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Sourcing Women's Ecological Knowledge: The Worry of Epistemic Objectification

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Rebecca Tuvel
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Abstract

In this paper, I argue that although it is important to attend to injustices surrounding women's epistemic exclusions, it is equally important to attend to injustices surrounding women's epistemic inclusions. Partly in response to the historical exclusion of women's knowledge, there has been increasing effort among first‐world actors to seek out women's knowledge. This trend is apparent in efforts to mainstream gender in climate change negotiation. Here, one is told that women's superior knowledge about how to adapt to climate change makes them “poised to help solve and overcome this daunting challenge.” Pulling from the work of Miranda Fricker, I argue that such claims risk epistemically objectifying women. To illuminate the risk of women's epistemic objectification in climate change discourse, I offer a feminist analysis of current efforts to seek women's environmental knowledge, cautioning throughout that such efforts must reflect just epistemic relations.

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Articles
Information
Hypatia , Volume 30 , Issue 2 , Spring 2015 , pp. 319 - 336
Copyright
Copyright © 2015 by Hypatia, Inc.

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