Epistemologies of Engagement

Abstract

An entrenched Western philosophical will to mastery habitually codes irreducible differences as obstacles to truth and to political action. Instead, I argue that these differences are our most valuable resource, crucial nodes of potential dialogue, epistemological transformation, and effective political action. Philosophically and historically implicated in the racist, sexist, classist episteme they are also trying to challenge, U.S. academic feminists, among other critics of empire, need themselves to be challenged on the most fundamental levels, a process which cannot be undertaken unilaterally. Noncolonizing, nonhierarchical dialogue both requires and enables such a transformation.

‘we are not like them’: reinventing modernity within tradition in the debates on female khatna / female genital cutting in India

“…The production of knowledge appropriated by colonial discourses, they claim, does not consider the categories of 'difference' such as religious identity, in this case, the 'Muslim woman' (Ishaque, 2013, p. 339). Those employing a gendered epistemology do not believe that Islam itself gives men an epistemic privilege; rather, this privilege is read in patriarchal readings of Islamic texts (the Holy Qur'an and hadith) by male-centred epistemology (Cooke, 2001;Barlas, 2002;Waller, 2005). Recent work on women in religious movements has also moved from a reductive focus on causal or motivational factors to more sophisticated analyses using religious subjectivity to explicate processes of agency, subject formation and alternative modernities (Najmabadi, 1998;Mack, 2003;Mahmood, 2004;Kandiyoti, 2005; Kamali, 2012).…”

Chaostheorie und Literaturwissenschaft

“…differently. 522 Marguerite Waller führt mit Gayatri Spivak, Trinh T. Minh-ha, Gloria Anzaldúa, Jacqueline Bobo, Eve Sedgwick und Emily Hicks einige Theoretikerinnen an, die sich einer alternativen Wissensproduktion angenommen hätten, wobei der Zugewinn für die Theoriebildung deutlich ist:…”