Postmodern Feminist Research Articles

Contested Foundations: Postmodern Feminism and the Case of the Union of Italian Women

Previous articleNext article No AccessContested Foundations: Postmodern Feminism and the Case of the Union of Italian WomenChiara FerrariChiara Ferrari Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Signs Volume 33, Number 3Spring 2008 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/523708 Views: 89Total views on this site Citations: 1Citations are reported from Crossref © 2008 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Molly Tambor Mothers, Workers, Citizens: Teresa Noce and the Parliamentary Politics of Motherhood, (Jun 2018): 51–76.https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54256-4_3

‘Good man, Mary!’ Women musicians and the fraternity of Irish traditional music

The study of gender is ‘inherently a study of relations of asymmetrical power and opportunity’ (S.B. Ortner and H. Whitehead, 1981. Introduction to Sexual meanings: the cultural construction of gender and sexuality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 4 ). In the masculine space of the Irish pub, women musicians respond to this power differential by adopting an array of tactics aimed at increasing their musical participation and enjoyment. The impediments to women's public performance of Irish traditional music must also include consideration that the Irish pub is a social space in which women historically had no legitimate presence; but this is only part of the story. Untangling the complex relationships between music and gender in symbolic representations of the Irish nation further reveals a strand of cultural meanings that persists in configuring ‘woman’ and ‘music’, ‘Ireland’ and ‘nation’ in ways that are disempowering to women musicians today. This essay draws on Foucault's theory of discourse to examine the gendered historical and contemporary representations of Irish music and musicians and on postmodern feminist theory of the performativity of gender to demonstrate how deeply embedded are our gendered conceptions of subjectivity, music, and nationality.

Woman entrepreneurship programme breaks government's gender neutrality in Finland

Since 1970s the women entrepreneurship studies have indicated that for women starting and running the business is different arena than for men. Not only horizontal and vertical segregation but also the aspirations and expectation between men and women business owners are different. However, these differences have rarely had any impact on governments' decision making. More often formal institutions apply gender neutrality in their policy-making. This study suggests that the lenses of the post-modern feminism provides a perspective to women entrepreneurship that might be far more effective for supporting woman entrepreneurship as well as providing education, training and support systems for it. The study presents how gender lenses provided an opportunity to break gender neutrality in Finnish government's policy programme. In practice this meant gender specific activities in education, training and support systems. This anticipates that by giving up the gender neutrality might improve equality.

Pisliachornobyl's'ka biblioteka: ukrains'kyi literaturnyi postmodern by Tamara Hundorova (review)

REVIEWS I47 Hundorova, Tamara. Pisliachornobyl's 'ka biblioteka:ukrains'kyiliteraturnyi postmo dern.Krytyka, Kyiv, 2005. 263 pp. Notes. Index. English Summary. 19UAH (paperback). In Pisliachornobyl's'ka biblioteka (The Post-Chornobyl Library) Tamara Hun dorova translates the idea that the nuclear age is linkedwith the postmodern condition toUkraine: theChornobyl disaster, in the author's view, dramati cally transformed theUkrainian consciousness, entering it as a discourse in the same way that the nuclear threat of the Cold War entered Western consciousness. Chornobyl brought with itmistrust not only of totalitarian authority, but also of all authoritative discourse. The disaster also led to a rethinking of time and space, since itseffectsknew no boundaries and threat ened to end time and plunge theworld intopost-apocalyptic regression.With the disintegration of structures and hierarchies that it brought, Chornobyl consequently caused a decentralization and fragmentation of Ukrainian literature. Ukrainian intellectual and literary life became highly diversified, though with one uniting factor: the post-Chornobyl discourse. The texts produced within this discourse constitute the 'post-Chornobyl library' of the book's title. After laying out this theoretical approach, Hundorova discusses the devel opment of postmodernism inUkraine, highlighting numerous complications such as the interference of nationalist-romantic discourse in the embryonic postmodern process, or the re-activation of Ukrainian modernism: Ukrainian postmodernism paradoxically becomes a 'reflection and a completion' of this interruptedmodernism, rather than standing in opposition to it (p. 39). Other issues discussed by Hundorova include the process of re-evaluation of the Ukrainian literary canon, transformations in linguistic behaviour and how postmodernism fits into a 'culturally organic' vision of Ukrainian literature (p. 57). The book then goes on to discuss individual or groups of writers. The author sees theKyiv ironists,with their ironic linguistic behaviour, and the Bu-Ba-Bu poets, with their subversive carnival ethos, as forerunners and initiators of Ukrainian postmodernism. She identifies a common 'morpho logical' approach to reality between Taras Prokhasko and Iurii Izdryk, comparing the 'novel-essays' of the former, with their 'thought image con structions',with the latter's distorted dream imagery, inwhich the boundaries between subject and object become blurred (pp. 97-115). She also examines the advent of Ukrainian feminist postmodernism in the shape of Oksana Zabuzhko, who combines sexuality, language and national-cultural identity in a hybrid form ofwriting somewhere between popular women's fictionand the intellectual essay. In Serhii Zhadan's work Hundorova sees deliberate contrasting of 1960sWestern ideals with the nationalistic modernism popular inUkraine at the same time, combined with a deconstructive approach to socialist symbols that she identifieswith thework of theMoscow conceptual ists.The Chornobyl disaster itself ismost directly linked with the work of Ievhen Pashkovskyi, and his apocalyptic, moralizing texts.The author also identifieswhat she calls 'post-totalitarian kaif (post-totalitarian kicks) in the 148 SEER, 86, I, 2008 work of Volodymyr Tsybulko (p. 159), who combines mass-culture kitsch with a constructive underlying cultural agenda. In the final chapter she examines ?migr? dramatist George Tarnawsky's original stance on Derridian deconstruction in his 'anthology of anti-feminist concepts' (p. 227). Iurii Andrukhovych is themost analysed author in the book (which leads at times to repetition), and is discussed in the context of 'carnival postmodernism' (p. 77), post-colonialism and in the chapter 'Post-modern topography: nostalgia and revenge' (pp. 125-37). What is demonstrated by the book is somewhat at odds with what might seem to be its initial premise. The varied nature of the examined texts, and the literaryapproaches and cultural philosophies behind them, suggest a literary postmodernism that at once embraces and rejects the name. Few of thewriters discussed can be said to be purely postmodernist: the Bu-Ba-Bu was an embryonic form of postmodernism, not recognized as such at the time and remarkable more for its socio-political role; theKyiv ironistswere also only retrospectively associated with postmodernism; the 'post-totalitarian kaif ofTsybulko, the apocalyptic visions of Pashkovskyi and the intellectual ideals of Tarnawsky, while all involving postmodernist techniques, have more in common with what Hundorova herself describes as a 'neo-modernist' view of literature (p. 254); similarly, the two most important writers discussed, Andrukhovych and Zabuzhko, have a somewhat ambivalent relationship with postmodernism which, in its Western form...

VII. Meanings of Sex and Gender for a New Generation of Feminist Psychologists

When Rhoda Unger’s landmark essay ‘Toward a Redefinition of Sex and Gender’ was published in 1979, we were 10 and 14 years old respectively. But by the time we met in graduate school in 1992, we were feminists, we were becoming feminist psychologists and, perhaps most importantly, there was such a thing as feminist psychology. We didn’t have to do the intellectual work to create the subfield, we didn’t have to fight for it, we didn’t have to hide it or do it on the side while pursuing ‘mainstream research’ in public. We weren’t told by our advisors that studying gender was a waste of our time; indeed, we had the opportunity to be advised by a prominent feminist psychologist, Abby Stewart. We ‘grew up’, then, in the context of a psychology already influenced by the women’s movement and by groundbreaking scholars such as Unger. Yet, the subfield we entered was young enough that we learned of these struggles from the women who fought them, and so we take none of these opportunities we’ve had for granted. We are acutely aware and appreciative of the legacy we have inherited, and of the specific ways Rhoda Unger was – and continues to be – influential in creating that legacy. To us as young scholars, the distinctions between ‘sex’ and ‘gender’ seemed clear and not in need of specification, an, in that way, Unger’s (1979) distinctions had already had a positive and important effect on the field and on us. Our experiences of feminist psychology were much like what Baumgardner and Richards (2000) described as the experience of feminism for third-wavers: ‘For our generation, feminism is like fluoride. We scarcely notice that we have it – it’s simply in the water’ (p. 17). By the time we entered the field, the contemporary scholarship on sex and gender was heavily influenced by postmodern feminist thinking. We each have distinctive memories of reading Hare-Mustin and Marecek’s (1990) now classic, then hot-off-the-press, book Making a Difference:

Imperial Masochism: British Fiction, Fantasy, and Social Class, by John Kucich

Reviewed by: Imperial Masochism: British Fiction, Fantasy, and Social Class Regenia Gagnier (bio) Imperial Masochism: British Fiction, Fantasy, and Social Class, by John Kucich; pp. x + 258. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2007, $35.00, £22.95. John Kucich has written in the past of transgression, repression, excess, and restraint in Victorian literature. With Imperial Masochism he demonstrates his command of yet another psychosocial motive of the period by applying the insights of psychoanalysis beyond the individual to recover something like the group interiority or collective psychology that has all but disappeared in contemporary critique. As he states, then, his intentions are to demonstrate the continued relevance of psychoanalysis to historicism; to elucidate the role masochistic fantasy plays in identity formation beyond the field of sexuality; to illuminate the social function of such fantasy in British culture; and to recuperate for historicist studies both the category of social class and the domain of the psychological. Defining masochism as any pursuit of physical pain, suffering, or humiliation that generates phantasmic, omnipotent compensations for narcissistic trauma, Kucich identifies four types of masochistic fantasy: of total control over others, of the annihilation of others, of the omnipotence of others, and of solitary omnipotence. Chapters on Robert Louis Stevenson, Olive Schreiner, Rudyard Kipling, and Joseph Conrad then explore these fantasies in detail. Imperial Masochism contests current critical assumptions that masochism is always about sexuality; that it always organizes oedipal patterns of dominance and submission; and that, in colonial contexts, it is primarily about race, gender, or sexual orientation rather than class. To Kucich, masochism is a psychosocial language, not a fixed set of behaviors, and masochistic fantasy is an instrument for social action, not a specific act in itself. Class is a symbolic medium of conflict—rather than an economic or political category—in which conceptions of social identity are framed. Kucich successfully argues that willful self-martyrdom was central to the emergence of professional middle-class culture in the Empire at the end of the nineteenth century. [End Page 166] Against a psychoanalysis that views masochism as a sexual rebellion governed by oedipal thematics, Kucich proposes a relational psychology in which omnipotent fantasy is the compensation for narcissistic wounds. The interpretive cruxes he thereby clarifies are Conrad's stance on imperialism, Kipling's ambivalence toward social authority, the relationship between politics and decadence in Stevenson, and the relation of Schreiner's self-martyring politics to postmodern feminism. While I cannot say how professional psychoanalysts would judge it, to those of us interested in how and why the language of self-sacrifice, evangelism, and atonement functioned to secure empire, Kucich's analysis is persuasive and salutary. Each chapter in Imperial Masochism works through the relevant typology of masochistic fantasy and then turns to the emergent class dynamics. Stevenson is poignantly "perverse" (Kucich's term) in channelling evangelical authority into an anti-imperialist crusade, and Kucich links this with the author's decadent melancholy, defending the place of perversity in political radicalism. Beginning with the gang group fantasy of Stalky & Co. (1899), which Kucich calls magical, the chapter on Kipling shows how he fused a radical form of middle-class individualism with the intersubjective demands of the Tory public school in a professional code of conduct for imperial rule. Conrad, predictably the subtlest of imperialists, imported elements of masochistic self-consciousness that de-idealized the chivalric aims he hopelessly opposed to capitalism's creative destruction. Kucich argues on good grounds that Schreiner proposed a middle-class women's masochistic project to counter what she called their female parasitism. Yet his definition of masochism and discursive analysis of class do not seem adequate to the issues that Schreiner and her scholars have recognized: how much does extending freedom mean if it is merely procedural and not economic? Is altruism no more than masochism without compensatory fantasies of omnipotence? In using Matthew Arnold's categories of philistines, populace, and barbarians, Schreiner was referring to ideological machinery, labour, and manners or taste. What do these have to do with the economic stages of development, or relative distance from necessity, that distinguished the British, Boers, and Blacks? Were Boers—or for that matter, Blacks or white Europeans—in...

‘Our bodies, our selves?’ The body as source in feminist theology

AbstractThis article is, in part, an effort to come to terms with the ubiquitous celebration of embodiment in feminist discourse, and particularly within feminist theology. It will begin with a brief introduction to some of the key concepts in feminist theology and its use of the body, beginning with the body theologies of those who might now be called ‘second-wave’ theologians – Carter Heyward and Beverly Harrison. From here, I will consider postmodern feminist challenges to the reified and essentialised body as I examine what I call the subversive body in third-wave or postmodern feminism, both secular and theological. Finally, I shall move from these to an alternative construal of the importance of the body through the consideration of Christian bodily practices. Such an alternative will allow me to reflect upon what it is to become a specifically Christian body through church practices. I shall then endeavour to return to the critical concerns raised by feminism about the subjugation of women's bodies in the church as I consider the resources that might be available within the tradition itself for critical and emancipatory practices toward women and other strangers within the Body of Christ.

Feminist thought in transition: Never a dull moment

In this essay, I summarize how I believe feminist thought has developed during the period 1960–2000 and where it might go in the future. First, I summarize the evolution of second-wave feminist thought during the period from the early 1960s to the late 1980s, focusing on liberal, radical, and Marxist–socialist feminisms. Next, I summarize multicultural, global, and postmodern feminisms as they emerged in the U.S. and elsewhere during the late 1980s and early 1990s, viewing them as a transition from second-wave to third-wave feminist thought. Third, I claim that young women today, including those who are doing feminism in the manner of third-wave feminists, are shaping a very particularistic, even individualistic form of feminism, with mixed consequences. Fourth, I will conclude that the future of feminist thought depends on its ability to resolve the sameness–difference debate, for unless women and the category of gender have some role to play in feminism, it is not clear that labeling one's self a “feminist” makes sense anymore.

Figuring maternity: Christine Dixie's Parturient Prospects

The Interior, Birthing Tray and Parturition are three sub-sections of a project entitled Parturient Prospects that artist Christine Dixie began in 2005, when she was pregnant with her second child, and completed by the end of 2006. In Parturient Prospects, the author reveals, Dixie situates her experiences against Western discourses, especially images from early modern Europe. Focusing on the ways in which visual representations construct woman as ‘other’, Dixie invokes reference to not only representations of birth and maternity but also religious, medical and geographical images. While the gendered underpinnings of these discourses are not always immediately transparent when they are kept discrete from one another, they become evident when they are invoked simultaneously, and Dixie's works reveal that they are in fact mutually reinforcing agents and indeed often use related tropes. Dixie destabilises their authority not only by challenging their discreteness, however, but also, and even more crucially, by introducing motifs that interfere with their meanings. These additions to, or substitutions for, the imagery in the discourses to which she refers are markers of both a female subjectivity and a postmodernist feminist voice that sees ‘otherness’ as a potential position of strength—a place from which to subvert and transgress gendered norms and understandings.

Hermeneutics of science and multi-gendered science education

In this paper, I consider the relevance of the view of cognitive existentialism to a multi-gendered picture of science education. I am opposing both the search for a particular feminist standpoint epistemology and the reduction of philosophy of science to cultural studies of scientific practices as championed by supporters of postmodern political feminism. In drawing on the theory of gender plurality and the conception of dynamic objectivity, the paper suggests a way of treating the nexus between the construction of gender within the interrelatedness of scientific practices and the constitution of particular objects of inquiry. At stake is the notion of characteristic hermeneutic situation which proves to be helpful in designing a multi-gendered pedagogy as well.

Feminist legal theory: a primer

At long last, the complex field of feminist legal theory is presented in accessible, teachable form by two of its experts, Nancy Levit and Robert R. M. Verchick. In this outstanding primer, the authors introduce the diverse strands of feminist legal theory and the array of substantive legal issues relevant to women's and gender studies. The book centers on feminist legal theories-including equal treatment theory, cultural feminism, dominance theory, critical race feminism, lesbian feminism, postmodern feminism, and ecofeminism. The authors also address feminist legal methods, such as consciousness raising and storytelling. The primer demonstrates the ways feminist legal theory operates in real-life contexts, including domestic violence, reproductive rights, workplace discrimination, education, sports, pornography, and global issues of gender. Levit and Verchick highlight a sweeping range of cutting edge topics at the intersection of law and gender, such as single sex schools, women in the military, abortion, same sex marriage, date rape, and the international trafficking in women and girls. At its core, Feminist Legal Theory shows the importance of the role of law and feminist legal theory in shaping contemporary gender issues.

WHERE ARE THE WOMEN? GENDER, LABOR, AND DISCOURSE IN THE NOIDA EXPORT PROCESSING ZONE AND DELHI

Export processing zones (EPZs) are like islands of globalization. Much of the literature on EPZs and export-oriented industries (EOIs) notes a preponderance of women who are constructed as “cheap,” “nimble fingered,” and “docile” labor. This literature is dominated by socialist feminist thinkers, and this paper argues that there is a need to incorporate the insights of postmodern feminist thinkers. The article focuses on the role that language, discourse, and subjectivity play in the gendering process in handmade jewelry production in the Noida Export Processing Zone (NEPZ) and in the ranch production units related by common ownership in Delhi, India. It thus gives “voices” to women and men, and brings out their agency in structuring the labor market. The study confirms that gender division of labor is a product of discursive and material practices that are reproduced through discourses into which different actors invest, and that feed into the gendered subjective identities of these actors.

Women's experiences of incarceration in Hong Kong: Doing time, doing choice, doing class-gender-culture

This article engages with socialist and postmodern feminist debates to theorise how classed, gendered and cultured inequities structured the criminalisation and incarceration of 24 Chinese offending women in the Hong Kong penal-welfare complex. In this process the women were active agents who made reflexive choices in response to the substantial challenges posed by economic marginalisation, gendered-cultured discrimination and corrective attempts at disciplinary normalisation. However, as the women exercised agency by drawing on their real experiences of inequality and the hegemonic discursive representations of the ‘work ethic,’ ‘normative femininity’ and ‘filial piety’ which legitimated them, they mobilised ‘strategic’ elements which articulated the interests of powerful social, economic and political forces and thereby sustained their disadvantaged position at the margins. The women's choices, therefore, were discursively constituted at the ‘intersectionality’ of unequal classed-gendered-cultured relations and reflected ‘negotiated actions’ framed by broader socio-economic and cultural power structures.

Postmodern feminist perspectives and nursing research: a passionately interested form of inquiry

The challenges posed by postmodern and poststructural theories profoundly disrupt the certainties of feminist and nursing research, yet at the same time offer possibilities for developing new epistemologies. While there are an increasing number of accounts discussing the theoretical implications of these ideas for nursing research, I wish to discuss the practical and the methodological implications of using postmodern feminist theories within empirical research. In particular, I identify the challenges I encountered through an examination of specific aspects of the research process and through examples drawn from empirical research. I conclude that using postmodern feminist theories requires a continuous engagement with, and interrogation of, the modern epistemological and ontological assumptions of qualitative, feminist nursing research and, in so doing, presents the possibility for nurse scholars to begin to develop a 'passionately interested' methodological approach to nursing inquiry.

‘I can't do with whinging women!’ Feminism and the habitus of ‘women in science’ activists

This article explores the field of policy, activism, and educational activity around the issue of women's under-representation in science, engineering, and technology (or Women in SET) which has developed since the 1970s in Europe and North America. Critical, radical, and postmodern feminist ideas are marginal in this field, despite the existence of a body of feminist literature on the inter-relationships between gender and SET. Evidence is presented from in-depth interviews with Women in SET activists, most of whom were employed in scientific and technical professions, exploring their reluctance to claim an allegiance with feminism. Bourdieu's concept of habitus is used in an attempt to show how these dispositions are connected to the internal dynamics of the Women in SET field and the wider field of SET. It is argued that the activists' ‘feel for the game’ incorporates a disposition towards reformism and ‘neutrality’ that relies in part on a dis-identification with feminism. It is therefore concluded that in addition to other factors such as the wider shift in gender politics and the role of personal experience, the status of feminism within particular social fields may be connected to the structures of these spaces and the relative compatibility of resultant dispositions with a feminist identification. The ‘reformist habitus’ of Women in SET activists, which is directly connected to the constraints under which they work, is posited as a contributing factor to the lack of progress made on Women in SET issues since the 1970s.

"Between Orientalism and Postmodernism: The Changing Nature of Western Feminist Thought Towards the Middle East"

Abstract1980s postmodernism provided a viable theoretical alternative to existing discourses. Where pre-postmodern second-wave feminism subscribed to prescriptive notions of what a woman should or should not be, postmodern feminists (or post-feminists) instead articulated a much more diverse, malleable, morally and culturally relative notion of what it means to be a woman. This new relativist approach meant that feminists were now making a conscious effort to engage with third-world women in a way that acknowledged cultural particularities. Today Muslim women are struggling to find a place for themselves. Western feminists have the potential to play an important role in the process of change in the Muslim world. The nature of this role has yet to be determined. In recent decades, Western feminists have had a tendency to superimpose their own culturally specific notions of equality on the Muslim world. Now, there is the risk that a new generation of postmodern intellectuals will decide to slowly disengage. With this in mind, finding the middle ground has never been more urgent.

Crossing the Borders: An Interview with Julia Kristeva

In this June 2004 interview, Julia Kristeva takes us through her long and extraordinary career as a writer, an intellectual, and an academic. She speaks of her early years as a radical poststructuralist, postmodern feminist, and discusses how her scope has broadened with the addition of psychoanalytical theory and practice. She answers questions about her work on the abject, melancholy, motherhood, and love, and reveals how personal experiences, like the death of her father, have shaped parts of her literary output.

Premodern, Modern, and Postmodern Perspectives On Sex and Gender Mixes

Postmodern sensibilities, generally associated with relational psychoanalysis, are applicable also in traditional and contemporary Freudian psychoanalytic contexts. Historically speaking, views of femininity and female sexuality may be ordered according to positions designated as premodern, modern, and postmodern. This temporal continuum provides a basis for incorporating aspects of postmodern feminist approaches to deconstructing gender into a more traditional yet contemporary psychoanalytic framework. The postmodern "crisis of category" is addressed through a critique from a modern psychoanalytic point of view of the gender stereotyping inherent in certain false binaries and either/or thinking of premodern psychoanalytic thinking regarding female (as well as male) sex and gender. The cultural changes brought about by the consciousness-raising of postmodern feminist and contemporary psychoanalytic thinking contribute significantly to evolutionary changes in the understanding of gender that are further internalized and represented intrapsychically. That is, sequential transformations in the internalization of new cultural norms influence the development of still more new cultural norms, so that progression in these identificatory markers of gender can be observed over successive generations.

Archetypal Literary Theory in the Postmodern Era

I propose that differentiating the archetype and the archetypal image provides a means of responding to some postmodern critiques of archetypal theory. I consider the literary theories of Northrop Frye and a postmodern feminist critique of his work. I hypothesize that a more fully Jungian perspective on archetypal theory provides a means of responding to the critiques levelled at Frye. This analysis hopes to contribute to positioning archetypal theory in such a manner as to allow it to remain cogent and relevant in light of postmodern critiques, and to do so without marginalizing or ignoring postmodern theoretical insights.

Postmodern Feminism and the Daoist Tradition of Inner Alchemy

The Daoist, in transcending the socially constructed identity, finds language, discourse and the body vital in their quest to achieve zhenren (the authentic person). They are pursuing ‘full contextualization for the always unique person within an ever changing world’ (Hall and Ames 1998a: 85). This relationship between language, discourse and the body, particularly in the neidan tradition, has strong correlations in postmodern feminism. The juxtaposition of postmodern feminism and Daoism gives rise to a valuable new perspective from which one can reflect upon both traditions. Such a perspective offers a new point of entry into the ongoing discussion of these traditions.