What Can She Know?

When it comes to “knowing,” does it matter who does the knowing? Is knowing independent of the knower, and if not, what is it about the knower that affects the knowing? Canadian philosopher Lorraine Code argues persuasively that whether the knower is a man or woman matters so much that understanding why requires a feminist epistemology. That project involves a paradigm shift in epistemology, from valuing autonomy and objectivity (“pure reason”) to valuing interdependence and subjectivity (communal knowledge); from focusing on the relation of a proposition to reality, to focusing on the interrelationship of subject and proposition in creating knowledge/power.

What Can She Know?, a book collecting and synthesizing work begun in Code’s 1981 paper “Is the Sex of the Knower Epistemologically Significant?” Metaphilosophy 1981), is an important step toward articulating the feminist epistemology needed to theorize the interaction of knower and knowing. I suspect the book will be most useful to feminists and to those who already accept postmodern views about the instability of the subject and the constructed nature of reality (as we “know” it). What is characterized as “malestream” philosophy, by far the bulk of what is published and taught about philosophy, is the epistemology against which Code marshals evidence in a complex, nuanced, and deeply engaging argument. Code’s most effective rhetorical aid is her own evenhandedness and clarity in synthesizing a broad array of often-contradictory philosophical positions, from Immanuel Kant to Carol Gilligan, from Aristotle to Sara Ruddick, from Hans Georg Gadamer to Mary Field Belenky.

Code manages this in what I would describe as a non-combative discourse that resolutely avoids dichotomizing. She steps into the discursive gap between a deconstructive practice emphasizing undecideability, and the traditional practice emphasizing universality and gender neutrality. Her own practice weaves a web of understanding between those polarities, with gender as her chief point of departure. In staking out an epistemological territory she eventually describes as “middle ground,” Code positions herself between such dichotomizing debates as nature/nurture and essentialism/constructionism, debates that currently occupy many feminist theorists as well as philosophers of all kinds. Her position, moreover, is dynamic, not static, and emerges developmentally in succeeding chapters of the book. For example, her use of “sex” instead of “gender” in the early chapters turns out to be a deliberate retention of the language she and others used when first theorizing these issues. (In a footnote, Code defends this usage on historical grounds, “gender” being a relatively recent usage, “sex” being the term used by epistemologists discussed in her early chapters.) Conceptually, “middle ground” may be the wrong metaphor for establishing a new paradigm for thinking about thinking. “Common ground” seems to be what Code is seeking and what she most successfully achieves. Her critique establishes this common ground chiefly by articulating key feminist theories that challenge widely held beliefs about the procedures for defining and attaining knowledge. Often, she integrates feminist theory with what is useful from such non-feminists as Aristotle, Kant, Nietzsche, and Foucault. Code is especially effective in adducing what is useful in traditional philosophy, wasting little time attacking what is not useful, except in establishing the ways that what counts as knowledge has traditionally been defined so as to exclude women. Most of her opening chapter is devoted to showing how any claim for “women’s knowledge,” knowledge from a domain assigned to sterotypically-defined “women,” has been declared not-knowledge. Furthermore, she argues, the exclusion does not work symmetrically for men; that is, knowledge from a domain assigned to men has been assumed to be gender-neutral. Men define the norm for defining knowledge.

These and other ideas about gendered knowledge, and Code’s debunking of claims for gender-neutrality, are familiar in women’s studies. In fact, Code’s careful documentation of these ideas makes the book very valuable as a bibliographic guide to scores of feminist essays over the last twenty years. But they are not new ideas, and Code’s contribution is more one of synthesizing than of formulating a procedure or practice...