Disciplinary canons are gendered and there have been significant erasures and exclusions. Over the past several decades an impressive and original body of feminist criticism of social and political theory has emerged, that has forcefully challenged the masculinist assumptions of classical cannons. A critique of the partial, androcentric nature of disciplines is the starting point for all feminist interventions. We begin by interrogating this canon, from political philosophy and economics to sociology, we argue how a series of dualisms and binaries have characterized the development of knowledge. Women and those from marginal locations lie on the periphery of this ‘knowledge-making process’. We then ask what a feminist re-imagination of disciplines would entail. Is it all about adding the women’s perspective to the existing masculinist discourses or is it about disrupting and dismantling those hegemonic discourses and a reconceptualization of the same from a feminist perspective with the necessary shifts in epistemologies and ontologies? We argue for a fundamental re-ordering of canonical precepts and discourses through a feminist lens.
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Feminist Re-imagination of Social Theories
- January 7, 2023
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