ABSTRACT
The critique of ethnography, feminism’s own internecine struggles, as well as contestation over the problematic category of postmodernism, are arenas of such bitter, partisan dispute that the censoring hostility of rhetorical ambush tends to prevent dialogue. Mascia-Lees, Sharpe and Cohen acknowledge that ‘there are many postmodernisms, just as there are many feminisms, and within both movements definitions are contested’. Taking a critical distance from the hegemony of both Anglo-American feminism and Anglo-American interpretations of postmodern criticism, many feminists in Australia have been engaged in grafting, re-reading and recycling these exotic imports into products with different and local use values. Donna Haraway’s hope that feminism might extricate itself from the violence of dialectical thinking assumes that oppositional logic is an error to be avoided, a mistake that can be corrected. An equally uneasy battery of questions hovers around feminism’s investment in the author function.
