ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the contemporary alliance between feminism and postmodernism. Viewed from within the intellectual and academic culture of western capitalist democracies, feminism and postmodernism have emerged as two leading currents of our time, and each is in its own way profoundly critical of the principles and meta-narratives of western Enlightenment and modernity. The decision of the autonomous bourgeois subject to take nothing and no authority for granted whose content and strictures had not been subjected to rigorous examination, and that had not withstood the test of “clarity and distinctness,” began with the withdrawal from the world. The feminist counterpoint to the postmodernist theme of the Death of Man can be named the “Demystification of the Male Subject of Reason.” The deepest categories of western philosophy obliterate differences of gender as these shape and structure the experience and subjectivity of the self.
