Page 139 - Contemporary Cultural Theory

FEMINISM

part post-structuralist—thus arise precisely “because the centre used
to function as the pivot between binary oppositions which always
privileged one half: white/black, male/female, self/other, intellect/ body,
west/east, objectivity/subjectivity”. 94
Huyssen himself pays little attention to explicitly feminist
theorizations of the postmodern, except in his concluding invocation
of a “postmodernism of resistance”, which concedes the contribution
made by the women’s movement to an emergently postmodern
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“problematic of ‘otherness’”. For Huyssen, postmodern culture is
at once both incorporated and oppositional, commodified and
subversive. Writing from a more explicitly feminist perspective, Ann
Kaplan has described these twin faces of postmodernism as, respectively,
96
the “commercial” and the “utopian”. They are connected primarily
by virtue of their shared antipathy to the binary trope in modernist
(and more especially structuralist) thought. Where the capitalist mass-
market has deconstructed the opposition between élite and popular
cultures, postmodern feminism and the women’s movement deconstruct
that between masculinity and femininity. These vastly differing
conceptions of postmodernism, a largely feminist utopianism and a
deeply capitalist commercialism, can coexist in a single cultural space,
according to Kaplan, only because they each respond to a similar
cultural situation, that of the 1960s. 97
But it seems to me that Kaplan here confuses two quite distinct
moments within second wave feminism itself: that of a largely
anglophone, often American, politically interventionist, and often
pseudo-popular, feminist cultural practice which has indeed often
been subversively postmodernist (as, for example, with Barbara Kruger);
and that of a largely French, theoretical, feminist post-structuralism,
which is, as Kipnis argues, almost classically modernist in its politico-
cultural character. No doubt, the antithesis can be overdrawn. But
one can distinguish nonetheless between the more strictly post-
structuralist aestheticisms of feminist high theory on the one hand,
and the more eclectic, postmodern political engagements of much
feminist cultural studies, on the other. Good examples of the latter
can be found in the more recent work of Judith Williamson and in
that of Meaghan Morris, perhaps the most interesting and certainly
one of the most widely cited of the new Australian feminists.
Williamson herself rejects the term “postmodernism”, judging it
the “academic parent-concept” of much that she has disliked in the

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