ABSTRACT
Feminist Standpoint Theory is often portrayed as a relic of a bygone era in Anglo-American feminism: a throwback to an outmoded 1970s agenda, an archaic mode of theorizing anchored in the second rather than the third wave, a humorless operation in contrast to a playful gesture, an obsolete approach situated within a modernist as opposed to a postmodernist horizon. 1 This assessment is, at least in part, a legacy of the more reductive formulation of the modernist-postmodernist debate of the 1980s in which modernism (and with it, Marxism in general and feminist standpoint theory in particular) is presented as “the Enlightenment,” poststructuralism—depicted as “postmodernism”—is posited as its archenemy, and the rest of us are constrained by the relentlessly oppositional logic, employed to maintain this dualistic frame, to choose either one side or the other. Not only does this reading distort existing examples of standpoint theory, what is more important, it discounts the potential of this theoretical tradition to generate variations capable of contributing to feminist theories and practices in and beyond the 1990s. In the pages that follow I propose a series of unexpected encounters and unexplored affinities in order to further the project of locating and developing this potential. This will include considerations of Judith Butler’s theory of gender performativity, Gilles Deleuze’s reading of the Nietzschean thought of the eternal return, Kathy Ferguson’s endorsement of irony as a feminist practice, and Antonio Negri’s concept of self-valorization. The version of standpoint theory that emerges from these selective engagements incorporates certain aspects of these projects in a way that I believe can enhance some of standpoint theory’s fundamental strengths and demonstrate its continued relevance to contemporary feminist theories and practices.
