ABSTRACT

Over the past decade, a growing number of feminists have challenged the view that postmodernism is the most productive theoretical framework for feminist discourse. Barbara Christian, in her 1987 essay “The Race for Theory,” and bell hooks, in her 1991 essay “Essentialism and Experience,” were among the first to express reservations about the usefulness of a poststructuralist-influenced literary theory for their own critical projects.1 Other feminists followed close behind: as early as 1992, Linda Singer sounded cautionary warnings about the “regulative effect” that postmodernism seemed to be having on feminist theorizing, and in an explanatory note preceding her 1994 essay “Purity, Impurity, and Separation,” Maria Lugones made the point of dissociating her theoretical account of multiplicity from postmodernist theorizing of the same. Both Judith Roof, in her 1994 essay “Lesbians and Lyotard: Legitimation and the Politics of the Name,” and Linda Martin Alcoff, in her 1997 essay “The Politics of Postmodern Feminism, Revisited,” urged feminists to recognize the epistemological denial apparent in postmodernist projects that rely on unacknowledged legitimating metanarratives to establish the “truth value” of no truth. Jacqui Alexander and Chandra Talpade Mohanty, in their 1997 introduction to Feminist Genealogies, Colonial Legacies, Democratic Futures, suggested that “postmodernist theory . . . has generated a series of epistemological confusions regarding the interconnections between location, identity, and the construction of knowledge” (xvii). . . .