Drawing primarily from the work of Julia Kristeva and Judith Butler, the author suggests that a postmodern approach to identity can be used to challenge the essentialism that pervades both feminist empiricism and standpoint theory, and thus move feminist psychology in a more emancipatory direction. A major premise of this paper is that an engagement with postmodernism redirects our attention to symbolic constructions of femininity and to the sociopolitical grounding of experience.

This paper will first examine the different versions of social or socialized epistemology, a field that has gathered much support among epistemologists in recent years. After the necessary classification, the paper goes on to suggest that socialized epistemology could benefit from contemporary social theory, and Derek Layder's views are presented as especially fruitful in this respect. To give grounds for this suggestion, features of Layder's theory will be contrasted with certain shortcomings in 'conservative' and 'feminist' versions of socialized epistemology.