ABSTRACT
Introduction ‘Challenging orthodoxies, and questioning the taken for granted-stirring it’, as Gabriele Griffin et al. (1994:1) put it-has long been the ‘business of feminists’. Yet feminism’s critical acuity is under significant challenge. This comes in the first place from critiques external to feminism witnessed in the current backlash literature which blames women’s new found ‘equality’ for all kinds of social ills, such as the so-called breakdown of the family (see Fauldi 1991; Oakley 1997). The second challenge comes from the internal fragmentation of feminism, evident in the often bitter disputes that have emerged between competing perspectives. While, of course, internal debates have historically driven feminist thought, the contemporary period is marked by a vituperative stand-off between postmodern and modernist perspectives. The fundamental issue at the heart of this debate is the nature of feminist politics in a social world which no longer readily lends itself to being understood through the relatively stable categories of class and gender divisions and their intersection, and the implications that this has for an understanding of the relationships between gender and health. Any contemporary consideration of this topic must therefore grapple with the substantial theoretical task of how to at once appreciate diversity and its radical implications, while also recognising the powerful hegemonic discourses that simultaneously construct similarity and facilitate difference. In this chapter we take up Teresa Ebert’s attempt to develop such a position, conceptualised as resistance postmodern feminism, as a framework within which to explore the issue of gender and health.
