  Feminist standpoint theories have developed substantially over the years, especially in response to feminist theorists’ recognition that gender cannot be understood in isolation from other social categories. For example, the highly influential work of Patricia Hill Collins puts forth the idea of a black women’s standpoint, identifying specific epistemic resources in black women’s experience that are important to the development of black feminist thought (Collins 1990). Recognizing the intersection of many axes of oppression, feminist standpoint theorists have had to reconceptualize the idea of the margins and move away from the original Marxian standpoint premise of a bifurcated society. As bell hooks has articulated, the margins must be recognized as both sites of oppression and resistance (hooks 1990). If this is the case, then the Marxian requirement that the epistemic privilege of the oppressed must stem from their being positioned as the inverse of the dominant in a bifurcated system, is mistaken. The oppressed can gain epistemic privilege through their resistance, without relying on the idea that they complete the system of power by being positioned as both marginal and central the system’s functioning (Tanesini 1999).