Postmodernism

The term postmodernism originally stemmed from the field of architecture in the 1960s and referred to the conservative efforts of designers to incorporate styles from periods prior to the Modern movement into contemporary buildings. By the late 1960s the term had been adopted by the humanities (particularly philosophy, literary criticism, and history), where it became intertwined with the Yale University and French schools of poststructuralism and deconstructionism. Postmodernism marked a critical challenge to concepts and approaches to knowledge that had become widely accepted as objective truth in the “modern” Western world of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Among the concepts challenged by postmodernism was an understanding of heterosexual masculinity (including a power structure based on the hegemony of the heterosexual white male) that had so ...