Abstract

Current inquiries into the meaning of feminist concepts, such as the third world woman worker, seek to explain contemporary social relations of global capitalism within the context of the legacy of post-colonialist structures. At the same time, these very concepts draw attention to the limitations of language to adequately approximate the world as it is in order to capture some truth about its categorical entities, in particular, about the embodied experiences of the third world women worker. Through a comparative analysis of critical and postpositivist realisms that highlights feminist interventions in the context of standpoint epistemology, and the evolution in both towards dialectics, I argue that feminist dialectical realism offers an alternative to feminist poststructuralist materialisms as well as addresses limitations in prevailing standards for truth in social theory and philosophy.