Postmodern Feminism

Postmodern feminism: These two words together can be read in several ways, partly because the first word is a kind of hybrid term whose meaning has been much contested and partly because the second word is the name for a variety of practices, both intellectual and activist, that have developed out of the history of women's struggle for equal rights, liberation, and self-definition. Thus, postmodern feminism can sound like the felicitous conjunction of two powerful forces. Or the combination may seem to generate varying degrees of irony. Last, and in the worst case, the phrase may appear oxymoronic, a contradiction in terms that hinders or even negates feminism.

To describe the different ways that postmodernism partners with feminism, one must begin provisionally with a basic definition of the term feminism, despite its internal variety and the different countries and contexts in which it has a history. Feminism may be characterized as both a theoretical critique and a social movement. That is to say, feminism is both intellectual and interventionist. On one hand, it attempts to expose and criticize the fundamental division between male and female on which patriarchal societies organize themselves—a hierarchy of power in which women must occupy positions and conform to roles that are subordinate, invisible, and “other.” On the other hand, feminism also seeks to push forward to the point of all its social criticism and historical interpretation. That point, to adapt one of Marx's theses on Feuerbach, is to change the world. Feminism is deeply committed to a transformation of those structures and institutions that determine women's identities and to a political activism that seeks to free women (and men) from an oppressive social system.

When the prefix postmodern is added to this critical and emancipatory project, the ambition of feminism to effect a change in social relations is modified, as are the methods proposed to bring about such change. In the first case, where feminism and postmodernism seem consonant with one another, this alteration has been seen as an improvement upon previous waves of the women's movement. For instance, first-wave feminism focused on universal suffrage and equality under the law. Second-wave feminism was concerned with showing how, in a famous phrase of Carol Hanisch, “The personal is political”: to expose the connection between the way women are determined politically and the way they live their lives personally. In the evolution from first to second wave, the world that women wanted to transform was enlarged to include the hitherto unpoliticized realms of everyday domestic life. As a result, much emphasis was given to the unveiling of the long-unrecognized lives of women, the legitimation of their experiences and social contributions as equally important as men's, and the promotion of a solidarity built on a shared female identity. For postmodern feminists, these emphases seemed to imply that feminism was really an extension of liberal humanism, distributing its rights to, and shining its lights on, that half of the population who happened to be overlooked as whole persons. When feminists began to feel that the problem was the liberal-humanist framework itself and began to think that the world they wanted to change was mounted on a foundation of unexamined beliefs, values, and systems of knowledge, postmodernism seemed a powerful ally.

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