Code’s Feminist Epistemology: Ecological Knowing

Notes on Lorraine Code, “Feminist Epistemologies and Women’s Lives”, in The Blackwell Guide to Feminist Philosophy, eds. Linda Martín Alcoff and Eva Feder Kittay (Malden: Blackwell, 2007).

Epistemology in its classical form is about determining “necessary and sufficient conditions for knowledge in general: conditions that would silence the skeptical challenge while establishing foundational truths and/or normative principles for achieving epistemic certainty” (211).

Late twentieth-century feminist critics called into question the status of the ‘we’ that is supposed to know, and the very idea of ‘knowledge in general’. They showed that these idealizations in fact cover over tacit exclusions and hierarchical assumptions that do not hold up upon closer inspection. Let’s take a look at why.