The feminist movement has played a key role in challenging dominant modes of knowledge and expertise, revealing the masculine biases of allegedly objective knowledge and linking such biases to gendered power structures. In the field of health, the contestation of established medical knowledge and practices has also been centrally informed by the women’s health movement. In both the feminist movement broadly and in the women’s health movement, women’s ‘lived experiences’ have comprised an epistemic basis for building new knowledge challenging received wisdom. The use of women’s collectively processed personal experiences as an epistemic counter-authority has been most programmatically articulated in the method of feminist consciousness-raising that was central in the 1970s’ second wave of feminism. Meanwhile, feminist theorists, especially of a poststructuralist or social constructionist orientation, have criticized naïve concepts of experience as a basis for knowledge claims, arguing that experiences are always culturally and discursively mediated in a way that rids them of their status as an unproblematic locus of truth.
In this presentation we revisit feminist debates on the epistemic status of experience and its place in building counter-knowledges, through an analysis of group interviews (7) with and essays (23) written by women who claim or suspect that their use of copper IUDs has led to a range of systematic side-effects related to a bodily excess of copper. The knowledge claims about systemic side effects from copper IUDs are not supported by conventional medical authorities or healthcare institutions. The women were recruited from a Facebook group centred on the issue. We delineate the different ways that the women collectively draw on their own experiences as a ground for building their counter-discourse, relating to previous theorizations of feminist consciousness raising and feminist discussions of the relationship between experience and knowledge. However, we also show that the women’s invocation of experiential knowledge is complemented by other epistemic strategies bolstering their knowledge claims. Finally, we seek to draw out the implications of our case analysis for epistemic debates in a ‘post-truth’ era, where subjective experiences as a counterforce to established expertise are used by both progressive and reactionary groups.