Women in Post Modern Society
Women in Post Modern Society
During the 1960s and 1970s movements emerged such as second wave feminism, civil rights and gay “liberation” whose previously silenced and marginalized voices suggested that the white male was no longer the only hero of the story. These voices variously and collectively claimed the right to speak in their own name and attempted to foster a sense of group “identity” as a way of resisting the systematic oppression that was experienced by each group in different ways. At the same time post modernist theories were also gaining currency. Patricia Waugh (1989:307) has described postmodernism as a “mood expressed theoretically across a wide range of discourses involving a collapse of grand narratives” and this “mood” incorporates the post structuralism notion of the death of the “subject”. My argument in this paper will be that while postmodernist theories were once useful positions to challenge patriarchal, heterosexist, racist society they have become double edged swords for the marginalized and disenfranchised groups who still need to articulate themselves through the now debated “identity politics”. Theorists such as Elizabeth Wheeler (1991:6) have pointed out the irony that just as female and/or non-white subjects began to make themselves heard, the white male declared the death of the subject. The fetish of the textual beckoned in an age where white intellectuals were threatened with the disposition of their words.
The central postmodern project is the end of dualism. This challenge to dualism was a feminist project before it was a postmodern one and part of my discussion will be an elaboration of what I believe to be the more sinister implications for women regarding the end of dualism as it is articulated in postmodern epistemological theory, (especially its challenge to the epistemological foundations of feminist theory.) I will be arguing that postmodernism absolutely supports the status quo, which, in our culture is that of consumerism and commodifation. I will also be arguing that postmodernism, whilst claiming to have no stake in its own hegemony (like queer theory) does extreme ‘violence’ to identity politics and only totally reinforces the hegemonic position of white males in our culture. My contention throughout this paper will be that post modernism’s logical outcome can only be a political vacuum where “meaning” is destabilized, commodity fetishism is the only “verity” and organized opposition an absurdity in a culture without a “meaningful” language.
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