Postmodern feminism
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Postmodern feminism is a mix of
Postmodern feminists seek to analyze any notions that have led to gender inequality in society. Postmodern feminists analyze these notions and attempt to promote equality of gender through critiquing
The inclusion of postmodern theory into feminist theory is not readily accepted by all feminists—some believe postmodern thought undermines the attacks that feminist theory attempts to create, while other feminists are in favor of the union.[1]
Origins and theory
French feminism
French feminism, as it is known today, is an Anglo-American invention coined by Alice Jardine to be a section in a larger movement of postmodernism in France during the 1980s. This included the theorizing of the failure of the modernist project, along with its departure. More specifically for feminism, it meant returning to the debate of sameness and difference.[5]
The term was further defined by Toril Moi, an academic with a focus on feminist theory, in her 1986 book Sexual/Textual Politics. In this book she further defined French feminism to only include a few authors such as Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray, and Julia Kristeva, while also creating a distinction between French feminism and Anglo-American Feminism.[6] She states that the difference between the two is that Anglo-American feminists want to find a "woman-centered perspective" and a woman identity since they were not given the chance to have one in the past. French feminists believe there is no identity for a woman 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.[7] Through American academics contriving their own concept of French feminism, it separated and ignored the already marginalized self-identifying feminists, while focusing on the women theorists associated with Psych et po (Psychanalyse et politique) and other academics who did not always identify as feminists themselves. This division ultimately ended up placing more importance on the theories of the French feminists than the political agenda and goals that groups such as radical feminists and the Mouvement de liberation des femmes (women's liberation movement) had at the time.[8]
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.[13]
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".[15]
Critiques
There have been many critiques of postmodern feminism since it originated in the 1990s. Most of the criticism has been from
Focus on language
As with criticism of postmodernism in general[
Of the name
The very term "postmodernism" has been criticised by some theorists who have themselves been labelled as postmodern feminists.[12]
See also
References
- ^ ISSN 1545-6846.
- ^ JSTOR 377692.
- ^ OCLC 1041706991.
- OCLC 967130390.
- ^ S2CID 144756187.
- OCLC 49959398.
- OCLC 5051713.
- ProQuest 233178967.
- ISSN 2164-1250.
- ^ Gutting, G. (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Foucault (2002), p. 389.
- S2CID 144691426.
- ^ 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.
- ^ "Studies On Contemporary Chinese Woman Development". www.wikidata.org. Retrieved 2023-12-12.
Bibliography
- 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.