Postmodern feminism is a branch of feminism that opposes a universal female subject. Drawing on postmodern philosophy, postmodern feminism questions traditional ideas about gender, identity, and power, while emphasizing the social nature of these concepts.

Origins

Derrida

Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) challenged the idea of a singular, objective truth or "transcendental signifier," arguing instead that meaning is constructed through an endless chain of signifiers that refer only to each other. He introduced the concept of différance to illustrate how language operates through contrasts and perpetual deferral of meaning. His work underscores the idea that language does not represent reality but actively constructs it. Their work is deeply rooted in Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, focusing on pre-Oedipal experiences, maternal representation, and the unconscious. For feminism, this meant revisiting the sameness/difference debate through new lenses.

Theory

Centrality of language

Legal scholar Mary Joe Frug, a founding member of a group of legal scholars known as the Fem-Crits— itself a part of the critical legal studies movement—, suggested that one "principle" of postmodernism is that human experience is located "inescapably within language". Power is exercised not only through direct coercion, but also through the way in which language shapes and restricts our reality. She also stated that because language is always open to re-interpretation, it can also be used to resist this shaping and restriction, and so is a potentially fruitful site of political struggle.

Sex as a social construct

Postmodern feminism's major departure from other branches of feminism is perhaps the argument that sex, or at least gender, is itself constructed through language, a view notably propounded in Judith Butler's 1990 book, Gender Trouble. They draw on and critique the work of Simone de Beauvoir, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Lacan, as well as on Irigaray's argument that what we conventionally regard as "feminine" is only a reflection of what is constructed as masculine.

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 essentialism: though recognizing that gender is a social construct, feminists assume it is always constructed in the same way. Butler's argument implies that women's subordination has no single cause or single solution.

Similarly, Frug maintains 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.

Criticism

There have been many critiques of postmodern feminism since it originated in the 1990s. Most of the criticism has been from modernists and feminists supporting modernist thought.

thumb|Feminist activist [[Gloria Steinem]]

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." 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. 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. 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.

However, the very term "postmodernism" has been criticised by some theorists who have themselves been labelled as postmodern feminists: Butler, for example, rejects the term "postmodernism" as too vague to be meaningful. 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.

As with criticism of postmodernism in general, postmodern feminism also faces criticism with its heavy focus on sexism in language.

See also

References

Bibliography

  • 'Postmodern Feminism in 3 pages'