Outrage Epistemology: Affective Excess as a Way of Knowing in Feminist Scholarship

Dominant paradigms of epistemology conventionally separate the rational from the emotional. In contradistinction to those views, we build on a rich tradition of scholarship about feminist anger to make the claim that outrage, in particular, has epistemic value. We understand feminist outrage-especially in the sense of a gross or malicious wrong or injury to principle-as a source of knowing, rather than an obstacle to it. Though the epistemic usefulness of anger has long been recognized among feminists, particularly Black feminists and other feminists of color, the disciplining of feminist outrage in the scholarly publication process invites our attention and demands our response. We define outrage epistemology as a way of knowing through felt, reflective awareness of injustice.