Campbell, Kirsten. Jacques Lacan and Feminist Epistemology. Florence, KY, USA: Routledge, 2004.133
Feminist discourses do not negate social fictions, since feminism cannot stand outside them. Instead, feminist discourses restage and resignify those existing social discourses and hence produce a new signifying chain.
The symbolization of the otherwise repudiated real of women, and the reinsertion of that signifier into existing symbolic structures, produces a new discourse. Feminist discourses disrupt the established possibilities for signifying acts, and, by producing new discourses, open new possibilities for discursive acts. With these new possibilities, feminist discourses create the potential for different speaking subjects and new forms of relations between them.
Like the ego-psychology of which Lacan is so critical, feminist knowledge often relies on empiricist (‘in my experience’) or positivist (‘studies have shown’) justifications for its knowledge claims. As both these forms of justification rely on a conscious knower, feminist knowledge exposes itself to the operation of the misrecognitions of the conscious, and hence to its radical error. The second and related problem emerges from the formulation of feminist knowledge as a discourse. … By conceiving knowledge as a discursive practice, there is no criterion or position ‘outside’ discourse to appeal to, … How, then, is it possible to justify feminist knowledge-claims?
In my model, feminist discourse evades the méconnaissance of the Master because it undertakes an act of symbolization of the ‘laws’ of discourse. Similarly to analytic discourse, it is situated in the field of the signifier because it is a practice of the symbolization of the real of women. In the Lacanian sense, it is a symbolic knowledge. Its undertaking of the symbolization of the a of social fictions situates feminist knowledge within the field of signification. In its disruption of the Discourse of the Master, feminist discourse produces a different speaking position for the knowing subject … feminist discursive practice can produce a different speaking position of a knowing subject from that of the Master of consciousness. Occupying a speaking position analogous to that of the analysand, a feminist knower accepts her ‘split and contradictory’ subjectivity and the finitude of her knowledge, and so repudiates mastery (Haraway 1991: 193). In this way, a knowing subject refuses the speaking position of the Master through her epistemic practices. 135-136