminist standpoint, the postmodern, and the postcolonial epistemology. The analysis takes place on an abstract theoretical level and it is necessary to discuss the literature in some detail to tease out the underlying assumptions of the debate in which feminists in South Africa criticize each other's research practices. In the second section, the author analyses the nature of the South African academy which pits black and white women against each other. She also deals with the essentialist way in which 'experience' is used when women deny that all experience is mediated by structural conditions, and the demand to deal with difference but the actual inability to deal with it. Bibliogr., notes, ref. |
