Feminism and Postmodernism/Poststructuralism/Postcolonialism

Postmodernism/Poststructuralism

Postmodernism is a complicated term, or set of ideas, one that has only emerged as an area of academic study since the mid-1980s. It is hard to locate it temporally or historically because it is not clear exactly when postmodernism begins. Perhaps the easiest way to start thinking about postmodernism is by looking at the relation between "postmodernity" and "modernity" from historical or sociological perspective. This approach defines postmodernism as the name of an entire social formation or set of social/historical attitudes. Modernity was meant to distinguish the present era from the previous one which was labeled antiquity. Generally, modernity (modern era) is associated with the European Enlightenment which roughly in the middle of the eighteenth century.

Jean-Francois Lyotard

(Postmodernism rejects singular universalizing explanation in favor of diversity/plurality/instability/contingency.)

The basic ideas of the Enlightenment are roughly the same as the basic ideas of humanism. In modern/humanist/Enlightenment thought, there is a stable, coherent, knowable self. This self is conscious, rational, autonomous, and universal--no physical conditions or differences substantially affect how this self operates. This self knows itself and the world through reason, or rationality, posited as the highest form of mental functioning, and the only objective form. The mode of knowing produced by the objective, rational self is science, which can provide universal truths about the world, regardless of the individual status of the knower. Reason is the ultimate judge of what is true, and therefore of what is right, and what is good (what is legal and what is ethical). Freedom consists of obedience to the laws that conform to the knowledge discovered by reason. In a world governed by reason, the true will always be the same as the good and the right; there can be no conflict between what is true and what is right. Science thus stands as the paradigm for any and all society useful forms of knowledge. Science is neutral and objective; scientists, those who produce scientific knowledge through their unbiased rational capacities, must be free to follow the laws of reason and not by motivated by other concerns.

Looking closely at the fundamental premises of the Enlightenment, we find that modernity is fundamentally about order based on rationalization: about rationality, creating order out of chaos. The assumption is that creating more rationality is conducive to creating more order, and that the more ordered a society is, the better it will function (the more rationally it will function). Because modernity is about the pursuit of ever-increasing levels of order, modern societies constantly are on guard against anything and everything labeled as "disorder," which might disrupt order. Thus modern societies rely on continually establishing a binary opposition between "order" and "disorder," so that they can assert the superiority of "order." But to do this, they have to have things that represent "disorder"--modern societies thus continually have to create/construct "disorder." In western culture, this disorder becomes "the other"--defined in relation to other binary oppositions. Thus anything non-white, non-male, non-heterosexual, non-hygienic, non-rational, (etc.) becomes part of "disorder" and has to be eliminated from the ordered, rational modern society.

The ways that modern societies go about creating categories labeled as "order" or "disorder have to do with the effort to achieve stability. Francois Lyotard equates that stability with the idea of "totality," or a totalized system (think here of Derrida's idea of "totality" as the wholeness or completeness of a system). Totality, and stability, and order, Lyotard argues, are maintained in modern societies through the means of "grand narratives" or "master narratives," which are stories a culture tells itself about its practices and beliefs. A "grand narrative" in American culture might be the story that democracy is the most enlightened (rational) form of government, and that democracy can and will lead to universal human happiness. Every belief system or ideology has its grand narratives, according to Lyotard; for Marxism, for instance, the "grand narrative" is the idea that capitalism will collapse in on itself and a utopian socialist world will evolve. You might think of grand narratives as a kind of meta-theory, or meta-ideology, that is, an ideology that explains an ideology (as with Marxism); a story that is told to explain the belief systems that exist.

Lyotard argues that all aspects of modern societies, including science as the primary form of knowledge, depend on these grand narratives. Postmodernism  is the critique of grand narratives, the awareness that such narratives serve to mask the contradictions and instabilities that are inherent in any social organization or practice. In other words, every attempt to create "order" always demands the creation of an equal amount of "disorder," but a "grand narrative" masks the constructedness of these categories by explaining that "disorder" really is chaotic and bad, and that "order" really is rational and good. Postmodernism is then identified with a rejection of universalizing truth of totality in favor of a recognition that truth/knowledge is not impartial but constructed through exclusion and repression. Postmodernism, in rejecting grand narratives, favors "mini-narratives," stories that explain small practices, local events, rather than large-scale universal or global concepts. Postmodern "mini-narratives" are always situational, provisional, contingent, and temporary, making no claim to universality, truth, reason, or stability. (Klages 164-69)

Jean Baudrillard

(Reality has become textualized in the world of images and simulations.)

For modern/humanist/Enlightenment thought, the world is comprehended through our rational minds. Language or the mode of expression used in representing objects and producing knowledge must be rational also. Language, from this perspective, is fundamentally representational: words can (more or less) accurately depict the world and our experiences of it. In other words, to be rational, language must be transparent; it must function only to represent the real/perceivable world which the rational mind observes. Language is capable of (more or less) accurately depicting the real world. There must be a firm and objective connection between the objects of perception and the words used to name them (between signified and signifier). Modern societies depend on the idea that signifiers always point to signifieds, and that reality resides in signifieds. (Klages 167-68)

In postmodernism, however, there are only signifiers. The idea of any stable or permanent reality disappears, and with it the idea of signifieds that signifiers point to. Rather, for postmodern societies, there are only surfaces, without depth; only signifiers, with no signifieds. Jean Baudrillard, a postmodernist who studies contemporary popular culture, says that commodities are all signifiers. You buy stuff not necessary because the stuff means something beyond itself--it is a signifier that points to a signified. That signified, according to Baudrillard, is social status, or a subject position, within a variety of social codes or models. Thus when you buy a car, you do not buy just any car to drive around in (which would be buying a commodity largely for use value); the car you buy is a signifier of your social position, your income level, your recreational habits, your political/environmental views. So someone who buys a Mercedes is signifying something different from those who buy minivans or SUVs or hybrid gas/electric cars. What is signified is in fact your position as a subject; according to Baudrillard, identity (subjecthood) is thus a product of the signifiers with which one surrounds oneself, rather than something essential that is unique to each individual, as in the humanist model. Selfhood, for Baudrillard, as for Lacan, is thus always already an alienated position, something defined by externals.

Baudrillard takes this idea of the signifier-signified relationship further in discussing one of his best-known ideas, the concept of the simulacrum. According to Baudrillard, in postmodern society there are no originals, only copies--or what he calls "simulacra." You might think, for example, about painting or sculpture, where there is an original work (by Van Gogh, for instance), and there might also be thousands of copies, but the original is the one with the highest value (particularly monetary value). Contrast that with cds or music recordings, where there is no "original," as in painting--no recording that is hung on a wall, or kept in a vault; rather, there are only copies, by the millions, that are all the same, and all sold for (approximately) the same amount of money. In the world of mass media, according to Baudrilliard, there is no signified, no reality, no level of simple existence to which signifiers refer. He calls this separation of signifier from signified a "simulacrum," a representation without an original that it copies. Simulacra do not mirror or reproduce or imitate or copy reality: they are reality itself. Mass media disseminate these simulacra everywhere, constantly, so that they are unavoidable and inescapable. The simulacra forever being projected at viewers by the mass media provide what Baudrillard calls codes or models which tell us (viewers, consumers) what and how to think, act, believe, buy, desire, hate, etc. Humans in postmodern culture occupy passive subject positions within these codes or models.

When the image is more real than any other reality, where there is only surface but no depth, only signifiers with no signified, only imitations with no originals, Baudrillard says, we are in the realm of hyperreality. According to Baudrillard, signs no longer correspond to their real life referent but replace it in a world of "floating signifiers"; there has been "implosion of image and reality." This implosion leads into "simulated hyperreality." The real is now defined in terms of the media in which it moves. It is the image-creating postmodern communication technologies--especially television--which for Baudrillard stimulate this proliferation of images across the postmodern surface. Hyperreality characterizes the inability of consciousness to distinguish reality from fantasy, especially in technologically advanced postmodern cultures. Hyperreality is a means to characterize the way consciousness defines what is actually real in a world where a multitude of media can radically filter the original event or where multiple technologies can shape the reality of experience. One of the best examples of such hyperreality is Disneyland, which is a minutely created reality of things that do not exist in the modern version of the real world. For postmodern theorists, the hyperreality of the created worlds becomes more real than the real world, and in fact highlights how what we have always thought of as the real world is itself a constructed hyperreality. (Klages 170-72)

Poststructuralism

(The subject is in process and is capable of being other than it is.)

In modern/humanist/Enlightenment thought, language is a product of the individual writer's mind or free will, meaning that we determine what we say, and what we mean when we say it; language thus expresses the essence of our individual beings (and there is such a thing as an essential unique individual "self");and the self or the individual (or the mind or the free will) is the center of all meaning and truth; words mean what I say they mean, and truth is what I perceive as truth, that is, I create my own sentences out of my own experiences and need for individual expression. The self is understood to be a unified coherent identity or autonomous unit organized around the reasoning core of the Enlightenment.

(Post)structuralism counters this perspective by insisting that the self, individual identity, is itself the product of the structure of language. Structuralist theorists (particularly Ferdinand de Saussure) argue that any piece of writing, or any signifying system, has no origin, and that writers merely inhabit pre-existing structures (langue) that enable them to make any particular sentence or story (parole). What we (mis)perceive as our originality is simply our recombination of some of the elements in the pre-existing system. In erasing the author and history, structuralism challenged what we now call the humanist tradition. For structuralists, the structure of language itself produces "reality," that is, we can think only through language, and therefore our perceptions of reality are all framed by and determined by the structure of language; the source of meaning is not an individual's experience or being, but the sets of oppositions and operations, the signs and grammars that govern language. Rather than seeing the individual as the center of meaning, structuralism places the structure at the center--it is the structure that originates or produces meaning, not the individual self. Meaning is thus formulated within language and is subject to the underlying structure of language. (Klages 52)

Poststructuralist thinkers destabilize Saussure's notion of language. Saussure views language as being a fixed structure which can be analyzed in objective terms that suggest a neutral order which is separable from particular contexts. For poststructuralists, meaning is constantly being constructed within particular contexts. Meaning produced through a system of linguistic differentiation (or sexual difference) cannot be disconnected from power, as is manifest in the formation of selves shaped by the social and sexual hierarchy. In other words, meaning/language is never neutral, including the meaning given to identity/the self, rather it is socially contextualized and constructed. From this idea of constructedness, comes the poststructuralist rereading of the word, "selfhood." For poststructuralists, selfhood is something not "naturally" produced by bodies or by birth, but a constructed idea. Selfhood, in poststructuralist theory, becomes "subjecthood" or "subjectivity." The switch in terms is a recognition that, first of all, human identity is shaped by language/meaning in particular contexts. The shift from "self" to "subject" also marks the idea that subjects are the product of signs, or signifiers, which make up our ideas of identity. Selves are stable and essential; subjects are constructed, hence provisional, shifting, changing, always able to be redefined or reconstructed. Selves, in this sense, are like signifiers within a rigid system, whose meanings are fixed; subjects, by contrast, are like signifiers in a system with more play, more multiplicity of meaning. (Klages 172)

Postmodern Feminism

Postmodern feminism is an approach to feminist theory that incorporates postmodern and post-structuralist theory. Its largest departure from other branches of feminism is the argument that sex is itself constructed through language. Feminist theory, in the mid- to late 1970s, looked at gender as a system of signs, or signifiers, assigned to sexually dimorphic bodies, which served to differentiate the social roles and meanings those bodies could have. Feminist theory thus argued that gender was a social construct, something designed and implemented and perpetuated by social organizations and structures, rather than something merely "true," something innate to the ways bodies worked on a biological level. Feminists see the gender systems currently in operation (in our culture and in other cultures) as structured by a basic binary opposition--masculine/feminine--in which one term, masculine, is always privileged over the other term, and that this privileging has had the direct effect of enabling men to occupy positions of social power more often than women. Since gender constructed through arbitrary links between signifiers and signifieds, the connection between the two can be weakened, changed, or broken, showing the constructed fragility of subjectivity. Since the signifiers of gender help maintain the system of binary oppositions that shape Western thought by dividing the world into male and female and valuing male over female, gender can be deconstructed, and the elements that constitute stable notions of gender can be put into play. (Klages 92)

The most notable proponent of this argument is Judith Butler. In her book Gender Trouble (1990), Butler argues that gender is performative. No identity exists behind the acts that supposedly "express" gender, and these acts constitute the illusion of the stable gender identity: a fantasy, a set of signs internalized, psychically imposed on the body and on one's psychic sense of identity. The coherence of the categories of gender/sexuality (the natural-seeming coherence, for example, of masculine gender and heterosexual desire in male bodies) is culturally constructed through the repetition of stylized acts in time. These stylized bodily acts, in their repetition, establish the appearance of an essential, ontological "core" gender. This is the sense in which Butler famously theorizes gender, along with sexuality, as performative: a performance, a set of manipulated codes, costumes, rather than a core aspect of essential identity. Furthermore, if the appearance of "being" a gender is thus an effect of culturally influenced acts, then there exists no solid, universal gender: constituted through the practice of performance, the gender "woman" (like the gender "man") remains contingent and open to interpretation and "resignification." In this way, Butler provides an opening for subversive action. She calls for gender trouble, for people to trouble the categories of gender through performance. Butler's main metaphor for this is "drag," that is, dressing like a person of the opposite sex. All gender is a form of drag; there is no real core gender to refer to. (Wikipedia)

Feminism and Race/Ethnicity

"Race," like gender, can be defined as a set of cultural signs assigned by various social mechanisms to human bodies. The physical traits of these bodies, as in gender, become signifiers of "race"; what is signified, then, are the ideologies of "race"--what and how "race" as a concept has social meaning. As a set of signifiers attached to cultural signifieds, "race", like any mode of signification, is arbitrary. There is nothing inherent in hair texture, for instance, that indicates social role or ability, yet that is what the cultural constructions of "race" try to create. Once we see "race" as the arbitrary connection of signifiers and signifieds, we can start to see how racial signs might be analyzed. Does "race" also fit within a structure based on binary opposition? Certainly in regards to racial hierarchies created by the opposition "white/non-white," ideas about "race," or racial ideologies, certainly seem to follow that familiar pattern. If "race" does operate within a structure of binary oppositions, what social mechanisms--material and/or ideological--hold that binary in place?

An ethnic group consists of individuals who are distinguishable, within a majority cultural and social system, by shared characteristics such as race, religion, language, cultural modes, and national origin. If you then make assumptions about that person's ability, social role, or lifestyle on the basis of your awareness of their ethnicity, then you are practicing "ethnocentrism" in the pejorative sense: making assumptions and value judgments (positive or negative) on the basis of ethnicity.

Black Feminism

Black feminism argues that sexism, class oppression, and racism are inextricably bound together. Forms of feminism strive to overcome sexism and class oppression but ignore race can discriminate against many people, including women, through racial bias. The Combahee River Collective (a Black feminist Lesbian organization active in Boston from 1974 to 1980) argued that the liberation of black women entails freedom for all people, since it would require the end of racism, sexism, and class oppression. One of the theories that evolved out of this movement was Alice Walker's Womanism.

The Black feminist movement emerged after earlier feminist movements which were largely led by white middle-class feminists and ignored oppression based on racism and classism. Alice Walker and other Womanists pointed out that black women experienced a different and more intense kind of oppression from that of white women. Patricia Hill-Collins defined Black feminism, in Black Feminist Thought (1991), as including "women who theorize the experiences and ideas shared by ordinary black women that provide a unique angle of vision on self, community, and society".

Postcolonial Feminism

Postcolonial Feminism is a form of feminist philosophy which criticizes Western forms of feminism, notably radical feminism and liberal feminism, and their universalization of female experience. Postcolonial feminists argue that cultures impacted by colonialism are often vastly different and should be treated as such. Colonial oppression may result in glorification of pre-colonial culture, which, in cultures with traditions of stratification of power along lines of gender, could mean the acceptance of, or refusal to deal with, inherent issues of gender inequality.

Many postcolonial feminists argue that oppressions relating to the colonial experience, particularly racial, class, and ethnic oppressions, have marginalized women in postcolonial societies. They challenge the assumption that gender oppression is the primary force of patriarchy. Moreover, postcolonial feminists object to the perceived portrayal of women of non-Western societies as passive and voiceless victims, as opposed to the portrayal of Western women as modern, educated and empowered. While challenging gender oppression within their own culture, postcolonial feminists also fight charges of being "Western", as some within their cultures would contend. (Wikipedia)

Third-World Feminism

Third-World Feminism has been described as a group of feminist theories developed by feminists who acquired their views and took part in feminist politics in so-called third-world countries. Although women from the third world have been engaged in the feminist movement, they criticize Western feminism on the grounds that it is ethnocentric and does not take into account the unique experiences of women from third-world countries or the existence of feminisms indigenous to third-world countries. The development of third-world feminism is associated with concepts such as black feminism, womanism, Africana womanism, and chicana feminism.

Chandra Talpade Mohanty, one of third-world feminists, attacks the reductive way in which the "average third-world woman" is represented in feminist discourse. While western women are portrayed "as educated, as modern, as having control over their own bodies and sexualities, and the freedom to make their own decisions", she argues that the average third-world woman is portrayed as leading "an essentially truncated life based on her feminine gender (read: sexuality constrained) and her being "third world" (read: ignorant, poor, uneducated, tradition-bound, family-oriented, victimized, etc.)."

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's conception of the "subaltern" theorizes the process by which non-western women are "spoken for" in first world writing, which renders them the mute, passive (and implicitly grateful) recipients of western ideas, and which often ignores strategies evolved by third-world women themselves to contend against their own oppression. Third-world women speaking from both within and without western culture destabilise the notion of a seamlessly unified global feminism, yet it may make possible the evolution of a specific and localized seeks to establish overlapping areas of purpose which span cultural boundaries: what Mohanty terms an "imagined community" of women. (Gamble 327)