ABSTRACT
If, in the postmodern age, we do live in what has been called a recessionary erotic economy brought about by fear of disease and a fetishization of fitness, the erotic cannot but be part of that general problematizing of the body and its sexuality. And this is one of the sites of the conjunction of interest of both postmodernism and feminisms as they both zero in on the representation of and reference to that body and its subject positions. The body cannot escape representation and these days this means it cannot escape the feminist challenge to the patriarchal and masculinist underpinnings of the cultural practices that subtend those representations. But, without those feminisms, the story would be a rather different one, for I would want to argue for the powerful impact of feminist practices on postmodernism – though not for the conflation of the two.
