Postmodern Feminism - Criticism

Criticism

Critics like Meaghan Morris have argued that postmodern feminism runs the risk of undercutting the basis of a politics of action based upon gender difference, through its very anti-essentialism.

“One of the most appealing aspects of postmodernism to many feminists has been its focus on difference. The notion that women have been created and defined as ‘other’ by men has long been argued and explored by feminists, most notably Simone de Beauvoir. She challenged male definitions of woman and called on women to define themselves outside the male female dyad. Women, she urged, must be the subject rather than the object (other) of analysis.”

Feminist Moya Lloyd adds that a postmodernist femin.ism “does not necessarily represent a post-feminism, but alternatively, can affirm feminist politics in their plural, multivocal, fluid, oft-changing hue"

Post-structuralism is defined in the Penguin Reference, Dictionary of Literary Terms & Literary Theory, as “Post-structuralism is a more rigorous working out of the possibilities, implications and shortcomings of structuralism and it’s basis to Saussurean linguistics itself…. Post-structuralism doubts the adequacy of structuralism and, as far as literature is concerned, tends to reveal that the meaning of any text is, of its nature, unstable. It reveals that signification is, of its nature, unstable.”

“Post-structuralism, pursues further the Saussurean perception that in language there are only differences without positive terms and shows that the signifier and signified are, as it were, not only oppositional, but plural, pulling against each other, and, by so doing, creating numerous deferments of meaning, apparently endless criss-crossing patterns in sequences of meaning. In short, what are called ‘disseminations.'"