Feminist Epistemology. About Male, Female and Knowledge

My aim in this paper is to develop a social constructivist approach of feminist epistemology and to assert that speaking about a feminist conception of the world is a meaningful statement. Historically speaking, we have to make a difference between some stages of the feminist movement. The first was the liberation stage, then the equity stage and the last the reflective stage. The feminist epistemology was developed beginning with the second stage and its main topics were related to gender discrimination in scientific community. In the third stage of the feminist movement, the feminist epistemology became a sort of naturalized epistemology. The content of science itself was analized starting from feminist suppositions. But the assertions that the content of scientific theories and the truth of them are determined by gender criteria are too strong and refutable. Therefore, I suppose that the feminist epistemology could be conceived as a social construction. This means that some social factors related with gender differences have an epistemological significance. My thesis is that the epistemic value of these differences is equal with the differences between the so-called qualia. Hence, my approach is based on the supposition that we have to take into account the gender qualia as an explanans of the epistemic differences between male and female.