Abstract
This paper reviews the claims that areas of knowledge have been masculine and the attempt to develop feminist alternatives which followed from them. The idea of a feminist standpoint onto knowledge has been subject to hefty criticisms and this paper assesses the impact of these. Drawing on the recent work of Sandra Harding and Edward Said it redraws the project of standpoint epistemology to accommodate the significant impact of marginality, without making a fetish of difference. In doing so it provides an encounter between materialist and deconstructionist tendencies within contemporary epistemologies.