Counting Zero: Rethinking Feminist Epistemologies

Abstract

This article concerns feminist engagements with epistemologies. Feminist epistemologies have revealed and challenged the exclusions and denigrations at work in knowledge production processes. And yet, the emphasis on the partiality of knowledge and the non-innocence of any subject position also cast doubt on the possibility of feminist political communities. In view of this, it has been argued that the very parameter of epistemology poses limitations for feminism, for it leads to either political paralysis or prescriptive politics that in fact undoes the political of politics. From a different perspective, decolonial feminists argue for radical epistemic disobedience and delinking the move beyond the confines of Western systems of knowledge and its extractive knowledge economy. Nevertheless, the oppositional logic informs both feminist epistemologies and its critiques, which I argue is symptomatic of the epistemic habits of academic feminism. This article ends with a preliminary reconsideration of the question of origin through the figure of zero. It asks whether it might be possible to conceive of feminist epistemologies as performing the task of counting zero – accounting for origin, wholeness, and universality – that takes into account specificities without forfeiting coalition and claims to knowledge.