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 far remained relatively intact in the Western world. Postmodernists argued that traditional perceptions of masculinity, far from being universally valid, were social and cultural constructions that had been imposed and supported by the heterosexual white males traditionally in power. They claimed that these constructs shifted in relation to experiences of “gender,” “self,” and “identity.” Likewise, they argued that the ideologies, or “master narratives,” of the past were usually developed by men and intended to bolster the existing social and cultural structures that privileged male authority. Postmodernists therefore called for a plurality of thinking that allowed for multiple new definitions of masculinity and gender, fostering the idea that gender is a fluid construct. This perspective has had a profound impact on American historical and cultural studies, since it has generated among scholars an awareness that traditionally dominant narratives about American life— which imply the centrality of white males and typically excluded women, nonwhites, and homosexuals—represent only one of many possible narratives.

In American culture, the impact of postmodernism coincided with the rise of second-wave feminism and the racial and sexual identity movements of the 1960s and 1970s. The resulting advent of women's studies, gender studies, and queer theory in American academia has challenged the established notion of a natural or absolute “maleness.” These developments also sparked the development of men's studies, an interdisciplinary field that assumes the social and cultural variability of experiences and definitions of masculinity and seeks to connect such variations to power dynamics.

Outside academia during this period, the idea that gender and masculinity are fluid and changeable challenged the traditional notion of the dominant male breadwinner and subordinate female homemaker. Growing numbers of Americans sought to redefine gender roles and distinctions, producing role reversals in which men embraced domestic engagement as an essential element of their identities. This blurring of gender distinctions was apparent in American [Page 370]popular culture in such films as Mr. Mom (1983), in which a male executive becomes a homemaker; Tootsie (1982), in which a male actor advances his career by pretending to be a woman; and Mrs. Doubtfire (1993), in which a divorcé dresses as a woman and poses as a housekeeper, thus highlighting his “femininity,” in order to spend time with the children he considers necessary to his sense of self.

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