Postmodern Feminism

11 Key excerpts on "Postmodern Feminism"

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  Emancipatory International Relations

  Critical Thinking in International Relations

  • Roger D. Spegele(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  8 Postmodernist international relations feminist theory Can one avoid the maelstrom? DOI: 10.4324/9781315768007-8

  1 Introduction

  From the last chapter it should be apparent that modernist feminism has some formidable detractors who identify themselves as postmodernists and who have prepared the ground for replacing modernist feminism altogether by occupying the space between it and other feminist conceptions. Such a view is to be expected as soon as one grasps that Postmodern Feminism has a completely different epistemic view about the Subject (X in our formula) than the kind of feminism canvassed in the previous chapter. It also has different views of theory and practice and a different understanding of the role of philosophy and how to create radical change in the face of resistance.

  Postmodernist feminism is a conception which may be described as ‘discursive’ or a ‘discursive practice’, an idea that would lead us to expect women to take up different Subject positions in the performance of multiple subjectivities, that is, in perceiving themselves acting as mothers, food providers, citizens, community workers, artists, lesbians, intellectuals, the exact content being dependent on context and personal characteristics.

  To put this somewhat differently, for postmodern feminist international relations, identity is constructed through discourse and embodies interpretative possibilities that focus on inscriptions of styles and on performativity. Identity contains within it multiple, contested sights of meaning, encompassing critique and creativity. Postmodern feminist international relations’ conception of identity looks to the possibility of achieving emancipation via a radically different understanding of subjectivity: subjectivity is not discovered as in modernist conceptions; it is created. Such an understanding of subjectivity works within a shifting terrain of struggle in which the mode of identity is claimed, refused, reclaimed and (possibly) diffused. For postmodern feminist international relations there is no univocal entity woman

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  Women, Gender, and World Politics

  Perspectives, Policies, and Prospects

  • Peter R. Beckman(Author)
  • 1994(Publication Date)
  • Praeger

    (Publisher)

  More importantly, it means that there is very little that knowing actors can do to challenge those meanings or identities. The ways in which power manifests itself, the particular meanings and identities that emerge, seem almost inevitable. They are unrelated to prevailing material conditions or the activities of agents and institutions. Critics, then, may describe the play of power in the construction of meaning, but cannot participate in changing it. 31 Postmodernists are equally postfeminist, a title that they sometimes adopt, for their analysis loses sight of the political imperatives that inform Feminism: to uncover and to change inequalities between women and men. As Ann Marie Goetz suggests, when many of the issues surrounding women and international relations are ones that concern the very survival of those women, Postmodernism's continued backpedaling and disclaimers are not only politically unacceptable but are, more importantly, politically irre- sponsible. 32 Feminist Theories • 83 CRITICAL/FEMINIST INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS: FROM WOMEN TO GENDER There are, then, a number of important problems associated with Liberal feminism, Radical feminism, and Feminist Postmodernism, but this is not to say that there is nothing of value in any of these attempts to produce a Feminist theory of world politics. Each makes a contribution toward uncov- ering the ways in which women have not been absent from international relations and the ways in which world politics have always been gendered. Combining the best of each theory will help us move from an examination of women to an analysis of gender in world politics. I call this combination "Critical/Feminist Theory," or a "gender-in-International-Relations" per- spective. Liberal feminists have underscored the absence of women from both the practice and study of international relations. This absence has been used in the past to defend the supposed gender neutrality of the study of world politics.

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  Fundamental Feminism

  Radical Feminist History for the Future

  • Judith Grant(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Spurs. Rather, in postmodern and Anglo-American feminist theory, analysis takes place from a political perspective; in short, through a feminist lens. Postmodern feminists look more to power and liberation vis-a-vis gender, and in this emphasis they depart from the tradition established around the core concepts. What is not always clear from post-modern feminisms, however, is what female liberation will look like. The images of nonidentity that are invoked as strategies for liberation are often alienating and not nearly so comforting as the peaceful community evoked in feminisms content to be grounded in a feminine principle. This does not change the fact that, in this instance, as with all other hyphenated feminist theories, a feminist politics guides the use of the theory. Though it is anti-foundationalist, Postmodern Feminism relies on a political identity that grew out of a foundation-alist feminism.

  Despite ambiguity about the very idea of postmodernism and its relationship to feminism, something called “Postmodern Feminism” is currently enjoying a lively existence among feminists off the Continent. These theorists do not shy away from calling themselves feminists, but do reject many of the major categories of Anglo-American feminism. Although they eschew an essentialized use of Woman, they do, in fact (even obviously), share the Anglo-American feminist desire for women’s liberation as a major raison d’etre. But rather than grounding feminism in female experience, gender is examined as a source of power and hierarchy, which are assumed to have a differentially negative impact on women as beings who embody the “feminine.” Power becomes a major category in this analysis. Epistemological questions about how to ground feminism in women’s experiences, and how to define Woman, become less important than questions about how to resist power and enhance freedom.

  This stress on power and freedom in some Postmodern Feminism is due in large part to the influence of Foucault. On the relationship between truth and power, he writes,

  [T]ruth isn’t outside power, or lacking in power…. Truth is a thing of this world: it is produced only by virtue of multiple forms of constraint. And it induces regular effects of power. Each society has its regime of truth, its “general politics” of truth: that is, the types of discourse which it accepts and makes function as true; the mechanisms and instances which enable one to distinguish true and false statements.8

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  Gender

  • Harriet Bradley(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Polity

    (Publisher)

  According to Waugh, this reflexivity has led feminists to discern a contradiction at the heart of their thinking: namely, that the quest for equality, which is the political heart of feminism, is based on the notion of a distinct and separate gendered identity. This in turn is the foundation of a common movement among women, the solidarity of sisterhood built on shared experience. But this idea of women as ‘different’ from men in some common way is similar, Waugh suggests, to the patriarchal ideology which legitimates different treatment of the sexes through the proposition of ‘essential’ and ‘natural’ gender difference. Like Mottier, we can question the idea that all women do share a common identity. Throughout the 1980s women from various ethnic minority backgrounds, in particular, argued that white feminism did not speak to or for them and that they did not feel included in the notion of ‘sisterhood’: their experiences, they stated, were too different from those of white middle-class women. This internal critique posed a radical challenge to how gender was conceived, moving from a primarily binary category (women/men) to a signifier of diverse and multiple identities.

  Ideas of ‘difference’ and ‘multiplicity’ are central issues in the postmodernist case against modernism. Before looking in more detail at the key features of a postmodern approach to gender, however, I want to discuss the political context which led to this shift in thinking.

  The politics of postmodernity

  In the last chapter I linked the development of gender as an academic topic to the growth of the movement of radical protest in the 1960s. It is more difficult to make a firm link between Postmodern Feminism and particular political events, partly because, as we shall see, postmodernism is a very diffuse and diverse body of thought. However, I have no doubt that one key contextual influence was the break-up of the Soviet bloc, especially that major symbolic event, the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. The ‘deconstruction’ of the wall brought together two previously sundered social formations, one successfully capitalist, one (quasi?) socialist, into the new unified German Republic, breaching the frontline confrontation between these two combative ideological and political systems. This triumph of capitalism posed a major challenge to radical political thinking and appeared fatally to damage the legitimacy of Marxist theorizing. Many western Marxist intellectuals sought a new radical home. Along with this blow to Marxism, there evolved a general scepticism to the kind of ‘grand theories’ or ‘big ideas’ which the Marxist theory of socialist revolution perfectly exemplified. This is demonstrated in what is seen as the key initial text of postmodernity, Jean-François Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition

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  International Relations and the Challenge of Postmodernism

  Defending the Discipline

  • D. S. L. Jarvis, Darryl S. L. Jarvis(Authors)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • University of South Carolina Press

    (Publisher)

  Questioning Identity Politics Critical research agendas of this type, however, are not found easily in International Relations. Critics of feminist perspectives run the risk of denouncement as either a misogynist malcontent or an androcentric keeper of the gate. At work in much of this discourse is an unstated political correctness, where the historical marginalization of women bestows intellectual autonomy, excluding those outside the identity group from legitimate participation in its discourse. Only feminist women can do real, legitimate, feminist theory since, in the mantra of identity politics, discourse must emanate from a positional (personal) ontology. Those sensitive or sympathetic to the identity politics of par-ticular groups are, of course, welcome to lend support and encourage-ment, but only on terms delineated by the groups themselves. In this way, they enjoy an uncontested sovereign hegemony over their own self-identification, insuring the group discourse is self-constituted and that its parameters, operative methodology, and standards of argument, appraisal, and evidentiary provisions are self-defined. Thus, for example, when Sylvester calls for a “homesteading” of International Relations she 160 International Relations and the Challenge of Postmodernism does so “by [a] repetitive feminist insistence that we be included on our terms ” (my emphasis). Rather than an invitation to engage in dialogue, this is an ultimatum that a sovereign intellectual space be provided and insulated from critics who question the merits of identity-based political discourse. Instead, Sylvester calls upon International Relations to “share space, respect, and trust in a re-formed endeavor,” but one otherwise proscribed as committed to demonstrating not only “that the secure homes constructed by IR’s many debaters are chimerical,” but, as a con-sequence, to ending International Relations and remaking it along lines grounded in feminist postmodernism.

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  Reworking Gender

  A Feminist Communicology of Organization

  • Karen Ashcraft, Dennis K Mumby(Authors)
  • 2003(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications, Inc

    (Publisher)

  Having sketched broad points of convergence and divergence in the relationship between feminism and postmodernism, we are ready to delve further into that relationship as manifest in the context of orga-nization studies. The next section explores the question, how does post-modern feminist organization studies engage and problematize the relationships among gender, discourse, power, and organization? We are particularly interested in how this work approaches identity as discursively constructed in mundane contexts and routine performances of power, resistance, and organizing. Organizing at the Intersection of Feminism and Postmodernism —— 95 L ORGANIZING GENDER: A POSTMODERN FEMINIST PERSPECTIVE One of the basic premises underlying this book is that gender is not simply one feature of organizing that may be addressed or ignored; rather, it is a basic, constitutive feature of organization. As we explained in Chapter 1 (see especially our discussion of frames 2 and 3), organization members “do” gender, thus creating “gendered organizations” in the moment-to-moment (Gherardi, 1994). As one iter-ation of this perspective, Postmodern Feminism represents a political and epistemological effort to shape our thinking about organizational life. Epistemologically, Postmodern Feminism is an attempt to break the last few bonds of a foundationalist position that seeks to discover the truth about organizational life generally, or about gender specifically. With Postmodern Feminism, gender is both constitutive of organizing and a contingent condition that has no essence. Scholars in this vein “play” with and deconstruct gender, adopting it as a strategic construct to reveal certain truth effects, which emanate from the construction of gender as a difference that shapes lives in meaningful ways. Politically, Postmodern Feminism explores how discourses of difference create and are created by certain forms of power-knowledge.

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  Unassimilable Feminisms

  Reappraising Feminist, Womanist, and Mestiza Identity Politics

  • L. Gillman(Author)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  The intense theoretical reconsideration of the concept of the self as a singular, unitary, and coherent subject in both camps led to very different conclusions about antiessentialist identities, even as both borrowed conceptual insights and arguments from each other to some extent. The most extreme version of postmodernist feminism has been fueled by certain assumptions about the deterministic nature of sexual difference, namely, that all attempts to define a gendered identity trig- ger normative roles or behaviors to which women must conform. and thus function as an exercise of power. I elaborate on this topic in greater detail in chapter 2. For now, suffice it to say that postmodern feminists view the category “women” as phantasmatic, having no objective basis in reality. As recently noted by Alison Stone, postmodern feminists, such as Judith Butler, Moira Gatens, and Elizabeth Grosz, among oth- ers, hold a view of bodies as so thoroughly articulated within culture, that they cannot conceive of sexed embodiments outside of social prac- tices and discourses (Stone 2004, 7). Thus, for example, according to Judith Butler, our gendered identities do not exist except through our doing or performing of them (Butler 1990, 9). The implication of such a view is that in the absence of any natural attributes or properties that are attributable to all women, there is no longer any means to posit a feminist epistemology, that is, a better knowledge about social life that women have because of their experiences as women. RECONCEPTUALIZING IDENTITY POLITICS 3 In fact, the crisis of truth that feminists evoked in raising the spec- ter of legitimacy with regards to the patriarchal foundations of Eurocentric thought and cultural traditions led postmodern femi- nists to the conclusion that no truth claims—not even those discov- ered and sustained by feminists—can be considered to provide the conditions for absolute certainty.

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  Interrogating Postfeminism

  Gender and the Politics of Popular Culture

  • Diane Negra, Yvonne Tasker, Diane Negra, Yvonne Tasker, Lynn Spigel(Authors)
  • 2007(Publication Date)
  • Duke University Press Books

    (Publisher)

  Postfeminism and the Ambivalence of “Post”-ing Our contention is that postfeminism as a concept and a cultural phenomenon repays close interrogation; in the process, we wish to situate it alongside other “posts,” including postmodernism and post-civil-rights discourse. All three posts involve an implicit understanding of history and historical change. Yet, as Bill Readings and Bennet Schaber suggest with respect to postmodernism, the posting of feminism means that feminism itself remains in the frame. They write: “We all have heard the word postmodernism. It is in the news. And yet it cannot be just the news, what is new, what is modern. It must be in some sense after the new, post, and yet must at the same time not yet have arrived, must have got caught in the post.”13 Readings and Schaber are specifically concerned with avoiding a modernist construction of history in which postmodernism emerges as simply “the most recent modernism”; for us the question of chronology, and of change, is pressing in a somewhat dif-ferent manner since postfeminist culture speaks both to and against the very feminism within which we situate our scholarship. Within this anthology, both Lisa Coulthard and Martin Roberts note a relationship between postfeminism and postmodernism, although they do not treat this relationship as the central theme of their essays. The preemptive irony that McRobbie pinpoints as a defining characteristic of postfeminist culture evidently chimes with the parodic play associated with postmodern aesthetics.14 Like postmodernism, postfeminism involves a particular relation-ship to late capitalist culture and the forms of work, leisure, and, crucially, consumption that thrive within that culture.

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  Challenging Liberalism

  Feminism as Political Critique

  • Lisa H. Schwartzman(Author)
  • 2006(Publication Date)
  • Penn State University Press

    (Publisher)

  And finally, Brown dismisses feminist attempts to generalize about such matters as oppression, injustice, rights, and equality, claiming that we cannot make statements that go beyond our own specific circumstances without falling into the problematic aspects of universalism. The one solution that Brown does offer—that women engage in political battles that proceed without making any reference to “established rights and identities”—fails to account for the collective and critical nature of social change. To succeed in the feminist battles that she advocates, women need both an analysis of the problems that must be addressed and a vision of what a better society might look like. Feminists have been engaged in political struggles for years, and most of these struggles have involved a collective understanding of women’s experience, as well as a general description 130 Feminist Postmodernism of the problem of male dominance. To the extent that these feminist analyses themselves reflect unequal relations of power between women, they should be altered and replaced with more accurate, less oppressive analyses. However, feminism simply cannot succeed without some understanding of systems of oppression. By employing an analysis of male dominance that is open to criticism and revision, feminists can increase consciousness of oppression; develop creative ways of challenging structural inequalities; and construct less oppressive, more egalitarian norms, practices, and institutions. Politicized Identity, Women’s Experience, and the Law 131 In Chapter 6, in examining Wendy Brown’s postmodern critique of liberal rights, I argued that Brown does not offer any real alternative to liberalism’s abstraction. Like the liberal theorists whom she criticizes, Brown fails to engage in concrete analyses of social relations of power.

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  Intersections between Feminist and Queer Theory

  • D. Richardson, J. McLaughlin, M. Casey, D. Richardson, J. McLaughlin, M. Casey(Authors)
  • 2006(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  Taking each in turn then, I want to briefly consider the assessment of the current state of feminism and subsequent roadmaps for the future by Between Post-Menopause and Post-Modern 161 ‘Feminism 2000’. The process of contextualizing their own beginnings in feminist politics feeds the direction for the future, but all agree on one point: for future success, feminism must change. As we have seen, Coward insists that feminism can only survive if a few ‘sacred cows’ are slaughtered, among them essentialist notions of power and oppression associated with a gender/sex binary. She believes there has been an overwhelming shift in gender politics: Feminism had come into being to attack a world of male privilege, a world where the economy was driven by male work and where individual homes mirrored this economic reality. In the 1980s this ceased to be true in any simple sense; the sexual composition of the workforce changed out of all recognition … men were appearing in the opposite light. The huge increase in male unemployment, both in heavy industrial and small businesses accompanied by visible signs of recession suddenly revealed men as disproportionately affected … feminism had give women the confidence to move into masculine areas. … Men by contrast, were experiencing their work changes, this so-called feminization of labour, more like a smack in the eye. (1999: 44, 51) According to Coward, men are experiencing a crisis in masculinity alongside, if not as a result of, the questioning of gender norms by feminists. While most would agree that the changing role of women since the 1960s has resulted in an increased awareness of the social construction of masculinity, I am not sure that as she maintains ‘suggestions of a real crisis have been dismissed by many feminists with a reassertion of female rights and male inadequacies’ (1999: 146).

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  Beyond Identity Politics

  Feminism, Power and Politics

  • Moya Lloyd(Author)
  • 2005(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications Ltd

    (Publisher)

  This raises a number of questions about feminist criticism: how is it to challenge limits? What are the presup-positions that underpin critique? How is it related to the broader ques-tion of political struggle? This chapter is divided into four sections. In the first, I return to the debate begun in Chapter 4 concerning the distinction found within beyond identity politics feminism, power & politics 112 postmodern materialist feminism between ludic postmodernism and resistance postmodernism. Then I concentrated on Ebert’s contention that if Postmodern Feminism is to have any political purchase, it needs to be grounded in a ‘logic of social necessity’ (making it a resistance postmodernism). Here, I turn to what constitutes, for materialist femi-nists, the proper grounds and range of critique. Subsequently, I explore the nature of critique from a resistance postmodern perspective by examining the work of Rosemary Hennessy. The primary charge against ‘ludic’ postmodernism is its inability to explain social inequal-ity and transform it. In the third section, therefore, I demonstrate how it is possible to generate a mode of critique from an allegedly ‘ludic’ position (namely a Foucauldian one) that both explains the emergence of phenomena in the present and opens up space for change. In the final section, I turn my attention to the politics of truth. Since critics often attempt to garner legitimacy for their theories by contending that these theories tell the truth about the world, it is important to con-sider the politics of truth: the challenge, that is, to the idea that truth is innocent of power. Ludic Postmodernism and the Failure of Critique Defining critique, Ebert notes that it is first and foremost a practice ori-ented towards the development of an historical understanding of how certain social institutions (she suggests motherhood, love, and taxation, by way of examples) come to be and how they change.

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