Women

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)

Resources:

From the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: "Continental Feminism," 2013
Summary of Tong: French Postmodern Feminists by Misa Nagaoka
Summary of Tong: Postmodern Feminism by Dion Peoples