postmodern feminism

 

postmodern feminism is a hybrid, contemporary and sometimes conflicted set of concepts and practices about the feminine at this sociohistorical moment. postmodernism calls into question all grand narratives (reason, truth, beauty, art, science) in a society informed by western metaphysics and accelerated by technological development. its historical situation is complex: "the postmodern is not simply a chronological 'after' to the modern; it is always embedded within the modern as interference or interruption and as a coming to consciousness! of a subject no longer modelled upon the western white male" [halberstam 473]. the postmodern radically interrogates notions of origin, essence, nature. balsamo states: "the 'natural' body has disappeared, replaced by a technologically produced simulacrum" [28]. postmodern feminism, in consequence, presents a challenge to essentialist feminisms by emphasizing the artificiality of the body, of gender, of race, of sexuality, of femininity. pomofem posits gender as a technology that consolidates itself through imitative performance [butler 24]. there is no origin. this has fascinating consequences for mainstream feminist discourse, often criticized from the 'margins' for its elitist construction of 'natural woman' as western, white, middle class, heterosexual and able-bodied. the postmod! ern shift decentres the canonized feminist self, creating space for new realities to come into play.

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if women exist only in men's eyes as images, women should take those images and reflect them back to men in magnified proportions
- luce irigaray