ABSTRACT
In its dominant form, contemporary postmodern feminism has been advanced as a mode of post-al1 politics-a generalized left-liberalism which has erased historical materialism from the scene of theory and substituted an emphasis on the semiotics of consumption (culture studies) and the priority of individual liberation (desire, pleasure) for the project of collective transformation of existing capitalist socioeconomic relations. In short, following the cue of the canonic writings of ‘high theory’ (Derrida, Deleuze, Foucault, Baudrillard, Lyotard, and so on) dominant feminism has abandoned problems of labour, exploitation and class struggle as central to any theory and politics engaging the current economic realities facing most women in the world and has become a ‘ludic feminism’. Contesting ludic feminism-‘a feminism that is founded upon poststructuralist assumptions about linguistic play [hence the term ludic], difference, and the priority of discourse and [which] thus substitutes a politics of representation for radical social transformation’ (p. 3)—Teresa L.Ebert’s various theoretical interventions over the past decade have been in order ‘to reclaim the critique-al knowledges of historical materialism for feminism in postmodernity and to help revive a revolutionary theory and praxis for third-wave feminism’ (p. xi). Developing and extending the range and focus of her previous work, Ebert’s first book Ludic Feminism and After is a devastating critique of ludic feminism which supersedes its historical and institutional limits and lays the groundwork for a new red feminism for the twenty-first century.
