ABSTRACT
Recently I had the temerity to open a fairly theoretical paper with a brief discussion of how my own historical body intertwined with my understanding and experience of ideology and subjectivity. While hardly a new approach, a postmodernist ‘devotee’ in the audience subsequently mentioned that this discussion had made him ‘nervous’. Now it may indeed be merely a question of clumsy stripteasing the unraveling of my particular discursive body-but what I should like to explore here is the ‘nervous’ juncture of feminism and postmodernism, as well as the possible confluence of feminism within the postmodern. This juxtaposition of feminism and postmodernism is not only nervous but also potentially problematic. Therefore I want to begin by briefly considering what may be at stake in a hasty merging of feminism and postmodernism. Neither of these fields is homogeneous; feminist theory potentially engages all disciplines, and postmodernism arises from the detritus, and the impossibility, of metanarratives. There are, however, key concepts which are proper to each plane. These sites and concerns do not define a dichotomy of ‘essences’ for either field, but they are important constitutive and epistemological loci. Thus within feminism they are: the ‘lived’; difference; bodies and subjectivities; sexuality; the material nature of experience; and various political articulations. And postmodernism heralds: the end of history; the implosion of meaning; the negation of totality and coherence; ‘the body without organs’; the death of the referent; the end of the social; and the absence of politics. While these lists are not necessarily mutually self-excluding, they do point to significant areas of contestation. One might reasonably assume, for instance, that a theory that asserts ‘the death of the social and the triumph of excremental culture’ (Kroker and Cook, 1986:7) might be incompatible with one that stresses, in various forms, the need to struggle over meanings within the social realm.
