Huyssen claims that postmodernism as a concept only gained currency in the 1970s, although he maintains that the critical element within postmodernism can only be fully understood if the 1950s are seen as the starting point of the ‘mapping of the postmodern’. He maintains that the general atmosphere of political and economic disillusionment of the […]

One of the now classic texts which charts the positioning of mass culture or popular culture within the nexus of the modernism/postmodernism debate is Andreas Huyssen’s After the Great Divide (1986), in which he draws attention to ‘the structuralist preference for the works of high modernism, especially the writing of James Joyce or Mallarme’ (McRobbie […]

Representations and resistance INTRODUCTION Many popular cultural forms and practices have a claim to be representatively postmodern even though they may be forms and practices which never passed through any recognisable modernist phase. Popular culture has been defined as ‘a site of struggle’ where many of these issues and meanings are determined and debated. However, […]

This ‘insistence on the ambiguous nature of the border which constitutes differences’ is identified elsewhere by Yeatman (1994:17) as an aspect of the ‘epistemological politics of a postmodern feminism’. As she explains, postmodern feminist models of differentiation dispense with ‘binary hierarchical models of differentiation’ and ‘substitute multiple hierarchies of differentiation’ (ibid.) around race, ethnicity, gender […]

Feminism has been confronted by debates emanating from its ‘margins’ andfrom the theoretical challenges raised by postmodernism, poststructuralism and post-colonialism. A major area of debate for second wave feminism has been its ability to deal with differences among women, without losing the impetus that derives from a unified and coherent movement for social change. Postmodernism […]

The intervention of feminism within the academy has been strengthened by the developments in the 1980s and 1990s of a greater degree of feminist pluralism, particularly as a result of debates emerging from non-Western women and women of colour. As indicated earlier, women of colour have challenged the uncritical use of concepts such as ‘oppression’ […]

Contemporary debates within feminist theorising have been reflected within the academy through the medium of Women’s Studies. Yeatman (1994:42) observes that the position of Women’s Studies within ‘the contemporary university has to do with making institutionalized knowledge accountable and responsive to contemporary politico-ethical challenges’. As such, it is ‘the site of a radical critique of […]

Kristeva’s work can in no way be characterised as primarily feminist, as it is not even consistently political in its approach. Even in her early, more feminist work, Kristeva does not try to speak from or for ‘the feminine’. For Kristeva to ‘speak as a woman’ would in any case be meaningless, since she argues […]

The French feminists maintain that it is a masculine rationality which has always privileged reason, order, and unity, and that it has done so by excluding and silencing the irrationality, chaos and fragmentation which they argue has come to represent femininity. Kristeva therefore refuses to define ‘woman’, as she maintains ‘To believe that one “is […]

At the same time as Women’s Studies was emerging from the Women’s Movement in the US and the UK in the 1960s and early 1970s, the feminist movement in Europe and particularly France was being influenced by debates emerging from the strong tradition of psychoanalysis, psychoanalytic theory and poststructuralism (see Chapter 4). Toril Moi (1985a) […]