POL 2103 Lecture Notes - Lecture 10: Existentialism, Standpoint Feminism, Dualism
19 Dec 2015
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Ontology (what does it mean to become a women or to be gendered?) Ethics (what does it mean to relate to others and to oneself as a women or as a gendered subject?) Gender in international relations: historical/theoretical context. 1970"s work on women and development dependency theory. Post-colonialist literature, peace studies literature, political thought, critiques of the social scientific method: varieties of feminist epistemological theories. Important distinctions: biological categories of male and female, socially constructed models of masculine and feminine, political positions of masculinist and feminist, all these interrelated. Gender in political theory: feminism (origins) Not mutually exclusive and not comprehensive: feminist empiricism. Sexist and androcentric biases can be eliminated by stricter adherence to existing epistemological methods. Existing ones are flawed only insofar as gender bias is allowed to infect the construction of epistemological theories: standpoint feminism, postmodern feminism. Once biases are eliminated, epistemology will be righted and will thus constitute a stable and rationally adequate enterprise.
