Counting Zero: Rethinking Feminist Epistemologies

Abstract

This article concerns feminist engagements with epistemologies. Feminist epistemologies have revealed and challenged the exclusions and denigrations at work in knowledge production processes. And yet, the emphasis on the partiality of knowledge and the non-innocence of any subject position also cast doubt on the possibility of feminist political communities. In view of this, it has been argued that the very parameter of epistemology poses limitations for feminism, for it leads to either political paralysis or prescriptive politics that in fact undoes the political of politics. From a different perspective, decolonial feminists argue for radical epistemic disobedience and delinking the move beyond the confines of Western systems of knowledge and its extractive knowledge economy. Nevertheless, the oppositional logic informs both feminist epistemologies and its critiques, which I argue is symptomatic of the epistemic habits of academic feminism. This article ends with a preliminary reconsideration of the question of origin through the figure of zero. It asks whether it might be possible to conceive of feminist epistemologies as performing the task of counting zero -accounting for origin, wholeness, and universality -that takes into account specificities without forfeiting coalition and claims to knowledge.

Global Feminist Autoethnographies During COVID-19

“…My embodied life in 2020 has been more local than ever; yet my lived experience of the year 2020 is far from local but embodies all scales from global microbial flows to economic fluctuations to feminist theorizing across borders. Feminist epistemology, uncertainty as a method and skill, has always emphasized the miniscule, the extremely local kitchen table discussions (Oakley 1981) with their intersectional, even transnational relationality (Collins 2019;Liu 2017;Phoenix 1994). Thinking with the very concept of distance within the feminist science studies traditions, distance diffracts.…”

“…This chapter has limited space to discuss how the different feminist orientations that span over 30 years of feminist theorizing influence each other but also diverge in important aspects, especially in terms of sociological methodology. I hope, however, that the following discussion on my own year will offer some provocations on how the embodied distance can be lived as political/personal diffractions in scale (Tsing 2015), where the lens of intersectional difference is crucial, as is also a commitment to not quite know or know diffractively (Collins 2019;Liu 2017;Oinas 2021).…”

Disorientation, disbelief, distance

“…My embodied life in 2020 has been more local than ever; yet my lived experience of the year 2020 is far from local but embodies all scales from global microbial flows to economic fluctuations to feminist theorizing across borders. Feminist epistemology, uncertainty as a method and skill, has always emphasized the miniscule, the extremely local kitchen table discussions (Oakley 1981) with their intersectional, even transnational relationality (Collins 2019;Liu 2017;Phoenix 1994). Thinking with the very concept of distance within the feminist science studies traditions, distance diffracts.…”

“…This chapter has limited space to discuss how the different feminist orientations that span over 30 years of feminist theorizing influence each other but also diverge in important aspects, especially in terms of sociological methodology. I hope, however, that the following discussion on my own year will offer some provocations on how the embodied distance can be lived as political/personal diffractions in scale (Tsing 2015), where the lens of intersectional difference is crucial, as is also a commitment to not quite know or know diffractively (Collins 2019;Liu 2017;Oinas 2021).…”