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Postmodern feminism is a branch offeminism that opposes auniversal female subject.[1][2][3] Drawing onpostmodern philosophy, postmodern feminism questions traditional ideas about gender, identity, and power, while emphasizing the social nature of these concepts.[2]
Postmodern feminists argue that language constructs reality and that power is embedded in social norms, shaping identities and limiting agency. They seek to challenge traditional binary oppositions (e.g., man/woman, culture/nature) and deconstruct hierarchies.[1]
The inclusion of postmodern theory intofeminist theory is not readily accepted by all feminists—some believe postmodern thought undermines the attacks that feminism attempts to create, while other feminists are in favor of the union.[4]
Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) challenged the idea of a singular, objective truth or "transcendentalsignifier," arguing instead thatmeaning is constructed through an endless chain of signifiers that refer only to each other. He introduced the concept ofdifférance to illustrate how language operates through contrasts and perpetual deferral of meaning. His work underscores the idea that language does not represent reality but actively constructs it.[1]
Michel Foucault (1926-1984) viewed power as a diffuse and pervasive force that shapes individual subjectivity. In his framework, power is not merely repressive but productive, operating through institutions, norms, and internalized self-surveillance. He suggested that recognizing these power dynamics can enable individuals to challenge and reconstitute their subjectivities.[1]
French feminism, as it is known today, is not a self-defined school of thought originating in France, but rather an Anglo-American construct. It describes a certain body of theory associated with French-speaking thinkers—particularlyHélène Cixous,Luce Irigaray, andJulia Kristeva.[5] Their work is deeply rooted inFreudian andLacanianpsychoanalysis, focusing onpre-Oedipal experiences, maternal representation, andthe unconscious.[5]
The term was coined byAlice Jardine to identify an emerging trend in French intellectual circles in the 1980s, where the failure ofEnlightenment ideals was being re-theorized.[6] For feminism, this meant revisiting the sameness/difference debate through new lenses.[5]Toril Moi's bookSexual/Textual Politics (1986) further shaped French feminism by including only Cixous, Irigaray, and Kristeva.[7][5] Moi also made official a distinction between Anglo-American and French feminism: while Anglo-American feminists wanted to find a "woman-centered perspective", French feminists believed there was no identity for women but that "the feminine can be identified where difference and otherness are found."[5]
Elaine Marks, an academic in the field of Women's Studies, noted another difference between French and American feminists: French feminists, specificallyradical feminists, criticized and attacked the systems that benefit men, along with widespread misogyny as a whole, more intensely than their American counterparts.[8]
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Donna Haraway's 1985 essay "A Cyborg Manifesto" is a reflection on the politics of feminism inpostmodernity, first published inSocialist Review under the title "A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s."[9] Haraway uses the cyborg, a hybrid of nature and culture, as a metaphor to criticize binary thinking and totalizing identities.[10]
The Manifesto was a response to the rising conservatism of the 1980s.[citation needed] Haraway argues that women were no longer on the outside along a hierarchy of privileged binaries but rather deeply imbued, exploited by and complicit within networked hegemony, and had to form their politics as such.[11] In 2006, Haraway discussed her thoughts on gender andpost-gender, saying "people are made to live several non-isomorphic categories simultaneously, all of which torque them."[12]
Postmodern feminism's major departure from other branches of feminism is perhaps the argument thatsex, or at leastgender, is itselfconstructed throughlanguage, a view notably propounded inJudith Butler's 1990 book,Gender Trouble. They draw on and critique the work ofSimone de Beauvoir,Michel Foucault, andJacques Lacan, as well as on Irigaray's argument that what we conventionally regard as "feminine" is only a reflection of what is constructed as masculine.[13][3]
Butler criticises the distinction drawn by previous feminisms between (biological) sex and (socially constructed) gender. They ask why we assume that material things (such as the body) are not subject to processes of social construction themselves. Butler argues that this does not allow for a sufficient criticism ofessentialism: though recognizing that gender is a social construct, feminists assume it is always constructed in the same way. Butler's argument implies thatwomen's subordination has no single cause or single solution; postmodern feminism is thus criticized for offering no clear path to action. Butler rejects the term "postmodernism" as too vague to be meaningful.[14]
Paula Moya argues that Butler derives this rejection to postmodernism from misreadings ofCherríe Moraga's work. "She reads Moraga's statement that 'the danger lies in ranking the oppressions' to mean that we have no way of adjudicating among different kinds of oppressions—that any attempt to casually relate or hierarchize the varieties of oppressions people suffer constitutes an imperializing, colonizing, or totalizing gesture that renders the effort invalid…thus, although Butler at first appears to have understood the critiques of women who have been historically precluded from occupying the position of the 'subject' of feminism, it becomes clear that their voices have been merely instrumental to her" (Moya, 790). Moya contends that because Butler feels that the varieties of oppressions cannot be summarily ranked, that they cannot be ranked at all; and takes a short-cut by throwing out the idea of not only postmodernism, but women in general.[15]
Legal scholarMary Joe Frug, a founding member of a group of legal scholars known as the Fem-Crits, itself a part of thecritical legal studies movement,[16] suggested that one "principle" of postmodernism is that human experience is located "inescapably within language". Power is exercised not only through direct coercion, but also through the way in which language shapes and restricts our reality. She also stated that because language is always open to re-interpretation, it can also be used to resist this shaping and restriction, and so is a potentially fruitful site of political struggle.
Frug's second postmodern principle is that sex is not something natural, nor is it something completely determinate and definable. Rather, sex is part of a system of meaning, produced by language. Frug argues that "cultural mechanisms ... encode the female body with meanings", and that these cultural mechanisms then go on to explain these meanings "by an appeal to the 'natural' differences between the sexes, differences that the rules themselves help to produce".[17]
There have been many critiques of postmodern feminism since it originated in the 1990s. Most of the criticism has been frommodernists and feminists supporting modernist thought. However, the very term "postmodernism" has been criticised by some theorists who havethemselves been labelled as postmodern feminists.[14]
Modernist critics have put a focus on the themes ofrelativism andnihilism as defined by postmodernism. They believe that through abandoning the values ofEnlightenment thought postmodern feminism "precludes the possibility of liberating political action."[18] This concern can be seen in critics such asMeaghan Morris, who have argued that postmodern feminism runs the risk of undercutting the basis of a politics of action based upon gender difference, through its very anti-essentialism.[19]Alison Assiter published the bookEnlightened Women (1995) to critique postmodernists and postmodern feminists alike, saying that there should be a return to Enlightenment values and modernist feminism.[20]Gloria Steinem has also criticized feminist theory, and especially postmodernist feminist theory, as being overly academic, where discourse that is full of jargon and inaccessible is helpful to no one.[21]
As with criticism of postmodernism in general[citation needed], postmodern feminism also faces criticism with its heavy focus onsexism in language.
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