Heuristic Voluntarism and Historicity in Gender Studies: An Epistemic Debate

Abstract

The present work is intended to investigate the methodological and epistemic conditions that may constrain the heuristic realms of anyone who is devoted to the gender studies. It is suggested here that as long as the social researcher intends to question the values, mindset and gnoseological constructs on which the tradition of gender studies is instituted, such a researcher should be able to renounce, at least initially, to any claim of scientism to his work (to such an end, the author will appeal, as a paradigmatic example, to the notion of the "performativity of the bodies" of Butler). In such a sense, it will be suggested that, in the end, the theoretical cost of opportunity related to the abovementioned inquiry can be exorbitantly considerable as long as it supposes restricting the heuristic freedom of the researcher.  Throughout this essay, the author will not appeal to bibliography related to the theoretical corpus of gender studies, but to contributions from epistemology and sociology of knowledge. On the other hand, the current essay is not grounded to discuss the rights of those groups which the gender studies attention is focused on, but, on the contrary, it will provide to exert some relative epistemological considerations within such a discipline.