CHAPTER 5 CHAPTER 5
5.5 Postmodernism and feminism in critical dialogue
Understanding social identity as multi-faceted and fluid is critical in the process of “giving voice” to the agency of poor and marginalised women which lies at the heart of my own work. For me, it their context of survival which is foundational to our work as women in overcoming oppression in its “endless variety and monotonous similarity” (Fraser and Nicholson 1990). As I have already suggested, postmodernism with its stress on identity, subjectivity, and historical locatedness is useful to an inclusive women’s project that
acknowledges difference and particularity. It is thus that I turn in the next section to a critical dialogue between postmodernism and feminism, and its usefulness to the South African debate generally, and my work as an activist-intellectual specifically.
Aspects of the work of leading French postmodern thinkers such as Jaques Derrida and Michèl Foucault have been borrowed by some feminists. The focus has been on Foucault (1980) who understands “truth” as “simply a partial localized version of ‘reality’
transformed into a fixed form in the long process of history” (Parpart and Marchand 1995:2).
In the postmodern feminist reading of Foucault by Parpart and Marchand (1995), “the false power of hegemonic knowledge can be challenged by counter hegemonic discourses which offer alternative explanations of ‘reality’”(Parpart and Marchand 1995:3). These alternate explanations of reality are attractive to feminists wanting to foreground marginalised voices.
“Other” realities imply a subjectivity of experience that recognises the contingent nature of the subject.
The subject as constructed and contingent is another aspect of the work of postmodern thinkers that has been appealing to some feminists because it “has drawn attention to the power of language/discourse and its impact on the way people understand and assign meaning to their lives” (Parpart and Marchand 1995:3). A focus of Derrida’s (1976) work, according to Parpart and Marchand (1995), has been on the deconstruction of texts (both written and oral) and has particularly emphasised the role played by binary opposites. These opposites, such as truth/falsity, unity/diversity or man/woman, on which, Derrida argues, western philosophy largely rests, give rise to the premise that “the nature and primacy of the first term depends on the definition of its opposite (other) and whereby the first term is also superior to the second” (Parpart and Marchand 1995:3). The process of the deconstruction of texts is important because it allows for a greater focus on the way difference(s) embedded in this binary thinking are constructed and maintained (Parpart and Marchand 1995:3). “The search to discover the way social meanings are constructed has highlighted the importance of difference and the tendency for people to define those they see as different (“other”) in opposition to their own perceived strengths” (Parpart and Marchand 1995:3-4). It has been particularly postmodern feminists from the third world such as Chandra Mohanty (1988) and Gayatri Spivak (1988; Landry and MacLean 1996) who have employed these insights in their work.
It must be recognised however, that postmodernism has spawned extremely diverse thinkers,
and as postmodern feminist Judith Butler (1992) has pointed out, any attempt to place postmodernism under a unifying sign, in fact renders it a project of modernity. Hence the necessity to speak of “postmodernisms”.
If postmodernism as a term has some force or meaning within social theory, or feminist social theory in particular, perhaps it can be found in the critical exercise that seeks to show how theory, how philosophy is always implicated in power, and perhaps that it is precisely what is symptomatically at work in the effort to domesticate and refuse a set of powerful criticisms under the rubric of postmodernism (Butler 1992:6).
Having said this, in broad summary, it can be asserted that postmodern thinkers
reject universal, simplified definitions of social phenomena, which, they argue, essentialize reality and fail to reveal the complexity of life as a lived experience... They emphasize the need for local, specific and historically informed analysis, carefully grounded in both spatial and cultural contexts (Parpart and Marchand 1995:4).
The appeal of postmodernism, particularly to some feminists in the third world, has been its emphasis on the importance of encouraging the recovery of silenced voices and its
acceptance of the partial nature of all knowledge. The search of postmodern feminists is thus a search for these silenced voices, and in so doing, takes into account the power of language in relation to knowledge, context, and locality (Huyssen 1990; Nicholson 1992).
5.5.2 Feminist reaction to postmodern ideas
Feminists have reacted to postmodern ideas in a number of different ways. Those who employ the critical tools of postmodernism are implicitly challenging the notion of a global sisterhood that adheres to one all encompassing vision that mobilises women and transforms their lives. Deconstructing women’s lives using the analytical tools of identity, subjectivity, and locatedness, has sparked a debate amongst western feminists themselves. Many
feminists are deeply concerned about the implications of deconstruction for the solidarity amongst women in their struggle to change the patriarchal relations that exist around the world.
Jane Flax (1992:447) has argued that one, global, “feminist vision” has in fact been “dreams of innocence” - a hope that there is some form of innocent knowledge that tells us how to live in the world and once our actions are grounded in that knowledge, transformation will occur.
Instead, she argues, these “dreams of innocence” are politically dangerous and need to end.
“Operating within the Enlightenment metanarrative, these feminist theorists confuse two different claims - that certain kinds of knowledge are generated by gender-based power relations and that correcting these biases will necessarily produce ‘better’ knowledge that will be purely emancipatory (that is, not generated by and generative of its own relations of non- innocent power)” (Flax 1992:457).
Standpoint feminists10 such as Nancy Harstock (1990a) have reacted strongly against this criticism. She is deeply suspicious of the fact that the emergence of a postmodern critique that calls into question the ability to theorize about the world, the stress on difference, and the nature of the subject has come at this particular time in history. “Why is it that just at the moment when so many of us who have been silenced begin to demand the right to name ourselves, to act as subjects rather than objects of history, that just then the concept of subjecthood becomes problematic” (Hartsock 1990a:163)?
10 Standpoint feminists privilege in their epistemology “women’s ways of knowing” as a consciously chosen political and social vantage point.
However, as Flax (1992) points out, this suspicion of the postmodern feminist project is more complex than Harstock suggests. “As much if not more than postmodernism, the writings of women of color have compelled white feminists to confront problems of difference and the relations of domination that are the conditions of possibility for the coherence of our own theorizing and category formation” (Flax 1992:459). Hence, any criticism of the postmodern feminist project, she asserts, cannot ignore the racial sub-text (I would also add the sub-texts of class, culture, and colonialism) which force an exploration of the power relations amongst
women themselves in the construction of knowledge (see also Armour 1999).
Like standpoint feminists, some Marxist feminists have also expressed opposition to
postmodern ideas. Sylvia Walby argues that postmodernism “has fragmented the concepts of sex, race and class, denying the pertinence of over-arching theories of patriarchy, racism and capitalism” (1992:31). Because, in her opinion, this fragmentation has gone too far, there is a denial of the significant structuring of power in society, which has led to “mere empiricism”
(1992:31). Postmodernists, thus move central theoretical concepts away from “structure”
into “discourse”. As a result power is conceptualized “as highly dispersed rather than concentrated in identifiable places and groups” which hinders the transformation of social structures (1992:48). Walby (1992:48) argues that in the face of the complexity of the social order, postmodernism denies the possibility of causality and macro-social concepts in an attempt to take gender and ethnicity seriously. For Walby, this is a misguided abandonment of the modernist project in explaining the world, “rather we should be developing the concepts and theories to explain gender, ethnicity and class” (1992:48).
Standpoint feminist Hartsock (1990a), critiquing Foucault, is similarly perturbed by his categories of power that are “insurrectionary”, “disordered”, “fragmentary”, “lacking
autonomous life”. For Hartsock, categorising power in this non-systematic way, “negates the fact that they rest on organized and indeed material bases” (1990a:167). Despite Foucault’s stated preference for resistance discourse, his thought, argues Hartstock (1990a), is still deeply embedded in the dominant perspective. Furthermore, she argued that Foucault focuses on the individual’s perception of power, with a call for resistance and exposure of power relations rather than transformation. The task of intellectuals, in Hartsock’s reading of Foucault, “is less to become part of movements for fundamental change and more to struggle against the forms of power that can transform these movements into instruments of
domination” (Hartsock 1990a:167). She concludes her critique of Foucault’s notion of power by paraphrasing Marx, “the point is to change the world, not simply to redescribe ourselves or reinterpret the world yet again” (Hartsock 1990a:172).
The need to change the social structures of the world lies at the heart of the feminist project, and it is the political implications of postmodern ideas that concerns feminists such as Alcoff