ABSTRACT
Some feminists have resisted postmodernism in the belief that rejecting the traditional Enlightenment ‘transcendent metanarrative’ of absolute truth or ‘foundation’ of androcentric science implies abandoning all social theory. But postmodern feminism, as a discourse quite distinct from postmodernism, has criticized and modified several of postmodernism’s core assumptions. For example, while accepting the postmodern critique of metanarratives that ‘employ a single standard and make a claim to embody a universal experience’ (Giroux, 1991:38), a feature of Enlightenment metanarratives shared by much feminist theorizing of the 1970s and 1980s (Fraser and Nicholson, 1990:27; Barrett and Phillips, 1992:4) postmodern feminism does not regard all large or formative narratives as ahistorical and essentialist. Modes of feminist theorizing that are attentive to differences and to cultural and historical specificity do not imply an acceptance of the postmodern view that rejects wholesale all forms of metanarrative (Fraser and Nicholson, 1990:33). Postmodern feminism recognizes the importance of grounding narratives in the context and specificities of peoples’ lives and cultures, but supplements this distinctly postmodern emphasis on the contextual with an argument for metanarratives that employ forms of social criticism that are dialectical, relational and holistic (Giroux, 1991:39). Metanarratives play an important theoretical role in placing the particular and the specific in broader historical and relational contexts: to reject all notions of totality is to run the risk of being trapped in particularistic theories that cannot explain how the various diverse relations that constitute larger social, political and global systems interrelate or mutually determine and constrain one another. ‘Post-modern feminism recognizes that we need a notion of large narratives that privileges forms of analyses in which it is possible to make visible those…interrelations and interdependencies that give shape and power to large political systems’ (Giroux, 1991:40).
