Epistemologies

Epistemology is the philosophy of knowledge and its production, sources, scope, structure, methods, and conditions. There are different, often contested ways of knowing and accounting for that multiplicity necessitates the plural: epistemologies. Epistemologies examine the how, what, why, where, and who of knowledge. In challenging the ways of naming, describing, and knowing gender and its relationship to embodiment, Trans Studies has been concerned with epistemologies since its inception. Some even argue that trans existence—that is, the assertion of one’s gender as different in some way from that assigned—is inherently an exercise in confronting the epistemological limits of cisnormative gender and thus always a practice of critique. Trans engagement with epistemic questions, on one hand, formulates correctives to established, often disciplinary bodies of knowledge and, on ...