Dialogue and Universalism

Volume 15, Issue 3/4, 2005

Sources and New Dreams of Western Wisdom

The Genesis and Justification of Feminist Standpoint Theory in Hegel and Lukács

Feminist standpoint epistemology suggests that women (or feminists) are cognitively privileged, since gender-specific forms of oppression produce insights systematically denied to men. Yet if many forms of oppression exist, what happens when they overlap? Some reject such theories as irredeemably essentialist, triumphalist, and relativist, but I argue that their original versions in Hegel and Lukács as supplemented by Sabina Lovibond generate both the strongest arguments for standpoint theories and a way through their deepest difficulties.