Feminist epistemology
Katrina Hutchison
Abstract
This chapter offers an overview of feminist epistemology and its connections with feminist bioethics. The chapter is divided into three sections. The first section provides a basic overview of feminist approaches to epistemology, summarizing key features of feminist empiricism, standpoint epistemology and postmodern feminist epistemologies. The second section explores challenges for the uptake of feminist epistemology in feminist bioethics, using the women’s health movement of the 1970s as an example of how key insights from feminist epistemology can be applied to topics in feminist bioethics. The final section focuses on connections between knowledge and power. It describes recent work on epistemic injustice and applications of this in feminist bioethics.