Thinking with the Weight of the Earth: Feminist Contributions to an Epistemology of Concreteness

Abstract

This essay proposes a possible direction for feminist epistemology—an embodied rationality that defines the process of knowing as a dialogue with particulars or the “things themselves.” On the grounds that modem reality is marked by abstract projects ofhomo mensura, I argue that the task of postmodernism is to ground cognition in the world by breaking the habit of looking at the world, as if from a distance, and by ceasing to think about the world as if it were composed of a collection of objects-in-general.