Postmodern Doc2

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 selfidentity 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).