“The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” This famous phrase was pronounced by Audre Lorde during a conference at the New York University Institute for the Humanities in 1984. Invited to participate in the only, and hastily organized, section about black feminism in that event, Lorde questioned the modus operandi in academics feminists’ circuits that symptomatically replays racial hierarchies even when allowing some space for black feminists. Starting from this bruising criticism, this thematic issue of e-cadernos ces aims to ask: is it possible, within academia, to produce transformative – and not reproductive – knowledge on inequalities, historically structured upon hierarchies of gender, race and class? Lorde herself offers a clue to solve the dilemma: it is necessary to question the production of scientific knowledge from the perspective of those who have been excluded from the production of scientific knowledge. This is the standpoint for developing feminist projects of de-colonizing epistemologies.

De-colonizing feminist epistemologies indicate that radical projects have their own stories of struggle, their own forms of both theorization and organization that embody – and transform – feminist practices. Basing on this perspective, we search for articles that critically problematize, in their analysis, at least one of the following issues:

i) the plurality of knowledge, beyond false binaries and oppositions, as well as the importance  of the political  dimension of daily body experiences and their various  forms of resistance;

ii)  the idea that a socially responsible knowledge can only be produced through an active dialogic engagement between different feminist initiatives, centered on a  broad questioning of gender and class hierarchies;

iii) the racial and classist foundations of science, including the critique of how capitalist processes produce ecological destruction and the expropriation of indigenous knowledge for profit;

iv) the critique of both universalism and relativism, which aim not only to cover all experiences, reducing them to one explanatory scheme which is in itself incompatible with the complexity of the cultural constellations that structure (post)colonial societies, but also to overshadow the persistence of the colonial difference, obscuring and maintaining intact relations of power and domination.

The e-cadernos ces are an online publication with free access based on a peer review system and edited by the Center for Social Studies of the University of Coimbra, Portugal. The e-cadernos ces are currently indexed in the following databases: CAPES, EBSCO and Latindex. For more information about the publication, please go to: http://www.ces.uc.pt/e-cadernos/pages/en/index.php?lang=EN

All texts must be submitted in full version, in Portuguese, English or Spanish. The texts must contain between 50 and 70,000 characters (spaces included), including notes and references. For the final section @cetera, it is possible to submit interviews and review essays (25,000 characters maximum) or book reviews.

Detailed guidelines for submitting texts are available at http://www.ces.uc.pt/e-cadernos/media/Normas_publicacao_e_cadernos_en.pdf. Manuscripts should be sent by email to e-cadernos@ces.uc.pt and authors should clearly identify the thematic issue in question: “Feminist Epistemologies: Encountering Radical Criticism”.


The deadline for submission is June 17, 2013.

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Lennita Oliveira Ruggi  - Universidade Federal do Paraná (UFPR), lennitaruggi@hotmail.com
  Rosimeire Barboza Silva -  Centro de Estudos Sociais da Universidade de Coimbra (CES/UC), rosebs@ces.uc.pt