Feminist
Thought
Human
Rights and Post-Modernism
Based on
MacKinnon, Chpt. 5, in Are Women Human?
Is
MacKinnon a postmodernist?
How can you
tell?
Summary of
MacKinnon’s views of postmodernism
It’s a
destructive and nonsensical movement
It, like the many of the theories it
attempts to deconstruct and criticize, undermines women’s experiences (It’s
all in your head anyway and only!)
Indeed, it
denies that women “as a social category” even exist at all
Context is
all, AND it is nothing, partial, contigent so what’s left: nothing.
Method:
Deconstruction
Disputing
the possibility of creating “grand narratives”
Playing
with meaning
Interesting
to note: feminists (and ‘moderns’)
did/do, invented all of these!
e.g., Feminism in one sense started the
critique of universality as currently practiced by showing how women are left
out of the human episteme (51).
Modernism
Gertrude
Stein quote (1946)
“There
ain’t any answer, there ain’t going to be an answer, there never has been an
answer, that’s the answer.”
Movements
in art: impressionism,
post-impressionism, surrealism, DaDaism, minimalism
Postmodernism
as a reaction to modernism
Or a
sub-field of it?
It’s
“logical conclusion???”
Woman
Using the
term “Woman,” for pomos leads to essentialism.
How can you
talk about women without falling into the trap of “essentialism”?
MacKinnon writes:
Feminism does
not “assume” but rather builds its “women” from women who socially exist. When feminism makes its ‘women” from
the ground up, out of particularities, from practice, rather than from the top
down, out of abstractions and prior theory, the so-called essentialism problem
cannot occur (51).
What do you
think? True? Not true?
POMOs
strive for “antiessentialism”
For
MacKinnon this means that, ultimately, every person’s story is unique; that we are all individuals.
It leads,
in short, back to the assumptions of liberalism.
It doesn’t improve one’s ability to analyze hierarchy as
socially constructed to add more pieces called differences if the differences
are seen as biologically determined to begin with. You can have a biological theory of race just like you can
have a biological theory of gender, and you’ve gotten equally nowhere in terms
of dismantling social hierarchy.
Put another way, if women don’t exist, because there are only particular
women, then Black people don’t exist either, because they are divided by
sex. Probably lesbians can’t exist
either, because they are divided by race and class; if women don’t exist,
woman-identified women surely don’t exist, except in their heads. We are reduced to individuals, which,
of all coincidences, is where liberalism places us. With its affirmation of women’s commonalities in all their
diversity, it is feminism that rejects the view that “woman” is a presocial,
that is biologically determined, category and the notion that all women are the
same. Feminism and essentialism
cannot occupy the same space (53).
MacKinnon
attacks the idea that women are an abstraction, a theoretical social category
but reminding us of the EXPERIENCES of REAL WOMEN
They are stories
(narratives) about their experiences
They are
REAL
They are
COUNTABLE
They are
MEASURABLE
They harm,
pain, torture, etc., they experience is REAL
Multiculturalism
The
assertion that all cultures are equally valid
How/why is
this movement within postmodernism harmful to women?
Her
examples of legal defenses of DV/men murdering and/or raping their wives as
culturally “specific,” derived, bounded (Chen, Rhines cases)
Example of
young girls sacrificed so that men can continue to be fertile and the crops
will keep growing.
Reality: There is none
Clinton’s
“it depends what your definition of is, is”
It’s
Facile, Hyper-intellectualism Masquarading Anti-intellectualism
Pomos want to win every
argument in advance (56)
If everything is in the
interpretation, you can never be wrong (56)
If you disagree, you
just don’t get it.
She asks, “To what and
to whom is postmodernism accountable?
I say it is accountable to academic hierarchy. Who else can afford this theory?” (61)
Sexuality
Victims vs.
“agency”
What is she
talking about? What are pomos
talking about it? (see pg. 55)
Is it wrong
to identify as a victim of sexual assault?
Is rape a
case of competing narratives?
Is
identifying as a survivor of sexual assault/abuse the same thing as claiming
sexual agency?