Page 138 - Contemporary Cultural Theory

FEMINISM AND POSTMODERNISM

emancipation. If Enlightenment liberalism and Enlightenment socialism
have failed to date to produce any lasting women’s liberation, it is
nonetheless still true, as Kate Millett recognized, that both Mill and
Engels faced the issue of patriarchy “courageously and intelligently”. 89
What Bentham and Mill have been to liberalism, and Marx and Engels
to socialism, so is Nietzsche, the grand philosopher of nineteenth
century irrationalism, to post-structuralism itself. Yet to read Nietzsche
is to be confronted by an anti-feminism bordering on misogyny. Thus
Nietzsche (and there is much more where this came from): “a man
who has depth of spirit as well as of desires…can only think of woman
as Orientals do: he must conceive of her as a possession, as confinable
property, as a being predestined for service and accomplishing her
mission therein—he must take his stand in this matter…as the Greeks
did formerly; those best heirs and scholars of Asia—who…with their
increasing culture and amplitude of power, from Homer to the time
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of Pericles, became gradually stricter towards woman”. Doubtless,
feminist deconstruction already knows the source from which much
of its critique of the Enlightenment is derived. But perhaps Amazons,
as much as Trojans, should beware Greeks bearing gifts.

Feminism and postmodernism
Following on from Laura Kipnis’s argument against too easy an
assimilation of postmodernism to post-structuralism, the question
arises as to what exactly a distinctly postmodern feminism might
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consist in. From Craig Owens on, there has in fact been a tendency
amongst male theorists to link the feminist to the postmodern. Despite
the understandable suspicion which such linkage can excite amongst
socialist feminists, there is at least one important sense in which it
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does indeed seem apposite. As Andreas Huyssen has stressed, high
modernism established itself partly by way of an opposition to mass
culture in which the latter was effectively gendered “as feminine and
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inferior”. And insofar as postmodernism has decentred such high
modernisms, then this has entailed a “recentring”, not simply of the
popular and of the female, but of the marginalized in general.
Postmodern culture becomes thereby quite fundamentally subversive
of all certainties, not least those of patriarchy. The liberating effects
of the new languages of difference and decentring—part postmodernist,

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