Introduction

I arrived late at a women’s meeting towards the end of the annual conference of the British Sociological Association a few years ago, to find some women expressing indignation at finding session after session of the conference dominated by men talking in terms of ‘postmodernism’. These women said they felt silenced, intimidated, excluded, put down and angry. They did not know whether ‘postmodernism’ was something they should take seriously, because they could not engage with a debate which made the issues inaccessible to them. In her chapter, Susan Bordo describes her own negative encounters as a graduate student with the ‘elitism’ of poststructuralist thought.