A Decolonial Critique of Critical Feminist Epistemology

A feminist account of knowledge can reject the supposedly neutral male observer and still treat a privileged group of women as the measure of everyone else. That is the problem Yuderkys Espinosa-Miñoso develops in this theoretical intervention, published in the March–April 2014 issue of El Cotidiano. The target is not simply a shortage of diverse citations: it is a framework that acknowledges race and class while leaving a universal explanation of women’s oppression untouched.

What happens after difference is acknowledged?

Espinosa-Miñoso draws on Black feminism, feminisms of color, Latin American autonomous feminism and decolonial thought. Their relationship is argumentative, not a claim that these traditions form one school. She asks whether concepts developed around particular historical experiences can become universal without reproducing the hierarchies that made some experiences easier to publish, teach and authorize as theory.

A concrete example is her reading of Diana Maffía’s account of sexism in scientific knowledge. Espinosa-Miñoso challenges the move from recognizing that knowledge producers are socially situated to treating gender as the decisive division between two internally coherent groups. Race, class and geopolitical location cannot simply be added later if they help constitute those groups in the first place. The Spanish original, especially pages 9–10, makes this dispute visible through close engagement with formulations rather than a new population study.

Diversity can leave authority intact

A second example concerns Catharine Stimpson’s treatment of differences among women. Espinosa-Miñoso argues that acknowledging differences does not necessarily alter the explanatory priority given to gender. Differences can be admitted as a subsidiary topic while a dominant account continues to speak for the whole. This is her criticism, not proof that every text by the authors she discusses takes the same position.

The mechanism is institutional as well as conceptual. When some women have greater access to universities, publication and intellectual recognition, their experiences can become the starting assumptions of general theory. Calling those assumptions situated does little if the resulting categories remain exempt from revision. The useful test is therefore not how often a text names difference, but whether another history can change its central question, account of power and political priorities.

A demanding argument, not an identity credential

The essay is a polemical epistemological intervention. It does not settle every dispute within standpoint theory or offer a comparative assessment of all feminist epistemologies. Its strongest reading resists replacing one universal subject with another supposedly uniform group at the margins. Social location matters, but neither purity nor automatic truth follows from a label.

Read it alongside Haraway’s Situated Knowledges, attending to the difference between a commitment to partial perspective and its actual implementation. Rege’s Dalit feminist standpoint argument offers a further comparison: experience becomes politically useful knowledge through interpretation, collective work and accountability. Together these texts sharpen a practical question for research and organizing: who can revise the terms of a shared project, rather than merely enter it?