Nothing Mat(t)ers: A Feminist Critique of Postmodernism

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recurrent Same. “The same was in the beginning with God.” The postmodern male
author is dying, imploding as subject, while women are claiming a voice, giving
birth to a feminist movement and vision and remembering against dismemberment.
Our knowledge is untranslatable and inaudible in mixed forums of masculine
hegemony. Yet les hommes roses abstract and parade a feminist language and theory
made textureless, without body, without speaking, female bodies. We serve as the
raw matter for an unaltered analysis which has none of our values, we do not control
this speech, insidious, neutralized, dishonest recognition of the female, spoken in a
sexist practice. Yet it is we who are accused of purism and intransigence when we
refuse absorption/invisibility of women’s experience. We reject Foucault’s power,
Sartre’s nothingness, Lévi-Strauss’s end to the world, Lacan’s fatal desire, Derrida’s
wizardry, Sade’s creation through murder, Nietzsche’s eternal return of the
masculine o/One. We refuse all these transvestites of travesty. It is now more than
ever necessary to continue the tradition initiated by Mary Wollstonecraft, that of the
woman “who will not try and gain a hearing by being agreeable to men” (Spender:
1983, p. 158). An extorted acknowledgement, and frantic search in the masculine
classics for their importance to women condemns us to an unseemly subservience. It
is only a feminist coming of rage which will liberate us from the containment of the
patriarchal standpoint, not the careful and dutiful tinkering with masculine
constructed and male-referent categories. We must halt the deferential deformation
of our experience that Pygmalion’s Galatea, and Pygmalion as Galatea, have
undertaken. We must open the door and leave the Masters’ House of theories of
subjectivity and consciousness, ideology and power, ethics and desire.
It is extraordinary and completely bizarre that we are accused of alterity, binarity
when we refuse to return to what this all means for men strategically, for what they
can say, what they can do. What is necessary now is feminist thinking that does not
take on the masculine construction of a question, and begins a more complex way of
conceptualizing, says goodbye to all that, in a disruption of the framework posed by
a masculinist methodology concerned with and concealing its subjectivity, reducing
the breath and breadth of female impulse and desire. We need women’s work that
rejects integration into the Manichaean world view, sees the incongruity of seeking
in masculine paradigms a process that is without our content, or a content that is
without our process, refuses the silencing of women by the masculinization of the
feminist project, and the feminization of patriarchy by Dionysus and postmodernism.
Only our autonomy can fundamentally avoid a thanatical and patriarchal
consciousness and practice. We must remember what matters. A feminist sensibility
proceeds from a different understanding of psyche, consciousness and value than
sexist non-sense. An understanding of the integrity of being and knowing, sense and
sensuality, recognizes that the mind cannot exist without the body, and our bodies
cannot live without our minds. Being comes from being, bodies come from other
bodies—women’s bodies— and not from the void or the Master’s word. To make
sense, we have to make knowledge with our experience, and if, yes, forms matter, it
is also true and significant for our worldly desires, that matter forms.