Barbara Johnson's statement not only challenges conventional modes of knowing but demands that we look at the concepts of knowledge and ignorance in a different light. In her view, ignorance does not signal the mere absence and opposite of knowledge. Rather, it is conceived as a means of examining and reconsidering the very terms within which we understand things.

The question of how knowledge is formulated, the cultural practices that inform how it is defined and the uses to which it may be put, have been major preoccupations of a range of feminist writing for some time. Such work unsettles the polarities that have found common currency in the meanings produced by modern Western culture. Johnson, for example, interrogates the conventional opposition between knowledge and ignorance and especially the gender markings inscribed in the cultural meanings of those terms which seek to fix woman (and ignorance) as the supplementary opposite of man (and knowledge). In turn, the effect of this radical questioning is to challenge the way in which we make sense and shape of the world in language: it is to shift, unfix and exceed the boundaries of knowing, and to contest the power relations that underlie gender relations.