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

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special introductory power; it is not so much that women are witches, but that
sorcery proceeds by way of this becoming-woman” (1988, p. 248). Is this male
apprenticeship some sort of talisman to frighten contemporary feminists (previously
known as “hysterics”) 2 Related to this is the curious omission of the sorceress in
Foucault’s history of sexuality, his intriguing point of departure. The scientia
sexualis ignores, but begins directly after, the witch hunts. Yet it was the new
printing press that enabled the dissemination of precise symptoms for inquisitors to
extort as confessions. The Malleus Maleficarum, the first postmodern text,
standardized patriarchal hysteria about female sources. 3
What is the meaning of this particular ideology of masculine domination Strange
timing: the subject is now annulled by ungenerous and disingenuous white western
wizards while women’s, Black and Third World liberation movements are claiming
their voices (hooks: 1991; Hartsock: 1990; Christian: 1988; Barry: 1990; de
Lauretis: 1989; Lazreg: 1988). Gallop (1988, p. 100) argues that postmodernism
“dephallicizes modernism so men can claim to be current. If modernism…is itself a
defense against feminism and the rise of women writers, postmodernism is a more
subtle defense, erected when modernism would no longer hold.”
We know we are in a world where politics is the separation of the public and the
private, and man’s, 4 Western man’s, image is everywhere. He is fascinated by this
image and at the same time bored by it. His images, of himself and us, are before our
eyes: this noxious narcissist has placed his body of knowledge across our desire
to know. I reach for my body, but this “male-stream” (O’Brien: 1981, p. 5) corpus
has imposed itself between my experience and my reflection. The access to formal
knowledge is mediated by the Master (Le Doeuff: 1989, pp. 100–128; Lorde: 1981).
The way to myself and other women is blocked by this male icon as a point of
reference, for reverence. And I have to make arguments which sound extravagant to
my ears, that women exist. That women are sensible. Only knowledge of the male
body and male thought is considered essential, the female is unessential, the female
is essentialist. And to contradict this, to speak against masculine culture, is so
uncultured. The Masters of discourse have also said that it requires a great deal of
sophistication to speak like a woman, clearly it’s best left to men. Their texts play
2. One of the most studied of Freud’s “cases” of hysteria was Anna O., who in reality was the Jewish
feminist Bertha Pappenheimer. Her experiences with male dominance and women’s rights
organizations are chronicled in a preliminary way by Marion A.Kaplan (1979), in Chapter 2 of The
Jewish Feminist Movement in Germany. See also Dianne Hunter (1985) “Hysteria, Psychoanalysis
and Feminism: The Case of Anna O.,” in The (M)other Tongue, edited by Shirley Nelson Garner
et al.
3. Catherine Clément’s sexist history of the sorceress in The Newly Born Woman (Cixous and
Clément: 1975/1986) turns the persecution into a co-dependency relationship, a dysfunctional
familial encounter. She hints at sado-masochism: “The hysteric must ‘quit the show’” and be “done
with the couple: perversion and hysteria, inquisitor and sorceress” (1975/1986, p. 56).
4. A note on usage: I use the masculine form only as I argue that it is precisely the masculine which
is meant by and in postmodern texts. Their positions and arguments cannot be uncritically extended
to women—to do so would render women’s experiences invisible. This book studies masculine
ideology, and it points to the masculine referentiality of these concepts. He, his and man are
therefore appropriate.