Postmodern feminism
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Postmodern feminism is a branch of feminism that opposes a universal female subject.[1][2][3] Drawing on postmodern philosophy, postmodern feminism questions traditional ideas about gender, identity, and power, while emphasizing the socially constructed and fluid nature of these concepts.[2]
Postmodern feminists argue that language constructs reality and that power is embedded in social norms, shaping identities and limiting agency. They seek to challenge traditional binary oppositions (e.g., man/woman, culture/nature) and deconstruct hierarchies.[1]
The inclusion of postmodern theory into feminist theory is not readily accepted by all feminists—some believe postmodern thought undermines the attacks that feminism attempts to create, while other feminists are in favor of the union.[4]
Origins
Derrida
Foucault
Michel Foucault (1926-1984) viewed power as a diffuse and pervasive force that shapes individual subjectivity. In his framework, power is not merely repressive but productive, operating through institutions, norms, and internalized self-surveillance. He suggested that recognizing these power dynamics can enable individuals to challenge and reconstitute their subjectivities.[1]
French feminism
French feminism, as it is known today, is not a self-defined school of thought originating in France, but rather an Anglo-American construct. It describes a certain body of theory associated with French-speaking thinkers—particularly
The term was coined by Alice Jardine to identify an emerging trend in French intellectual circles in the 1980s, where the failure of Enlightenment ideals was being re-theorized.[6] For feminism, this meant revisiting the sameness/difference debate through new lenses.[5] Toril Moi's book Sexual/Textual Politics (1986) further shaped French feminism by including only Cixous, Irigaray, and Kristeva.[7][5] Moi also made official a distinction between Anglo-American and French feminism: while Anglo-American feminists wanted to find a "woman-centered perspective", French feminists believed there was no identity for women but that "the feminine can be identified where difference and otherness are found."[5]
Elaine Marks, an academic in the field of Women's Studies, noted another difference between French and American feminists: French feminists, specifically radical feminists, criticized and attacked the systems that benefit men, along with widespread misogyny as a whole, more intensely than their American counterparts.[8]
Theory
Haraway
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Donna Haraway's 1985 essay "A Cyborg Manifesto" is a reflection on the politics of feminism in postmodernity. Haraway uses the cyborg, a hybrid of nature and culture, as a metaphor to criticize binary thinking and totalizing identities.[9]
Butler
Postmodern feminism's major departure from other branches of feminism is perhaps the argument that
Butler criticises the distinction drawn by previous feminisms between (biological) sex and (socially constructed) gender. They ask why we assume that material things (such as the body) are not subject to processes of social construction themselves. Butler argues that this does not allow for a sufficient criticism of
Paula Moya argues that Butler derives this rejection to postmodernism from misreadings of Cherríe Moraga's work. "She reads Moraga's statement that 'the danger lies in ranking the oppressions' to mean that we have no way of adjudicating among different kinds of oppressions—that any attempt to casually relate or hierarchize the varieties of oppressions people suffer constitutes an imperializing, colonizing, or totalizing gesture that renders the effort invalid…thus, although Butler at first appears to have understood the critiques of women who have been historically precluded from occupying the position of the 'subject' of feminism, it becomes clear that their voices have been merely instrumental to her" (Moya, 790). Moya contends that because Butler feels that the varieties of oppressions cannot be summarily ranked, that they cannot be ranked at all; and takes a short-cut by throwing out the idea of not only postmodernism, but women in general.[12]
Frug
Legal scholar
Frug's second postmodern principle is that sex is not something natural, nor is it something completely determinate and definable. Rather, sex is part of a system of meaning, produced by language. Frug argues that "cultural mechanisms ... encode the female body with meanings", and that these cultural mechanisms then go on to explain these meanings "by an appeal to the 'natural' differences between the sexes, differences that the rules themselves help to produce".[14]
Criticism
Modernist critics have put a focus on the themes of relativism and nihilism as defined by postmodernism. They believe that through abandoning the values of Enlightenment thought postmodern feminism "precludes the possibility of liberating political action."[15] This concern can be seen in critics such as Meaghan Morris, who have argued that postmodern feminism runs the risk of undercutting the basis of a politics of action based upon gender difference, through its very anti-essentialism.[16] Alison Assiter published the book Enlightened Women (1995) to critique postmodernists and postmodern feminists alike, saying that there should be a return to Enlightenment values and modernist feminism.[17] Gloria Steinem has also criticized feminist theory, and especially postmodernist feminist theory, as being overly academic, where discourse that is full of jargon and inaccessible is helpful to no one.[18]
As with criticism of postmodernism in general[
See also
References
- ^ OCLC 1041706991.
- ^ JSTOR 377692.
- ^ S2CID 144691426.
- ISSN 1545-6846.
- ^ S2CID 144756187.
- doi:10.2307/464680.
- OCLC 49959398.
- OCLC 5051713.
- ISSN 2164-1250.
- ^ Gutting, G. (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Foucault (2002), p. 389.
- ^ a b Butler, Judith, "Contingent Foundations", in Seyla Benhabib et al., Feminist Contentions: A Philosophical Exchange (New York: Routledge, 1995), pp. 35–58.
- ISBN 9780393927900.
- .
- JSTOR 1341520.
- ^ Hekman, Susan J. (1990). Gender and Knowledge. Boston: Northeastern University Press. pp. 152–153.
- ^ Schmidt, K. (2005). The Theater of Transformation. pp. 129–130.
- ^ Assiter, Alison (1995). Enlightened Women. London: Routledge.
- ISSN 0261-3077. Retrieved 2019-03-29.
Bibliography
- Nicholson, Linda (1990). Feminism/postmodernism. New York: Routledge. ISBN 9780415900591.
- Assiter, Alison (1996). Enlightened women: modernist feminism in a postmodern age. London New York: Routledge. ISBN 9780415083386.
- Kottiswari, W. S. (2008). Postmodern feminist writers. New Delhi: Sarup & Sons. ISBN 9788176258210.
- Williams, Susan; Williams, David (1 January 1996). "A Feminist Theory of Malebashing". Michigan Journal of Gender & Law. 4 (1): 35–127. ISSN 1095-8835.