Postmodern Feminism

In this paper I analyze the postmodern condition with particular reference to the ethical and political spheres. Postmodernism attempts a radical break with all of the major strands of post-Enlightenment thought. For postmodernists as the French Jean-François Lyotard and the Italian Gianni Vattimo, the orthodox Enlightenment “meta-narrative” of progress and the “speculative” narrative of Hegel and Marx have lost their explanatory force. In particular, Lyotard speaks about five large meta-narratives of Western culture: 1) Christianity (understood also in the secularized form (...) which its values have taken into modernity); 2) Enlightenment; 3) Idealism as a “theory of progressive freedom in history”; 4) Marxism, and 5) Capitalism. According to Lyotard, one can consider “the incredulity” towards these meta-narratives (méta-récits or grands récits) as postmodern. He points out that after Auschwitz it is impossible to speak of rationality and progress in Western history: In the twentieth century the Nazi genocide showed that history is not a continuous ethical progress towards the best. From the philosophical point of view the precursor of postmodern atmosphere is Friedrich Nietzsche. This German philosopher elaborated a radically anti-metaphysical thought and proposed an ethic of emancipation. Postmodernists refer to Nietzsche’s thought and theorize ethical-political practices aimed at the emancipation of women and socially weak subjects. Postmodernism’s rejection of “totalizing” theories with universal pretentions is complemented by positive celebration of diversity or “difference” and emphasis on the ethical demands of “the other”: this is, for example, the ethical perspective of Michel Foucault. (shrink)

In Telling Flesh, Vicki Kirby addresses a major theoretical issue at the intersection of the social sciences and feminist theory -- the separation of nature from culture. Kirby focuses particularly on postmodern approaches to corporeality, and explores how these approaches confine the body within questions about meaning and interpretation. Kirby explores the implications of this containment in the work of Jane Gallop, Judith Butler, and Drucilla Cornell, as well as in recent cyber-criticism. By analysing the inadvertent repetition of the nature/culture (...) division in this work, Kirby offers a powerful reassessment of dualism itself. (shrink)

In this article I discuss the emergence of Female Sexual Dysfunction (FSD) within American psychiatry and beyond in the postwar period, setting out what I believe to be important and suggestive questions neglected in existing scholarship. Tracing the nomenclature within successive editions of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM), I consider the reification of the term ‘FSD’, and the activism and scholarship that the rise of the category has occasioned. I suggest that analysis of FSD benefits from (...) scrutiny of a wider range of sources (especially since the popular and scientific cross-pollinate). I explore the multiplicity of FSD that emerges when one examines this wider range, but I also underscore a reinscribing of anxieties about psychogenic aetiologies. I then argue that what makes the FSD case additionally interesting, over and above other conditions with a contested status, is the historically complex relationship between psychiatry and feminism that is at work in contemporary debates. I suggest that existing literature on FSD has not yet posed some of the most important and salient questions at stake in writing about women’s sexual problems in this period, and can only do this when the relationship between ‘second-wave’ feminism, ‘post-feminism’, psychiatry and psychoanalysis becomes part of the terrain to be analysed, rather than the medium through which analysis is conducted. (shrink)

El presente texto quiere hacerse eco del impacto que la propuesta postmoderna de la diferencia tiene en el discurso feminista actual. Para ello, parte de la consolidación de la teoría feminista con el denominado neo-feminismo norteamericano y se adentra, en particular, en las propuestas teóricas actuales de Luce Irigaray y del feminismo francés de la diferencia. En particular, las tesis irigayanas sobre la mujer como lo- otro son aquí revisadas desde una posición crítica, que atiende al discurso de la diferencia (...) sobre el logo-falo-centrismo, aunque cuestiona la impugnación del discurso feminista ilustrado en su histórica reclamación de igualdad. This text wants to show the impact that postmodern vindication of sexual difference has in current feminist thinking. To do so, it begins with the consolidation of the feminist theory with the so-called Northamerican neo feminism and insists, in particular, on the theoretical proposals which Luce Irigaray and the French feminism of the difference support today. Particularly Irigaray¿s thesis on women as the other are here considered from a critical position. The analysis which the feminism of sexual difference makes about logo-phallus-centrism questions the challenging of the feminist point of view which is grounded in Enlightement and its historical vindication of equality. (shrink)

This chapter presents a task-based lesson sequence based on Judith Butler's Gender Trouble. Gender Trouble is a great piece of philosophical literature. However, as philosophical literature is a genre rarely found in EFL teaching, this chapter first demonstrates in detail the merits of this genre for the teaching ofEnglish for Academic Purposes. After a brief analysis of the source text, which deconstructs the entire sex-gender link and presents both sex and gender as free-floating, this chapter presents task-based methodology and how (...) it is utilized in a lesson aimed at building gender awareness and acceptance. In the target task students are asked to take the role of an ethics teacher at an Irish high school, in which the discussion arose whether the school should introduce unisex toilets and changing rooms in order to not discriminate against transsexual students. Tue study of Butler's philosophy will provide students with both the knowledge and language to accomplish this task. Open follow-up discussions often lead to powerful ethical insights in the context of gender, homo- and transsexuality. (shrink)

This introductory essay argues that it is a mistake to represent Australian feminist philosophy as a kind of discourse theory that is “downstream” of the French post-structuralists or North American postmodernists. Starting with the local—and the specifically Australian modes of racial exclusion, in particular—and exploring some of the byways of philosophy, what we encounter is a range of ontological, ethical, and political models that allow a reconfiguration of self, community, and social change.

ExcerptGiorgio Agamben's work would seem to be one of the contemporary philosophical projects that has been least hospitable to a feminist reading—least hospitable to posing questions about gender and sexual difference using its resources. But in recent years, a cluster of feminist responses to Agamben has emerged.1 Welcome as they are, they are as interesting for their ambiguity, their differences (thus perhaps their tacit disagreement) about the character, means, or route for a feminist reading, their caution, and often their awareness (...) of the difficulty and possible infelicity of the feminist response. There is much to be said for those feminist…. (shrink)

Explores ontological humility in the history of philosophy, from Descartes to contemporary gender and race theory.

This paper addresses the question of whether Derrida's “hauntology” as developed in Specters of Marx and related texts, can be anything more than yet another repetition of a specifically male preoccupation with the Father inscribed on the bodies of women, in this case the always absent daughter. A careful reading suggests that Derrida, and playwnght fathers of daughters such as Shakespeare and August Wilson, may be aware of the paradoxes of their situation.

Taking Jean Giraudoux's play _The Madwoman of Chaillot _as its starting point, this book seeks a way out of the dilemma that confronts those who feel that any nonrelativistic moral theory requires some metaphysical foundation but cannot see how a foundations position can be persuasively defended. Nancy Holland draws on the work of Heidegger and Derrida to formulate a concept of appropriate action that can address both extraordinary ethical problems within a particular cultural tradition and moral conflict between different cultures. (...) Her feminist reappropriations of the concept of the appropriate is then further developed by reference to Aristotle and Kant, whose ethical theories, she argues, are independent of their metaphysics, thus suggesting that moral evaluations can rely on a deep understanding of what it is to be human within a cultural tradition rather than on foundations premises. As an example of the application of her theory, Holland examines the problem of ordaining women women in the Roman Catholic Church and then goes on to compare her approach with that of other philosophers working in virtue theory, postmodern ethics, and feminism. We all want to be able to make valid moral judgments and to respect the ethical values of other cultural groups. By suggesting that a culture's sense of the human and a correlated sense of appropriate action, might provide a purely formal but still critical perspective on any community's current beliefs and practices without invoking any substantive external criteria, the concept of the appropriate is offered as one way in which we can satisfy both our moral wants and our intellectual needs. (shrink)

A review will be followed by a critique of Self in Relation as a theory of women's development. The critique will use feminist postmodernism as a tool to illuminate certain aspects of Self in Relation that might otherwise go unchallenged. The specific aspects of Self in Relation that will be given close attention are the concepts of connectedness as it relates to mental health, and empathy as the theory seeks to define it. Finally a brief chapter will discuss how Self (...) in Relation, given its strengths and limitations, can be used, along with concepts from postmodernism, to create training programs for psychologists at a mental health clinic. (shrink)

"In this exciting and important work, Wyschogrod attempts to read contemporary ethical theory against the vast unwieldy tapestry that is postmodernism.... [A] provocative and timely study."—Michael Gareffa, _Theological Studies_ "A 'must' for readers interested in the borderlands between philosophy, hagiography, and ethics."—Mark I. Wallace, _Religious Studies Review_.

Introduction: Morality in Modern and Postmodern Perspective Shattered beings are best represented by bits and pieces. Rainer Maria Rilke As signalled in its ...

Drawing primarily from the work of Julia Kristeva and Judith Butler, the author suggests that a postmodern approach to identity can be used to challenge the essentialism that pervades both feminist empiricism and standpoint theory, and thus move feminist psychology in a more emancipatory direction. A major premise of this paper is that an engagement with postmodernism redirects our attention to symbolic constructions of femininity and to the sociopolitical grounding of experience.

Nicholson's political philosophy is distinctively grounded in history. The Play of Reason: From the Modern to the Postmodern argues that such "grounding" plays as much of the foundational role demanded of philosophy as can coherently be played by anything-and that such a foundation is, pragmatically, enough. I focus on two moves: (1) thinking historically as a model for thinking cross-culturally, and (2) historicizing "all the way down," as a way of exorcising the demand for the ahistorical grounding of epistemology.

In this essay, I trace a rhetorical affinity between feminist postmodern theory and an Enlightenment narrative of development. This affinity consists in the valorization of mobility and the repudiation of locatedness. Although feminists deploy this rhetoric in order to accommodate differences and to accustom readers to the instability that results from such accommodation, I show how this rhetoric works to justify Western colonial development and to efface women's very different experiences of mobility in the early twenty-first century.

In ____Womanizing Nietzsche,__ Kelly Oliver uses an analysis of the position of woman in Nietzsche's texts to open onto the larger question of philosophy's relation to the feminine and the maternal. Offering readings from Nietzsche, Derrida, Irigaray, Kristeva, Freud and Lacan, Oliver builds an innovative foundation for an ontology of intersubjective relationships that suggests a new approach to ethics.

This paper offers a detailed account of Foucaults ethical and political notion of individuality as presented in his late work, and discusses its relationship to the feminist project of the theory of sexual difference. I argue that Foucaults elaboration of the classical ethos of care for the self opens the way for regarding the I-woman as an ethical, political and aesthetic self-creation. However, it has significant limitations that cannot be ignored. I elaborate on two aspects of Foucaults avoidance of sexual (...) difference as a relevant category for an account of political and ethical individuality, which thus implicitly associates individual agency with men. I argue that Foucault implicitly assumes the existence of an ontological desire to become engaged in political self-creation. However, the ethical position of self-knowledge and desire should be understood as a contingent option that depends on material and historical conditions for its realization. Hence, I argue that a feminist reworking of Foucaults notion of political individuality should add a substantial ethical condition to the imperative of self-knowledge and self-creation – making possible the desiring woman subject. (shrink)

The postmodern rejection of essentialism does not mean that feminist theorists must abandon all categorizations of women. Indeed, while it is important to deconstruct identities and highlight the differences among women, we need to arrive at some notion of gender identity for political purposes. In paying careful attention to the distinction between nominal essences and real essences, the author shows that the category of women can be maintained without resorting to the problems of traditional essentialism. The author argues that the (...) marginalization of women is a product of culturally determined identities rather than ontological differences between men and women.Le refus postmoderne de l’essentialisme ne signifie pas que la théorie féministe doive abandonner toutes catégorisations de femmes. En effet, bien qu’il soit important de déconstruire les identités et mettre en valeur les différences parmi les femmes, il faut en arriver à une certaine notion d’identité sexuelle pour des raisons politiques. Se laissant guider par la distinction entre essences nominale et réelle,l’auteure montre que la catégorie de femme peut être maintenue tout en éludant les problèmes de l’essentialisme traditionnel. L’auteure soutient que la marginalisation des femmes est le produit d’identites determinées culturellement plutôt que de différences ontologiques entre hommes et femmes. (shrink)

Applying the insights of Donna Haraway (1989, 1991) and Helen Longino (1989, 1990), this paper reviews Sandra Harding's (1986a) tripartite model of feminist critiques of science-empiricist, standpoint, and postmodern-and argues that it is based on misunderstandings of the relationship between scientific inquiry, objectivity, and values. An alternative view of scientific inquiry makes it possible to see feminist scientists as postmodern and postmodern feminists as having standpoints.

Some poststructuralist feminist theorists hold that the body is merely the product of cultural determinants and that gender is a free-floating artifice. I discuss how this “denaturalization” of gender and the body entrenches us yet deeper in the nature/culture dichotomy. The body, I maintain, needs to be “renaturalized” so that its earthy significance is recognized. Through a feminist reappropriation of Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of the body, I develop a noncausal linkage between gender and the body. I present the body as an (...) indeterminate constancy that is culturally and historically contextualized, on the one hand, yet part of our embodied givenness on the other. Interspersed throughout the paper are passages that describe my own bodily condition as I wrote the paper. (shrink)

Sandra Bartky's reply to the paper in the Symposium on her book Femininity and Domination.