Inessentially Speaking (Is There Politics after Postmodernism?)

Abstract

Although we need to use gender-related ideas in order to challenge gender constraints, we will only be able to accomplish that objective by constantly re-examining the ideas we are using. Ultimately, in order to challenge gender constraints effectively, our use of gender-related ideas must change with our shifting cultural context and the changes within ourselves. Only by continually re-thinking who we are and why we are making the choices we make can we free ourselves from the belief that our selves are constructed by our sexual identities. Mary Joe Frug1 Twilight is upon us. As the contemporary continuance of the Enlightenment project, modernity has had its day. Its erstwhile champions' efforts to establish a combination of authenticity and authority as the ground for Truth and Justice that individuals can only give meaning and value to their own lives by locating and expressing their own self-identity have proved to be misplaced. A modernist deliverance from doubt and uncertainty remains a tantalizing, but receding prospect. The sun of Truth is unfailingly hazy and in danger of total eclipse, resembling more a fading battery of artful floodlights. Everything loses its iridescence and is reduced to a dull pastiche of bland on bland. In a way of speaking, Minerva's owl has flown the philosophical coop entirely.2 No longer taking its crepuscular flights of fancy, Wisdom's bird has abandoned Western attempts to locate a fixed