For example, imagine a group of urban planners working on the design for a new quarter in a city. According to standpoint theory, including women in the design of a new quarter in the city would mean that they might take into account the safety concerns of women walking alone at night or to prioritize more family-friendly areas such as parks and playgrounds.
Standpoint theory also contends that those who control our knowledge-producing institutions should not simply be those with the most power — whether it be men or corporations or governments and militaries. Standpoint theorists argue that in our current social order these groups get to decide which questions are worth researching and which projects get funded. In line with this assertion, standpoint theory also takes an intersectional approach and is an important element of critical race theory. For example, in Black Feminist Thought, Patricia Hill Collins highlights the importance of elevating black women’s perspectives on the world in informing scientific inquiry.
Feminist postmodernism
Finally, as part of a broader critique of Enlightenment philosophy, feminist postmodernism takes issue with the pursuit of universal, objective forms of knowledge as a project itself. Rather, feminist postmodernists are more interested in the ways in which things like power, ideology, and identity shape social reality. For feminist postmodernists, there will always exist vastly different perspectives on social reality and, therefore, no one identity group can claim absolute, objective knowledge.
In terms of how this translates into feminist issues, feminist postmodernists reject binary conclusions about characteristics essential to men — such as strength and aggression — and to women — such as docility and domesticity. Instead, they emphasize the fragmented nature of identity by pointing to the various relationships to gender experienced by gender non-conforming people and people who live outside of white, western cultural contexts such as the Hijras in India or the two-spirit of indigenous peoples of North America.
Beyond merely challenging the gender binary (see our guide to gender performativity for more), postmodern feminists also tend to critique and break apart how we delineate our identities in the first place. One such postmodern feminist epistemologist is Donna Haraway, who is associated with new materialism and posthumanism, a perspective which goes beyond the previous two approaches to feminist epistemology by reimagining the bounds of categories such as man, woman, and even human. As Stephen Abblitt explains in “Composite Lives,”