ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

The Gendered Order of Legitimate Knowledge: Institutional Epistemicide in the Twentieth Century

• In Event: Objectivity Reconsidered

English Abstract

Scholarship on epistemicide –from Federici and de Sousa Santos to work by Kwaschik– has framed it as the early modern erasure of alternative, often feminized, knowledge traditions. This paper extends that genealogy by arguing that a distinct twentieth-century variant emerged within biomedical institutions. Here, epistemic loss was enacted not through persecution but through evaluative procedures that defined what counted as evidence. Methodological norms centred on objectivity and quantification rendered embodied and care-based expertise illegible. “Institutional epistemicide” thus functions as an analytic category capturing how these norms operated as filters of experience and as mechanisms for producing epistemic invisibility.

The analysis develops through US feminist health activism in the 1970s and 1980s. Drawing on Our Bodies, Ourselves, self-help gynecology manuals, diagnostic practices and critiques of sampling protocols in clinical research, the paper reconstructs how activists exposed inconsistencies in expert reasoning and showed why prevailing evidential standards failed to register women’s embodied experience. These materials reveal counter-archives –manuals, collective reports, symptom mappings– that acted as competing repertoires of verification within terrain claimed by biomedical authority.

By situating these dynamics within broader histories of contested biomedicine, the paper shows that institutional epistemicide was enacted through conflicts over who could produce credible knowledge and under which standards. It shows how marginalized epistemologies persisted through alternative practices of verification that articulated plural epistemic worlds, unsettled biomedical standards of evidence, and clarified both the historical construction of scientific authority and possibilities for redefining its boundaries.

Author

• Maria Amiridi-Wiedenmayer, National and Kapodistrian University Athens