Postmodern Feminism

Aathirah

“Postmodern feminists, like all postmodernists, seek to avoid

in their writings any and all reinstantiations of
phallogocentric thought…they view with suspicion any mode
of feminist thought that aims to provide the explanation for
why woman is oppressed or the ten steps all women must
take to achieve liberation…Postmodern feminists invite each
woman who reflects on their writings to become the kind of
feminist she wants to be. There is no single formula for
being a ‘good feminist.’”

I. Postmodern Feminism and Existentialist Feminism

De Beauvoir: woman is Other and this is not desirable;
women should strive to be subjects; to cultivate freedom in
their own unique directions
Postmoderns: “woman is still other, but rather than
interpreting this condition as something to be transcended,
postmodern feminists proclaim its advantages. The
condition of otherness enables women to stand back and
criticize the norms, values, and practices that the dominant
culture (patriarchy) tries to impose on everyone” (195).
II. Postmodern Feminism and Deconstruction
“the entire conceptual and therefore linguistic scheme of the
West is fundamentally flawed…they question…that there is
an essential unity of self through time and space termed self-
identity and that there is an essential relationship between
language and reality termed truth” (195).
“the self is fundamentally split between its conscious and
unconscious dimensions…reality eludes language and
language refuses to be pinned down or limited by reality”
(196).
III. Lacan: The Symbolic Order
“the symbolic order regulates society through the regulation
of individuals; so long as individuals speak the language of
the symbolic order…society will reproduce itself…(196).
A. Three phases: pre-Oedipal, mirror (identity in
mother’s gaze), Oedipal:
mother as other; “Fearing symbolic castration…the child
separates from the mother in return for a medium
(language).
B. The boy…”internalizes the dominant order…the boy
is born again—this time
to language
C. “women are excluded from the symbolic order or
confined to its margins
…Women are given the same words as men: masculine
words. These words cannot express what women feel,
however; they can express only what men think” (197).
D. “Were jouissance to find the words to express itself,
it would burst out of
captivity, destroying, once and for all, the symbolic order
and…patriarchy” (198).
IV. Derrida: criticized the symbolic order
A. Logocentrism: primacy of the spoken word, less
subject to interpretation
than the written word
B. Phallocentrism, a unitary drive toward a single,
attainable goal
C. Dualism: everything understood in binary
oppositions
D. Language creates meaning, but there is no being
or nothingness, so people
are free to think new and different thoughts
E. Difference: gap between reality and language
Postmodern Feminism: Labels “always carry with them the
‘phallologocentric drive to stabilize, organize and rationalize
our conceptual universe…the most fundamental liberation of
all: freedom from oppressive thought” (199).
I. Cixous: difference between feminine writing and
masculine writing
A. Dyad: man-woman; man associated with active,
woman as passive
B. Women’s writing is Heraclitean; leaves open
possibility for change
C. Men’s writing: sharply defined and rigidly imposed
structures
 D. Women’s writing is open and multiple, full of
possibilities
E. Desire, not reason, is the way to escape the limiting
concept of traditional Western thought
II. Irigaray: psychoanalysis
A. Women are caught in the imaginary, pre-Oedipal
phase, but that is good
B. Create a uniquely female language
C. Create a female sexuality
D. Mime the mimes men have imposed on women.
Women should take men’s
images of women and reflect them back to men in magnified
proportions. Through miming, women can ‘undo the effects
of phallocentric discourse simply by overdoing them"”(204).
E. “self-contradiction is a form of rebellion against the
logical consistency
required by phallocentrism” (204).
III. Kristeva
A. “the symbolic order, which is the order of
signification, or the social realm, is
composed of two elements: the semiotic element that seeps
in from the ‘territory’ of the pre-Oedipal and the symbolic
element that exist only in the symbolic order. The symbolic
element is that aspect of meaning-making that permits us to
make rational arguments; it produces linear, rational,
objective, and very grammatical writing. The symbolic is the
element of stasis within the Symbolic order” (205).
B. “a liberated person…[can function in] the dialectic
between the semiotic and
symbolic aspects of meaning-making inside the symbolic
order” (205)
C. “boys can exist and write in a ‘feminine’ mode and
girls can exist and write in
a ‘masculine’ mode” (205)
IV. Critiques of Postmodern Feminism
A. Feminism should not be absorbed into humanism
B. “Women do not want the right to be the same as
men. Rather, women want the right to be as free as
men—to construct themselves apart from, not in
 opposition to, men; to be opposite of men yet to be
themselves” (208).
C. Controversy over whether there is any essence of
woman
V. Jane Flaxx: Postmodernism and Gender Relations in
Feminist Theory
“Postmodern philosophers are all ‘deconstructive’ in that
they seek to distance us from and make us skeptical about
beliefs concerning truth, knowledge, power, the self, and
language that are often taken for granted within and serve
as legitimation for contemporary Western culture” (465).

Enlightenment assumptions placed in doubt”

1. The existence of a stable, coherent self.
2. Reason and philosophy can provide an objective, reliable,
and universal foundation for knowledge
3. The knowledge acquired from the right use of reason will
be “true.”
4. Reason has transcendental and universal qualities.
5. Freedom: obedience to laws that conform to reason which
amounts to autonomy.
6. Truth can serve power without distortion.
7. Science is the paradigm for all true knowledge; neutral in
its methods and socially beneficial in its results.
8. There exists a correspondence between ‘word’ and ‘thing.’
9. It is appealing to the oppressed to believe that reason, not
power, will prevail.
10.A feminist future does not lie in reviving Enlightenment
concepts.
11.The notion that reason is divorced from ‘merely
contingent’ existence still predominates in contemporary
Western thought and now appears to mask the
embededness and dependence of the self upon social
relations, as well as the partiality and historical specificity
of this self’s existence.
12.All transcendental claims reflect and reify the experience
of a few persons—mostly white, Western males.
A Feminist Problematic: What is gender? Gender is no longer
assumed as natural.
Social changes in the USA lead to conceptual changes.
VI. Thinking in Relations
A. Gender relations are differentiated and (so far)
asymmetric divisions and attributions of human traits and
capacities. (470)
B. Gender as a thought construct vs. gender as a social
relation
D. Feminists offer many explanations for the sex/gender
system: Freudian,
socialist, deconstruction, etc. but they all claim to know
more than one can know.
“We cannot simultaneously claim (1) that the mind, the self,
and knowledge are socially constituted and that what we can
know depends upon our social practices and contexts and (2)
that feminist theory can uncover the Truth of the whole once
and for all” (475).
E. Hence within feminist theory a search for a defining
theme of the whole or a
feminist viewpoint may requires the suppression of the
important and discomforting voices of persons with
experiences unlike our own” (475).
F. “only to the extent that one person or group can
dominate the whole, will
reality appear to be governed by one set of rules or be
constituted by one privileged set of social relations” (476).
VII. The Natural Barrier: What is ‘natural’?
A. The tendency of the Western world is to ‘disenchant’
the natural world.
B. “Concepts of gender than become complex
metaphors for ambivalences about
human action in, on, and as part of the natural world” (477).
C. “physically male and female humans resemble each
other in many more ways
than we differ” (478).
 D. “We live in a world in which gender is a constituting
social relations and in
which gender is also a relation of domination. Therefore,
both men’s and women’s understanding of anatomy,
biology, embodiedness, sexuality, and reproduction is
partially rooted in, reflects, and must justify (or challenge)
preexisting gender relations. In turn, the existence of
gender relations helps us to order and understand the facts
of human existence” (479).
E. “Feminist discourse is full of contradictory and
irreconcilable conceptions of
the nature of our social relations, of men and women and the
worth and character of stereotypically masculine and
feminine activities. The positing of these conceptions such
that only one perspective can be ‘correct’ (or properly
feminist) reveals, among other things, the embeddedness of
feminist theory in the very social processes we are trying to
critique and our need for more systematic and self-conscious
theoretical practice” (480).
F. “The complex fantasies and conflicting wishes and
experiences women
associate with family/home often remain unexpressed and
unacknowledged” (481).
G. “The ‘modal’ person in feminist theory still appears
to be a self-sufficient
individual adult” (483).
H. “Feminist theorists are faced with a fourfold task. We
need to (1) articulate
feminist viewpoints of/within the social worlds in which we
live; (2) think about how we are affected by these worlds; (3)
consider the ways in which how we think about them may be
implicated in existing power/knowledge relationship; and (4)
imagine ways in which these worlds ought to/can be
transformed” (483).
I. “There should also be a transvaluation of values—a
rethinking of our ideas
about what is humanly excellent, worthy of praise, or moral.
In such a transvaluation, we need to be careful not to assert
merely the superiority of the opposite” (484).
 J. “in insisting upon the existence and power of such
relations of domination, we
should avoid seeing women/ourselves as totally innocent,
passive beings” (484).
K. “the notion that a feminist standpoint that is truer
than previous (male) ones
seems to rest upon many problematic and unexamined
assumptions” (485).
L. “there is no force or reality ‘outside’ our social
relations and activity (e.g.,
history, reason, progress, science, some transcendental
essence) that will rescue us from partiality and differences”
(485).
M. “Feminist theories, like other forms of
postmodernism, should encourage us to
tolerate and interpret ambivalence, ambiguity, and
multiplicity as well as to expose the roots of our needs for
imposing order and structure no matter how arbitrary and
oppressive these needs may be” (486).
N. “If we do our work well, ‘reality’ will appear even
more unstable, complex,
and disorderly than it does now. In this sense, perhaps Freud
was right when he declared that women are the enemies of
civilization” (486).