Feminist Thought

Human Rights and Post-Modernism

Based on MacKinnon, Chpt. 5, in Are Women Human?

Postmodernism

Klages notes on

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?