Women's Studies 3050
Post Modern Feminism
There are values that have been established in the
society which effect all social/psychological interactions:
NORM
Men
White/European
Financially Secure
Heterosexual
Able bodies
Formal Education
Young Age |
OTHER
Women
Asian, Middle East, etc..
Poor, Working class
Homosexual
Disable, handicap
Experimental Education
Old, middle age |
Feminist Theories are concerned with:
|
Class Analysis
Marxist, Socialist
Radicals
|
Individual Analysis
Liberal and Postmodern
New wave of psycho-feminists
|
Postmodernism as a North American intellectual movement draws inspiration
from a variety of French poststructuralist and postmodernist theorists,
including Foucault, Lacan, Derrida, Lyotard, and Irigaray.
- It embodies a
skeptical sensibility that questions attempts to transcend our situatedness by
appeal to such ideas as universality, necessity, objectivity, rationality,
essence, unity, totality, foundations, and ultimate Truth and Reality.
- It
stresses the locality, partiality, contingency, instability, uncertainty,
ambiguity and essential contestability of any particular account of the world,
the self, and the good.
- Politically, the postmodernist emphasis on revealing the situatedness and contestability of any particular claim or system of thought is
supposed to serve both critical and liberatory functions.
- It delegitimizes ideas that dominate and exclude by undermining their
claims to transcendent justification.
- And it opens up space for imagining alternative possibilities that were
obscured by those claims.
Although postmodernist themes are often expressed in an obscure jargon, they
can be cast in terms more familiar to analytic philosophers. Postmodernists
begin with ideas about language and systems of thought.
| Language |
Systems of Thought |
- what we think of as) reality is “discursively constructed.”
- our minds grasp things not as they are “in themselves” but only
through concepts, signified by words.
- signs get their meaning not from their reference to external things
but from their relations to all of the other signs in a system of
discourse.
- Signs therefore do not have a fixed meaning over time.
|
- these ideas support the “rejection of totalizing meta-narratives.”
There can be no complete, unified theory of the world that captures the
whole truth about it.
- Any such theory will contain a definite set of terms. This entails
that it cannot express all conceptual possibilities.
- Thus, the selection of any particular theory or narrative is an
exercise of “power” — to exclude certain possibilities from thought and to
authorize others.
|
Feminist Postmodernism. Within feminism, postmodernist ideas
have been deployed against theories that purport to justify sexist practices —
notably, ideologies that claim that observed differences between men and women
are natural and necessary, or that women have an essence that explains and
justifies their subordination. The oft-cited claim that gender is socially or
discursively constructed — that it is an effect of social practices and systems
of meaning that can be disrupted — finds one of its homes in postmodernism
(Butler 1990).
However, postmodernism has figured more prominently in internal
critiques of feminist theories. One of the most important trends in feminist
thinking in the past twenty years has been exposing and responding to
exclusionary tendencies within feminism itself. Women of color and lesbian women
have argued that mainstream feminist theories have ignored their distinct
problems and perspectives. Feminist postmodernism represents both a vehicle for
and response to these critiques. It underwrites a critique of the concept
“woman” — the central analytical category of feminist theory. And it proposes
perspective-shifting as a strategy for negotiating the proliferation of theories
produced by differently situated women.
(See:
"Postmodernism in 3 pages")
|
What are the particular effects of the post-structuralist
feminism?
-
women are already on the margins of society, and so it
somehow makes sense for feminists to read philosophy from a ‘marginal,’
subversive perspective;
-
women who write in a style which is subversive of
traditionally masculine discourse (philosophy) can be seen in a sense to
do so more genuinely, or authentically, than men. For instance, Derrida’s
claim to ‘write in the hand of a woman’ (Spurs) seems to some
feminists simply to be yet another ‘masculine’ appropriation of the
‘feminine.’
However...
-
Many feminists are uncomfortable with being identified
with that which is resisted, or ‘repressed,’ by traditional discourse.
Ideas about women could again collapse into the hysterical women, or the
‘seductress,’ with no control over her writing
-
Many feminists criticize the tendency in post-modern,
or post-structuralist, feminism to destabilize the ontological notion
‘woman,’ or a shared identity in terms of which feminism, as a political
movement, defines itself. One might ask: what is the basis for politics
after we have undermined the identity of the group that we would want to
‘represent’?
(See:
http://www.philosophy.unimelb.edu.au/handouts/161022/6x.html) |
Readings:
- Donovan: 7
-
Reader: essays #35,#38
Oral Presentation #5: YouTube Analysis