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

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charges that political feminism is “essentialist”, Modleski points out: “But surely for
many women the phrase ‘women’s experience’ is shorthand for ‘women’s
experience of political oppression’, and it is around this experience that they have
organized and out of this experience that they have developed a sense of solidarity,
commonality and community” (1991, p. 17). Indeed, the writing of bell hooks is a
profound examination of the obstacles to, but potentials for, female solidarity. It is
grounded in black, female experience. Hooks illuminates race differences and racist
processes, and reconceptualizes female community and solidarity. She charges that
essentialism is perpetuated by white hetero-patriarchy, while marginalized groups
beginning from their own standpoint are targeted by an “apolitical” postmodernism.
In a review of Diana Fuss’s Essentially Speaking, she writes: “Identity politics
emerges out of the struggles of…exploited groups to have a standpoint on which to
critique dominant structures, a position that gives purpose…to struggle. Critical
pedagogies of liberation…necessarily embrace experience, confession and testimony
as relevant ways of knowing” (1991a, p. 180). Resisting the notion that race and
experience do not matter, P.Gabrielle Foreman shows that “[r]ace, and the habits of
surviving we’ve developed to resist its American deployment, is material in a racist
culture which so staunchly refuses to admit it is so. This we know but find almost
too obvious to write down. Yet our silent space is rapidly being filled with postmodern,
post-Thurgood Marshall concepts of the declining significance of race”
(1991, p. 13).
There is an identity politics to feminist poststructuralism: an identification with
the (white) male text. Elizabeth Meese, for example, writes: “When gender is the
focus for examining difference, deconstructive criticism might even be said to be
identical with the feminist project” (1986, p. xi). Others spend time cataloguing
feminism’s convergences with and divergences from this masculine point of
reference. Alice Jardine (1985) does this in Gynesis, 11 and Hekman (1990) in
Gender and Knowledge. Some insist that feminism belongs to postmodernism. In
“The Discourse of Others: Feminists and Postmodernism,” Craig Owens 12
mistakenly tries to improve the status of feminism by arguing that it is part of
postmodernism:
The absence of discussions of sexual difference in writings about
postmodernism, as well as the fact that few women have engaged in the
10. cont. from previous page many feminists of colour and lesbian feminists are complex enough to
be easily misread as both essentialist and deconstructionist by those who reject dialectical
possibilities… Today, it is not hard to see diverse, heroic and exciting, practice among ever wider
groups of women who are consciously and collectively claiming the right to define themselves/their
identity, to speak for themselves, and to name their world; who are articulating their own values and
visions; who are committed to building solidarity/sisterhood as they articulate their differences.
Nevertheless, postmodern feminists choose not to see the new dialectical possibilities this practice
creates and reveals. Their theory remains impervious to the lessons as well as the imperatives of
practice.”
11. See Toril Moi (1988) for a critique of Jardine’s work as a postfeminism which never really had a
feminist stage.
12. See Elspeth Probyn’s (1987) critique of Craig Owens and Donna Haraway.