Third Wave Materialism: New Feminist Epistemologies and the Generation of European Women's Studies

Abstract

This dissertation focuses upon the specific field of feminist epistemology and upon ways in which recent developments in feminist epistemology have been and can be understood as well as accounted for. The dissertation engages with a problematic formulated by Rosi Braidotti who has argued that the terms of feminist philosophy are shifting, and that therefore it is time to review the ways in which academic feminists negotiate ‘the new feminist philosophical canon.’ The dissertation discusses the ways that new developments in feminist epistemology (new feminist materialism or third wave feminist materialism) re-position the epistemic categories that have organized the field while being attentive to the continuing impact of the categories invented by Sandra Harding: feminist empiricism, feminist standpoint theory, and feminist postmodernism. Included in the dissertation is a case study that studies the generation of European women’s studies in a new materialist manner.