4
POSTMODERN, POSTSTRUCTURAL,
AND CRITICAL THEORIES
SUSANNE GANNON
BRONWYN DAVIES
WHAT ARE THE PRINCIPLES OF
POSTMODERN, POSTSTRUCTURAL,
AND CRITICAL THEORIES?
In this chapter, we explore postmodern, poststructural,
and critical theories and discuss how
they affect feminist research. These labels are
sometimes taken to refer to the same thing and
are sometimes taken up in oppositional ways.
Further, what each of these names refers to is
not an orderly, agreed on, and internally consistent
set of ideas. What they mean depends on the
vantage point from which the speaking or writing
is being done. Among those who wear each
of these labels there are many interesting and
productive divisions, which are ignored when
they are lumped together under one collective
noun. Butler (1992) points out,
A number of positions are ascribed to postmodernism,
as if it were the kind of thing that could be
the bearer of a set of positions: discourse is all
there is, as if discourse were some kind of monistic
stuff out of which all things are composed; the
subject is dead, I can never say "I" again; there is
no reality, only representations. These characterizations
are variously imputed to postmodernism
or poststructuralism, which are conflated with
each other and sometimes understood as an indiscriminate
assemblage of French feminism, deconstruction,
Lacanian psychoanalysis, Foucaultian
analysis, Rorty's conversationalism and cultural
studies. (p. 4)
Postmodernism is a term often used by critics
who believe postmodernism is undermining the
most fundamental assumptions necessary for
social science and feminist research. Against
this monster they try "to shore up the primary
premises, to establish in advance that any theory
of politics requires a subject, needs from the
start to presume its subject, the referentiality
of language, the integrity of the institutional
description it provides" (Butler, 1992, p. 3).
Through exploring these commonalities and
oppositionalities, we will make visible some of
the ideas and practices that emerge in the writing
and research to which these names are given. We
will extract a set of principles that characterize
these paradigms and set them apart from different
understandings of research and the world. Our
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account of these perspectives is written neither
from a distance, informed by a positivist ideal of
objectivity, nor as if they can be defined once and
for all. Every definition creates exclusions that
might (and should) be contested. Among feminist
concepts, for example, sisterhood was an important
concept for feminist activism for much of the
20th century, but it underpinned the policing of
behavior and the exclusion of those who did not
display appropriate sisterhood: "As bad as it is for
a woman to be bullied into submission by a patriarch's
unitary truth, it is even worse for her to be
judged as not a real feminist by a matriarch's
unitary truth" (Tong, 1998, p. 279). We will, with
this caveat on categorizing, attempt to create
some coherent storying of the interconnections of
postmodern, poststructural, and critical theories
as they are taken up by feminist researchers. It is
a principle of critical, poststructural, and postmodern
approaches to feminism that objectivity
must be carefully rethought. An account, from
these perspectives, is always situated. It is an
account from somewhere, and some time, and
some one (or two in this case), written for some
purpose and with a particular audience in mind.
It is always therefore a partial and particular
account, an account that has its own power to
produce new ways of seeing and that should
always be open to contestation. In this view of
feminism, we do not rely on objective truth but
on "being accountable for what and how we have
the power to see" (Castor, 1991, p. 64). The particular
position from which we write this chapter
is as feminist poststructuralists looking back, as
we trace the emergence of that field and its influences
on feminist work, and looking forward,
simultaneously, to the possibilities that such work
opens up.
Like many other feminist researchers in the
1980s and early 1990s, Patti Lather (1991) combined
what she called a critical approach with
postmodern and poststructural approaches. In
envisaging the task she was undertaking, she
located these three approaches along with feminism
within the overarching social science
framework in terms of the analytic work that
social scientists took themselves to be doing in
their analyses (p. 7). (See the table below.)
In this representation, earlier forms of
research characterized as positivist and interpretive
adopted a naturalistic or realist approach in
which the researcher is understood as separate
from the research and the social world as independent
of the researcher's gaze. This is in
marked contrast to work that sets out to make a
difference to that social world, to emancipate
subordinated groups from oppressive versions
of reality.
The deconstructive or poststructuralist/postmodern
movement will be the main topic of this
chapter. In this section, we will adopt the shorthand
"deconstructive" to refer to postmodern
and poststructural approaches and we will subsume
the "critical," for the moment, inside that
term. Our account is not offered as a grand narrative
of the progress of feminist theory from
one approach to another. Such grand narratives
exclude other ways of seeing, privilege accounts
from those with power, and promote falsely linear
versions of history. In what follows, we will
point out how, and on what grounds, some feminists
have been alarmed by the effects of
72­ˇ­HANDBOOK OF FEMINIST RESEARCH--CHAPTER 4
Postpositivist Inquiry
Predict Understand Emancipate Deconstruct
Positivism Interpretive Critical Poststructural
Naturalistic Neo-Marxist Postmodern
Constructivist Feminist Postparadigmatic Diaspora
Phenomenological Praxis oriented
Hermeneutic Educative
Freirian Participatory
Action research
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"deconstructive" ways of thinking on feminist
action and on our research and writing practices.
We will provide some responses to these critiques,
while reminding readers that neither
the criticisms nor our responses to them are
intended to be taken as the final word.
This chapter--and indeed the practices of the
research to be discussed here--can be read as a
simultaneous and constant weaving and unweaving
of how we think and what we do and say in
feminist research. This is a second principle.
Particular attention must be paid to the mode of
writing, to the discursive strategies through
which particular versions of the world are
accomplished, especially in the present moment
of writing. In the figure of the weaver, simultaneously
weaving and unweaving who she is, we
ask you to consider the stuff of her weaving as
the discursive threads of what is possible (nameable,
seeable, doable, speakable, writeable) at
any particular moment in time and place, and
from a particular situated position. Feminist
writers such as Laurel Richardson (1997) and
Trinh Minh-Ha (1989, 1991, 1992) draw attention
to the weft and weave of research texts and
the subjectivities realized within them. Acute
reflexivity--especially at the very moment of
writing--is necessary for researchers working
within critical, postmodern, and poststructural
frameworks.
A further principle of these theoretical
frameworks has to do with questions of power,
emancipation, freedom, and agency. Our third
principle is that relations of power are understood
as established and maintained through
discourse and through positions taken up and
made possible within particular discourses
(Davies & Harré, 2000). Power is seen as complex
and unstable and possibilities for agency,
resistance, "freedom," and emancipation as contingent
and limited. These concepts are treated
differently within critical, postmodern, and
poststructural theories: Indeed, their different
takes on power, freedom, and agency act as
distinguishing features between them. Furthermore,
feminist poststructuralism insists on a
particular position on agency that tends to differ
from the works of other poststructuralists
(Davies, 2000a; Davies & Gannon, 2005, 2006;
Weedon, 1997). Feminists working in poststructural
paradigms seek to reconfigure agency so
that we still might claim it as a possibility, albeit
contingent and situated, that will assist us to
conceptualize and bring about change.
You will notice that some of the theorists we
mention in this chapter are men, who do not
position themselves (and are not offered the
position) as "feminist." Their positioning in the
world as "men" may be seen by some radical
feminists as negating their value for feminism
because male theorists cannot know how one
would think when positioned as a woman. From
a deconstructive point of view, one can, rather,
examine the nature of the "binary" division
being discursively constructed in this concern:
"Identity categories are never merely descriptive,
but always normative, and as such exclusionary"
(Butler, 1992, p. 16). Binary modes
of thought limit and constrain thinking in ways
that are oppositional and hierarchical. These
binary categories--such as man/woman and
good/evil--are implicated in dividing and constraining
the world in ways that may be violent
in their effects. So too, the category feminist, if
understood in binary terms, implies the existence
of an imagined and oppositional category
that contains those items, people, or ideas that
are "not-feminist" or even "antifeminist" (mobilizing
the divisive logic of "if you are not with
us you are against us"). Detecting these binary
or oppositional and hierarchical modes of thinking,
where categories emerge to structure
thought on axes of this/not-this and good/bad, is
of particular interest to researchers working
within deconstructive frameworks. The binaries
are implicated in relations of power and in
maintaining the status quo. Despite the apparent
orderliness of binary thought, categories tend
to slip around and to glue themselves onto
other binaries, conflating one with another. For
example, feminist may be conflated with "woman"
(and, conversely, not-feminist with "man"). The
conflation of not-feminist with misogyny or
patriarchy is a further binary move. Some of the
binaries found glued to each other in Western
traditions of mythology and that continue to
inform our cultures and social practices are as
follows (Wilshire, 1989, pp. 95­96):
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The binary metaphors through which our
narratives and storylines are constructed and our
identities as men and women are made real are
recognizable here. It is possible to recognize
one's gendered identity (who you are or believe
you should be or are seen to be) by looking at
the appropriate side of the table (the one you
have been "assigned" to). But it is also possible
to claim characteristics from the other side.
Nevertheless, the binaries act as an ordering
device, defining what is appropriately "male" or
"female" in terms of their opposition from one
another. They rule out multiplicity and differences
to create order, social coherence, and
predictability around the idea of two opposite
hierarchical categories (Davies, 1994).
By drawing attention to the way binaries
insert themselves into thought, deconstructive
writers provoke us to think differently and more
carefully about the nuances and the possibilities
of meaning in the language and the ideas that we
might use. In pondering the nature of deconstructive
thinking and the concern that it might
not be useful for feminists because it has been
produced by men, it is fascinating to run down
the female side of Wilshire's table. Most of
these metaphors can be used to characterize the
theorizing that is done by deconstructive writers
whether male or female. We might ask then:
Is poststructural and postmodern theorizing
female even when it is produced by men? We
can use such questions and observations to
begin the work of deconstructing the male/
female binary. We can ask, How are such categories
constructed and maintained? What exclusions
and inclusions mark such sites? How are
social identities, the iterations of sex/gender,
performed and sedimented in the particularities
of people's lives? How are they lodged in their
bodies? How are the unstable borders of these
74­ˇ­HANDBOOK OF FEMINIST RESEARCH--CHAPTER 4
KNOWLEDGE (accepted wisdom)/IGNORANCE (the occult and taboo)
higher (up)/lower (down)
good, positive/negative, bad
mind (ideas), head, spirit/body (flesh), womb (blood), Nature (Earth)
reason (the rational)/emotions and feelings (the irrational)
cool/hot
order/chaos
control/letting be, allowing, spontaneity
objective (outside, "out there")/subjective (inside, immanent)
literal truth, fact/poetic truth metaphor, art
goals/process
light/darkness
written text, Logos/oral tradition, enactment, Myth
Apollo as sky-sun/Sophia as earth-cave-moon
public sphere/private sphere
seeing, detached/listening, attached
secular/holy and sacred
linear/cyclical
permanence, ideal (fixed) forms/change, fluctuations, evolution
"changeless and immortal"/process, ephemeras (performance)
hard/soft
independent, individual, isolated/dependent, social, interconnected, shared
dualistic/whole
MALE/FEMALE
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sites policed by individuals and institutions
through oppositional and moralistic discourses
and regimes of truth? As Cixous (1986) writes,
Men and women are caught up in a web of age-old
cultural determinations that are almost unanalyzable
in their complexity. One can no more speak
of "woman" than of "man" without being trapped
within an ideological theatre where the proliferation
of representations, images, reflections, myths,
identifications transform, deform, constantly
change everyone's Imaginary and invalidate in
advance any conceptualization. (p. 83)
Feminist deconstructive writing searches for
ways to disrupt the grip that binaries have on
thought and on identity. Such deconstructive writing
draws not only on rational argument but also
on poetic writing, on fiction, on music, and on
the performing arts. Sometimes it rewrites figures
from the past (e.g., Cixous, 1991; Clément, 1989).
Through play with language and alternative forms
of narrative and representation such writing can
blur the gender binaries, making a deconstructive
move from either/or to both/and, disrupting,
deconstructing, and troubling the clichés and
stereotypes of everyday thought and practice in
which we are enmeshed. This is a fourth principle:
The binaries within discourse limit and constrain
modes of thought and the possibilities of
identity. They disguise them as natural and give
us only one option--of mimicking one part and
abjecting the other. It is vital, life-giving work to
play with and find ways of disrupting those linguistic
forms, the binary oppositions, and the
identities and meanings they hold in place. The
power of language must be understood and
language itself opened up for revision.
It is here that we run into one of the deepest
divisions within the approaches we are writing
about in this chapter. The disruptive and deconstructive
work on the categories through which
we know ourselves and through which we argue
for change is read by some who work within the
critical framework to destroy the categories and
to make them unusable for the work of changing
society. Others do not see deconstructive play as
destruction. Butler (2004a), for example, suggests
that calling terms into question doesn't
mean debunking them but leads, rather, to their
revitalization (p. 178). From a deconstructive
perspective it is clear that we must work within
the language we have. The terms and the categories
that we wish to question are nonetheless
powerful categories that have a great deal of
political purchase. They can and do accomplish a
great deal within our personal and social worlds
whether we choose to mobilize them for political
ends or not. In drawing attention to their constitutive
power, a deconstructive approach does not
foreclose the use of constituted categories on
behalf of those who are subordinated by them. In
a double move characteristic of deconstructive
writing, we continue to use particular categories,
like feminist, but work to destabilize some of the
category's certainties. We put them "sous rature"
or "under erasure," following Derrida (1976),
using a textual reminder to stand as a permanent
reminder that we continue to need the concept but
are also wary of some of its dangers. A fifth and
important principle of thought is this deep skepticism
toward assumed truths and taken-forgranted
knowledges, because they are generated
through language, combined with a pragmatic
understanding of the power of those categories to
effect powerful positionalities and actions within
the social world.
The history of feminism can be read as a series
of moments in which wins against patriarchal
structures and practices have been achieved, and
then subtly undermined by a shifting ground of
resistance that negates the wins that have been
made and keeps women's subordinate status carefully
locked in place. Deconstructive approaches
to feminism eschew simple recipes and actions in
favor of a complex and continuous reflection on
the ways in which identities, realities, and desires
are established and maintained. This does not
mean that they are prevented from action.
Feminists are capable of working within multiple
discourses, depending on the social and interactive
contexts in which they find themselves, the
particular moment in history, and the particular
task in hand.
HOW HAVE CRITICAL THEORY,
POSTMODERNISM, AND
POSTSTRUCTURALISM BEEN TAKEN UP
WITHIN FEMINIST RESEARCH?
In this section, we will separate critical, postmodern,
and poststructural theories and elaborate
some of the key concepts within them. We then
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elaborate the ways in which approaches, concepts,
and strategies derived from each theoretical
framework have been taken up and
developed within feminist research.
Critical Theory, Postmodernism, and
Poststructuralism: Their Emergence
and Interconnections
Critical Theory
Many poststructural and postmodern feminist
writers began as critical theorists and maintain
a strong critical edge in their writing (e.g.,
Haug et al., 1987; Henriques, Hollway, Urwin,
Venn, & Walkerdine, 1998; Lather, 1991;
Walkerdine, 1990). Critical theory, as a formal
description of a particular mode of research and
analysis, first emerged in the Frankfurt School
of Social Research in Germany in the 1920s and
1930s through the work of Adorno, Horkheimer,
Marcuse, and, later, Habermas. These philosopher-sociologists
rejected fixed notions of hierarchies
of social domination, such as might be
found in Marxism, although Marxism was an
important influence. They disrupted disciplinary
authority by critiquing the supposedly objective
"view from nowhere" of a positivist social
science that had been modeled on the natural
sciences and that had emerged from Enlightenment
beliefs in universal reason and objective
thought. Critical theorists brought philosophical
questions into the arena of empirical social
research. They developed a reflexive and critical
social inquiry that saw social scientific knowledge
itself as implicated in complex modes of
production and regimes of truth. In so doing,
they historicized and contextualized social
science for the first time. Their work highlighted
the logocentrism of Western rationalist and liberal
humanist thought--questioning the belief
that reason is universal, disinterested, and dispassionate
and that it can set us free. However,
they did not abandon the tenets of Enlightenment
thought--the belief in reason and the
rational subject. Rather than dismantle them,
they reconstructed them as sociocultural forms.
In contrast to some of their successors, they
resisted the lure of relativism and remained
committed to the belief that truth is possible and
can ground social action (McCarthy, 1994,
pp. 7­30; Zima, 2002, pp. 194­198). For the
critical social theorists of the Frankfurt School
emancipation was part of their goal. This aspect
of their work has threaded through into the liberatory
discourses of contemporary critical theory.
Critical theorists continue to be influential in
qualitative research in diverse disciplines and in
different geographic locations. Current critical
theory uses discourses of equity, inclusion, and
social justice that are familiar and compatible
with feminist agendas. Lincoln and Denzin
(2003) note,
The critique and concern of the critical theorists
has been an effort to design a pedagogy of resistance
within communities of difference. The pedagogy
of resistance, of taking back "voice," of
reclaiming narrative for one's own rather than
adapting to the narratives of a dominant majority
. . . [aims at] overturning oppression and
achieving social justice through empowerment of
the marginalized, the poor, the nameless, the
voiceless. (pp. 625­626)
Critical theorists make grand claims for the
potential of such work to change the world.
Kincheloe and McLaren (2003), for instance,
claim that critical theory produces "dangerous
knowledge, the kind of information and insight
that upsets institutions and threatens to overturn
sovereign regimes of truth" (p. 433). They
characterize the current "criticalist" as any
researcher who believes
that all thought is fundamentally mediated by
power relations that are social and historically
constituted, [that] facts can never be isolated from
the domain of values or removed from ideological
inscription, [that the] relationship between concept
and object and between signifier and signified
is never stable or fixed and is often mediated
by social relations of capitalist production/consumption;
that language is central to the formation
of subjectivity; . . . that certain groups in society
are privileged over others. (p. 453)
This description could also include many
theorists who are called postmodernists or poststructuralists.
With language like "ideological"
and "social relations of capitalist production/
consumption," the authors also reference the
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traces of Marxism in current critical theory.
However, their claim that "institutions" and
"sovereign regimes of truth" might be overturned
implies a more rigid and hierarchical
conception of power and its operations than that
to be found in poststructural theory (e.g., Butler,
1997b; Foucault, 1980).
Although few feminists overtly cling to the
founding fathers of critical theory, there is much
sympathy with these positions particularly in
our longing for emancipatory agendas. Indeed,
recent critical theory is sometimes called new
left theory or neo-Marxism1
and it informs critical
race theory, critical multiculturalism, critical
psychology, critical feminist theory, and
critical pedagogy. In Getting Smart, Lather's
(1991) early synthesis of feminist and critical
pedagogies, she articulates her indebtedness to
critical theory and continuing affinity with its
emancipatory objectives, but she critiques
aspects of critical theory from a postmodern
perspective. Although it can also be claimed that
critical theory has "largely mutated into poststructuralism"
(Boler, 2000, p. 362), authors and
areas of study that thematize the "critical" tend
to insist that, unlike those working with postmodern
and poststructural approaches, the outcome
they envisage is "real" social change, with
the implication that this must entail subjects
who have agency in the world. As we will argue
later, these agendas are not as absent from the
work of postmodern and poststructural feminists
as some critical theorists claim, though the
concept of agency is carefully revised by these
feminists as a "radically conditioned" form
of agency (Butler, 1997b, p. 15). In Judith
Butler's view, for example, the social subject is
a site of ambivalence where power acts to constitute
these subjects (who might elsewhere be
called "individuals") in certain limiting ways
but where, at the same time, and through the
same effects of power, possibilities to act (albeit
constrained and limited) also emerge. Critical
theorists are committed to a more straightforward
concept of emancipation, and of the freedom
of individuals to strive toward it, as a
necessary and permanent possibility. Power
tends to be seen within critical theory as oppressive
and unilinear, and it is enacted by certain
groups on other groups. Emancipatory potential
lies in the radical overturning of those hierarchical
relations of power. Freedom from oppression is
a central goal of critical theorists. In pursuit of
this outcome, discursive analyses of sexism,
homophobia, racism, religious, and cultural
oppressions in everyday life and institutional
practices are part of their methodological arsenal
though they may not take up postmodern or
poststructural positions on truth or subjectivity.
Two prominent feminist exponents of critical
theory have been philosophers Seyla Benhabib
and Nancy Fraser. In their influential and
polemical collection Feminist Contentions
(Benhabib, Butler, Cornell, & Fraser, 1995),
they defend the tenets of critical social feminist
theory against the effects of poststructuralism,
represented in the collection in two papers by
Butler.2
Benhabib and Fraser see value in some
postmodernist ideas but they are wary of
theories that they see as radical and dangerously
relativist. Benhabib grounds her critique in three
principles that she argues must not be abandoned
by feminism and that, she claims, are
weakened within a deconstructive approach.
First, feminists must be able to assume an
autonomous feminist subject who remains capable
of self-reflection and agency. Second, she
argues that large-scale narratives have their
purposes, and feminists need to maintain some
distance from social contexts they critique to
develop objective perspectives and contribute to
new narratives. Third, she insists that utopian
ideals, abandoned by postmodernism, are necessary
for feminist ethics and social and political
activism (Benhabib, 1995, p. 30). In Feminist
Contentions, Fraser is less resistant than
Benhabib to postmodern feminism. She argues
that feminism can benefit from incorporation of
"weak" versions of postmodern ideas, but that
feminist work must enable political action
(Fraser, 1995a, 1995b). Benhabib and Fraser
acknowledge some of the contributions of postmodernism
to feminism, including the constitutive
effects of language and the rejection of
abstract (and masculine) universal reason. Their
commitment remains, however, with critical
theory, which they read as emancipatory and as
enabling political activism in a way that they
perceive postmodernism does not. The goal of
critical theorists, they say, is not only to interpret
social life but also to transform it. This
transformation, like any theory of liberation,
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they argue, is dependent on a notion of subjectivity
that allows some agency and incorporates
possibilities for choice and for freedom to act in
the world.
Within postmodern and poststructural
approaches to feminist research, in contrast, "liberation"
is made problematic, because one can
never stand outside of discourse, agency is always
radically conditioned by the positions made available
to the acting, agentic subject, and subjectivity
is always also subjection to the available ways
of being. Further, absolute moral or ethical truth
claims are regarded with a measure of skepticism,
though that does not prevent feminists who take
up these approaches from passionate attachments
to both morality and action. Nevertheless, critical
theorists are wary of postmodernism and poststructuralism
because of the obstacles they see in
such positions for political, social, or economic
transformation. If critiquing the foundations of
radical thought and activism leads to their collapse,
then how are we to move on? How might
we, they ask, effect change in the world? How
might we "work the ruins" of what we had and
knew (St. Pierre & Pillow, 2000)? Accusations of
ethical paralysis and apoliticism as the inevitable
consequences of poststructuralist thought are
common but they rest on an assumption that criticism
and transformation are binary, irreconcilable
opposites that cannot work together in a
"both/and" kind of way. In such feminist dismissals
of poststructuralism, criticism is allied
with "theory," transformation with "praxis," and
each side of the pair is positioned as oppositional;
that is, as mutually exclusive. Michel Foucault
(2000a) argued, in contrast, that critique and
transformation are necessarily implicated in each
others'operations, indeed that radical transformation
can only emerge from radical critique:
I don't think that criticism can be set against
transformation, "ideal" criticism against "real"
transformation.
A critique does not consist in saying that
things aren't good the way they are. It consists in
seeing on what type of assumptions, of familiar
notions, of established, unexamined ways of
thinking the accepted practices are based. . . .
There is always a little thought occurring even
in the most stupid institutions; there is always
thought even in silent habits.
Criticism consists in uncovering that thought
and trying to change it; showing that things are not
as obvious as people believe, making it so that
what is taken for granted is no longer taken for
granted. To do criticism is to make harder those
acts which are now too easy.
Understood in these terms, criticism (and
radical criticism) is utterly indispensable for any
transformation. For a transformation that would
remain within the same mode of thought, a transformation
that would only be a certain way of
better adjusting the same thought to the reality of
things, would only be a superficial transformation.
On the other hand, as soon as people begin to
have trouble thinking things the way they have
been thought, transformation becomes at the same
time very urgent, very difficult, and entirely possible.
(pp. 456­457)
The project for any critical theory, Foucault
argues, is to make it possible to think differently
and thus to open the possibility for acting differently.
This has profound implications for
social practice and for social research. In this
sense, critical theory, poststructural theory, and
postmodern theory can work together rather
than in antagonism with each other.
Postmodern Theory
The terms postmodern and poststructural
have at times been used interchangeably in the
United States, both terms signaling a "crisis
of confidence in western conceptual systems"
(Lather, 1991, p. 159). Postmodernism is "an
American term" (St. Pierre, 2004, p. 348) that
has been used in diverse arenas of social and
cultural life and that was in the early 1990s
inclusive of poststructuralism. In a recent
anthology of postmodernism, Bertens and
Natoli (2002) trace three aggregations of this
"protean" term: first, as a set of literary and
artistic practices; second, as "a set of philosophical
traditions centered on the rejection of realist
epistemology and the Enlightenment project"
mostly associated with French poststructural
thought (p. xii); and, third, in its most "ambitious"
form, as a term that seeks to describe "a
new sociocultural formation and/or economic
dispensation . . . an aggressive entrepreneurialist
capitalism" (pp. xiii­xv).
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In architecture and the arts, in general, postmodern
aesthetics are marked by the collapse of
distinctions between high and popular culture,
by self-referential reflexivity, by irony, parody,
pastiche, appropriation, and surprising juxtapositions
of images and ideas. Postmodernism is
viewed in other domains, such as economics,
often with alarm. It sometimes stands as a synonym
for "post-Fordist," "late," or "fast" capitalism,
signaling the rise of Western consumer
culture, multinationalism, and the globalization
of corporate culture, capital, and labor. The
postmodern logic underpinning the movement
of global capital challenges the work of feminists
who have fought long and hard for more
equitable distribution of income, labor, and
other resources. Global corporate culture can
be understood as a new form of colonialism.
Neoliberal approaches to management emphasizing
the flexibility of workforces and workplaces--thus
the instability of subjects and the
relations of power and knowledge within which
they are located--are underpinned by these versions
of postmodern culture. Regardless of the
context or ideological intent, discourses that
deploy postmodernism "seek to distance us
from and make us skeptical about beliefs concerning
truth, knowledge, power, the self and
language that are often taken for granted within
and serve as legitimation for contemporary
western culture" (Flax, 1990, p. 41). The turn
from critical theory to postmodernism is thus
marked by a profound skepticism toward takenfor-granted
foundational concepts, including
those that underpin emancipatory agendas.
In its very naming, postmodernism is produced
both in opposition to and as a continuation
of some aspects of modernism. While gurus
of postmodernity, like Lyotard (1984) and
Bauman (2004), have claimed that postmodernity
was very modernist, postmodernity is more
usually characterized as replacing modernity,
which is the era of social and cultural life and
aesthetics that spans the latter half of the 20th
century in the West. Modernity--emerging from
the Enlightenment overturning of church and
king as the origins of truth--validates reason,
logic, and universal truth as the foundation for
action in the world. The emancipatory impulses
of liberal humanism and Marxism, both of
which have influenced feminist movements, are
rooted in the modernist project. Critique of the
institutions and social practices that routinely
excluded women became possible because of
modernist thought. Yet many feminists have
noted that the tenets of modernism have not
been friendly to women. They argue that the
modernist subject, able to act autonomously in
the world, his actions driven by scientific, objective
knowledge and by will, is always already a
masculine subject, an individual subject more or
less separate from the social world and free
to act on it. As Hekman (1990) notes, the feminist
position on "the modernist-postmodernist
debate" is "anomalous" (p. 2). Modernism is
part of our legacy, and as the humanist ideals of
social justice and equity that remain important
for feminism emerge from modernism, its
vocabulary and politics continue, inevitably, to
work through us (St. Pierre, 2000a, p. 478).
Nevertheless, both feminists and postmodernists
have been critical of the modernist project and
these critiques signaled a shift toward different
conceptions of the subject and of society and its
signifying systems. Postmodern approaches in
art and social analysis "privileged aesthetics,
language and singularity over the analysis of
social institutions and social structures, and in
their more extreme and polemical form declared
the social to be dead" (Baudrillard, 1983, cited
in Gane, 2004, p. 4). Postmodernists argue that
knowledge is contextual, historically situated,
and discursively produced; that subjects are
constituted within networks of power and
knowledge. Yet postmodernism, like feminism,
is not uncontested. Bauman (2004) explains
why he gave up the term:
"The postmodern" was flawed from the beginning:
all disclaimers notwithstanding, it did suggest
that modernity was over . . . In time more
flaws became clearer to me--I'll mention but two
of them. One was, so to speak, objective: "postmodern"
barred the much needed break or rupture
. . . "Postmodern thinking" could not but adhere to
the "modernity grid" . . . The second was subjective.
I prefer to select my bedfellows and affinities
myself. Ascription to the "postmodernist" camp
grew more and more unsavory and unpalatable by
the day as the "postmodern" writings went further
and further astray and "postmodernism" came to
mean, more than anything else, singing praise of
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the brave new world of ultimate liberation rather
than subjecting it to critical scrutiny. (p. 18)
Foucault (1998) also drew attention to categorical
problems when he asked "What are we
calling postmodernity? I'm not up to date"
(p. 447), and, he continued, "I've never clearly
understood what was meant in France by
modernity . . . I do not grasp clearly what that
might mean, though the word itself is unimportant;
we can always use any arbitrary label"
(p. 448). He goes on, nevertheless, to name the
"recasting of the subject" as the central problem
that allied those who had been working in what
might be called postmodern theory up to that
time. Of his own work he says,
The goal of my work during the last twenty
years . . . has not been to analyze the phenomena
of power, nor to elaborate the foundations of such
an analysis. My objective, instead, has been to
create a history of the different modes by which,
in our culture, human beings are made subjects.
(Foucault, 2000b, p. 326)
It is this task of resituating the human subject
not as the central heroic and active agent who
shapes her own destiny but as the subject who is
constituted through particular discourses in particular
historical moments that is central to the
postmodern approach to research. Butler also
traces the splits and contradictions that are
elided by the abstract collective noun postmodernism.
Like Foucault and Bauman, Butler
(1992) rejects the name: "I don't know about the
term `postmodern' but . . . [I know that] power
pervades the very conceptual apparatus that
seeks to negotiate its terms, including the
subject position of the critic" (p. 6), and again,
"I don't know what postmodernism is, but I do
have some sense of what it might mean to
subject notions of the body and materiality to a
deconstructive critique" (p. 17). The subject,
power, and the body--and deconstruction as a
strategy for critique--are issues that they both
signal and that are at the core of our theoretical
conversations in this chapter.
Although categories are useful in academic
work, and we use them and are here engaged in
their perpetuation, we are less concerned with
policing their borders than with exploring the
work that might be done with ideas emanating
from these modes of thought. The semantic puzzles
prompted by the naming of theoretical
positions--and the seductions of theoretical
progress narratives and successor regimes--
have led us to a moment when we are variously
faced with "post-postmodern theory," "posthumanist
theory," "postfeminist theory," and even
"post-theory theory." Rather than becoming
entangled in these confabulations, and having
alerted readers to some of the problems with
such labels, we go on to explore in more detail
poststructuralism and what that might be said to
entail. Because many feminist authors who originally
used the term postmodern have since
vacated the term and moved toward poststructural,
we will devote the remainder of this section
to an exploration of poststructural theory
and the concepts that have been taken up within
it by feminist researchers.
Poststructural Theory
While the postmodern label was initially
used to cover both the postmodern and the
poststructural, the term poststructural has
subsequently become more common. The poststructural
label signals in particular the "linguistic
turn," although many theorists who would
see themselves as responding to this turn would
not describe themselves as poststructuralists and
may or may not see themselves as postmodernists
or critical theorists. The turn to language
marked by poststructuralism is a recognition of
the constitutive power of language and of discourse,
particularly as introduced through the
work of Michel Foucault (1997b) where discourses
are seen to "articulate what we think,
say and do" and to be historically contingent
(p. 315). The subject is discursively produced
and the very body and its desires are materialized
through discourse. Thus, the linguistic turn
of poststructuralism is, more accurately, a "discursive"
turn. Poststructural theory turns to discourse
as the primary site for analysis and
brings a deep skepticism to realist approaches
where the task of social science is to discover
and describe real worlds, which are taken to
exist independent of their observations and their
subjects. It troubles the individualism of humanist
approaches, seeing the humanist individual
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as a (sometimes) troubling and fictional accomplishment
of social and discursive practices
(Davies & Gannon, 2005, 2006). In this sense,
poststructuralism, in marked contrast to postmodernism,
might be seen as the antithesis of
global capitalism and of neoliberalism in which
the individual is emphasized and the social is
proclaimed as dead. Humanist psychology and
some aspects of psychoanalysis are among the
metanarratives that have been brought into question
by poststructuralism, though many feminist
poststructural researchers find aspects of psychoanalysis
useful (e.g., Britzman, 1998; Butler,
1997b, 2004b; Clément, 1989, 1994; Flax,
1990, 1993; Grosz, 1990, 1994a; Ussher, 1997;
Walkerdine, 1990). These theorists use psychoanalysis
to theorize desire and to explore the
changes individual subjects must engage in to
bring about new patterns of desire and thus new
ways of being.
The focus of poststructural thinking is on
cultural life as the production and reading of
texts and on the deconstruction of those texts. Its
work is in marked contrast to the realist and
naturalistic modes of thought in which the task
was to "understand" or to make predictions
about what was already there (Lather, 1991, p.
7). This poststructural work, which Butler
(2003) describes as the work of critical intellectuals,
is often a difficult and painful process of
making strange that which we take for granted:
I believe it has to be the case (certainly since
Marx it has been the case) that becoming a critical
intellectual involves working hard on difficult
texts. From Marx through Adorno, we learned
that capitalism is an extremely difficult text: it
does not show itself as transparent; it gives itself
in enigmatic ways; it calls for interpretive
hermeneutic effort. There is no question about it.
We think things are the way they must be
because they've become naturalized. The life of
the commodity structures our world in ways that
we take for granted. And what was Marx's point?
Precisely to make the taken-for-granted world
seem spectral, strange. And how does that work?
It only works by taking received opinion and
received doxa and really working through it. It
means undergoing something painful and difficult:
an estrangement from what is most familiar.
(p. 46)
Though poststructuralism does not provide a
clear set of practices that might be taken up and
ossified as a "method," it does provide a new set
of approaches that might be made use of in analysis
to provoke the sort of estrangement that Butler
speaks of and to allow for new thought. In addition,
methodologies themselves are made strange
as "thinking technologies" that are also, always,
subject to critical scrutiny (Haraway, 2000).
Within a poststructural research paradigm it
becomes difficult to define discrete methods for
research. Indeed, Barthes (1989) suggests that we
need to "turn against Method . . . regard it without
any founding privilege, as one of the voices
of plurality: as a view . . . a spectacle, mounted
within the text" (p. 319). It is more useful to think
of strategies, approaches, and tactics that defy
definition or closure. Poststructuralism promotes
close textual analysis as a central strategy but the
idea of a text encompasses far more than conventional
written or spoken data. It allows for macrotexts
like "capitalism" (or Marxism, humanism,
feminism, postmodernism), and it allows for
more familiar "micro" level texts like interview
transcripts or literary texts. Strategies for poststructural
analysis have nomadic tendencies and
cross over disciplinary boundaries. Texts go
beyond the conventional perceptions of literary
or linguistic texts and might include bodies in
space, spaces without bodies, or texts comprising
nonlinguistic semiotic systems.
In poststructural research, the shift of interpretive
focus is from language as a tool for describing
real worlds to discourse, as constitutive of
those worlds. There are no "right" research methods
that will produce a reality that lies outside of
the texts produced in the research process because
reality does not preexist the discursive and constitutive
work that is of interest to poststructural
writers. This is important for feminist researchers
in that it makes visible the historical, cultural,
social, and discursive patterns through which current
oppressive or dominant realities are held in
place. What might have been taken for granted as
natural, even essential to the human condition,
and therefore unable to be questioned in any systematic
way, is no longer taken to be inevitable,
no longer left invisible. The structures and practices
of everyday life are opened to scrutiny.
Inevitabilities are reviewed as constituted realities
(which have the possibility within themselves of
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their own reconstitution or collapse). In its focus
on discourse and discursive and regulatory practices,
poststructural analysis seeks to transcend
the individual or social divide and to find the ways
in which the social worlds we inhabit, and the
possibilities for existence within them, are
actively spoken into existence by individuals and
collectives. The individual in this way of thinking
is not separate from the social landscape, but continuous
with it (Davies, 2000b).
An important focus of feminist poststructural
theorizing is on the processes of subjectification
and the discursive regimes through which we
become gendered subjects. In this way it breaks
with theoretical frameworks in which gender
and sexuality are understood as inevitable, as
determined through structures of language,
social structure, cognition, or biology. It rejects
the essentialism that attributes the experiences
of women to "an underlying essence of womanness,
an essence contained in bodies and
expressed in culture," or that universalizes
women's experiences (Ferguson, 1993, p. 81).
Thus, it rejects conventional elements of radical
and liberal feminisms. It also breaks with theoretical
frameworks that define power as that
which is held in hierarchical and institutional
frameworks by certain groups and individuals
(Foucault, 1980). The question for poststructural
feminism then becomes that of agency and
what possibilities there are for us to act. This
agency does not presume freedom from discursive
constitution and regulation of self (Davies,
2000a, 2000b) but rather lies in the capacity to
recognize that constitution as historically specific
and socially regulated through particular
games of truth, and thus as able to be called into
question and changed. Meaning and intention
are not stable across times, places, interactive
contexts, and discourses. Individual subjects
take up their existence in specific moments and
are always located historically, politically, and
discursively in contexts from which they are not
separate (Davies, 2000b). In what follows we
will elaborate each of these concepts of discourse,
subjectivity, agency, power, and truth.
Poststructural Concepts
Discourses are complex interconnected webs
of modes of being, thinking, and acting. They
are in constant flux and often contradictory.
They are always located on temporal and spatial
axes, thus they are historically and culturally
specific. We are always already constituted
within discourse and discourses operate on and
in us simultaneously at the levels of desire as
well as reason. The concept of discourse is used
by poststructuralists to bring language into the
material world where what can be understood
and what can be said and done is seen as historically,
socially, and culturally constituted. The
range of possible ways of thinking are encompassed
within (in)finite discursive possibilities
that open thought up to us and close thought
down. Discourse "can never be just linguistic
since it organizes a way of thinking into a way
of acting in the world" (St. Pierre, 2000a, p.
485). We do not have a prediscursive rational
self, existing outside of or apart from discourse,
we are ourselves constituted within discursive
regimes, some of which are more powerful and
more readily available than others. Discourses
are not fixed but subject to constant revision and
contestation to flux and flow. The concept of
discourse serves to denaturalize what seems
"natural," and to interrupt essentialist thought. It
links together "power, knowledge, institutions,
intellectuals, the control of populations, and the
modern state as these intersect in the functions
of systems of thought" (Bové, 1990, pp. 54­55).
Influential discourses related to femininity, heterosexuality,
fertility, and maternity have structured
the conditions of women's lives. Feminists
have worked to reform these structures. That
reformation became possible through rethinking
discursive regimes of truth about the essential
qualities of women at particular moments in
time. The suffragettes worked to make it possible
to think about women differently--as rational
and intelligent beings--at a time when
women were excluded from citizenry. As it
became possible to think differently, discourses
about democracy and the institutions within
which these discourses of citizenry were regulated
and disseminated shifted until, quite
rapidly, it became impossible to think that
women were not capable of voting. The discourses
of equity and women's rights that came
to be called feminism in the West did not arise
independently--outside of space and time--but
from an intersection of historically situated
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discourses relating to emancipation and revolutionary
changes in France and the United States
that questioned what it is to be a human subject
in a democracy. They arose in part from the new
thinking that became possible at these intersections
for individual subjects and from the strategic
alliances that these women made with others
who had begun this deconstructive thinking.
Poststructuralists, however, are suspicious of
successor regimes and victory narratives. They
prefer to trace how a certain mode of thought
became possible at a particular juncture, and
how it became a dominant discourse or regime
of truth that can itself be subjected to retracings
and retellings. Butler (1992) sees such questioning
of democracy as central to radical, deconstructive
politics:
A social theory committed to democratic contestation
within a postcolonial horizon needs to find
a way to bring into question the foundations it is
compelled to lay down. It is this movement of
interrogating that ruse of authority that seeks to
close itself off from contest that is, in my view, at
the heart of any radical political project. (p. 8)
Possibilities for shifting discourses, for taking
up new ways of thinking and being, that is,
for agency in the world, become possible in the
contradictions and mo(ve)ments3
within discursive
regimes (Davies & Gannon, 2006). In contrast
to the humanist essentialist more or less
fixed version of identity, poststructuralism
proposes a subjectivity that is "precarious,
contradictory and in process, constantly being
reconstituted in discourse each time we speak"
(Weedon, 1997, p. 32). Some feminists have
worried that the idea of doing away with the
subject (i.e., the humanist, essentialized subject)
has meant an abandoning of the possibility of
agency and so of social change. Theorizing
agency has thus become one of the most important
tasks for feminists working within poststructural
perspectives (Butler, 1997b; Davies,
2000a). In "Contingent Foundations," Butler
(1992) makes a strong argument for subjection
being a precondition of agency:
The constituted character of the subject is the very
precondition of its agency. For what is it that
enables a purposive and significant reconfiguration
of cultural and political relations, if not a relation
that can be turned against itself, reworked, resisted
. . . In a sense, the epistemological model that
offers us a pregiven subject or agent is one that
refuses to acknowledge that agency is always and
only a political prerogative. As such it seems crucial
to question the conditions of its possibility,
not to take it for granted as an a priori guarantee.
(p. 13)
Subjectivity is an ongoing construction taking
place through an ongoing process of subjectification,
in which one is both subjected to
available regimes of truth and regulatory frameworks
and at the same time and through the
same processes becomes an active subject. As
we are imbricated within discourse, we become
complicit in our own subjection, simultaneously
seeking submission and mastery (Butler,
1997b).
In contrast to the poststructural interest in subjectification,
both radical and liberal feminisms
relied on a humanist conception of the individual
subject as separate from and outside of language,
as autonomous and capable of rationality.
However, because individualism and realism have
been opened up to question by critical theory and
the wider effects of postmodern and poststructural
thinking, many of the strong claims made
from within liberal feminist and radical feminist
frameworks can no longer be counted as absolute
certainties (Clough, 1994; Davies, 2000a; Moi,
1985; Tong, 1998). These essentializing claims
were already under challenge because feminists
of color (other than white) queried their invisibility--or
their objectification--and these so-called
third world women challenged the commonsense
of Western feminism.
The question of the ongoing formation of the
subject in everyday practices draws attention to
the poststructuralist concepts of power/knowledge.
Foucault (2000b) attended very closely to
the micropractices of power relations and their
effects in the creation of subjects:
This form of power that applies itself to immediate
everyday life categorizes the individual, marks
him by his own individuality, attaches him to his
own identity, imposes a law of truth on him that he
must recognize and others have to recognize in
him. It is a form of power that makes individuals
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subjects. There are two meanings of the word
"subject": subject to someone else by control and
dependence, and tied to his own identity by a conscience
or self knowledge. Both meanings suggest
a form of power that subjugates and makes subject
to. (p. 331)
Power is not hierarchical, for Foucault
(1980), but it proceeds in every direction at
once: It is capillary. It is not a possession that we
have (or do not have) and that we can deploy to
oppress (or to liberate) ourselves or others.
Power is productive rather than oppressive, productive
of subjects and of nets of domination
and subjection within which subjects are always
in motion. Subjects are constituted within power
relations: They are not prior to or apart from
them, nor can they be delivered from them. The
rational, autonomous subject of some critical
theory is a subject generated with a masculinist
discourse. Foucault talks more often about
power relations; that is, about how power is
operationalized in interactions between individuals
and institutions, than about power as something
apart or prior to the discursive regimes
within which power is in continual circulation.
Indeed, we are always within relations of power,
because we are always within discourse. In his
work on power, beginning with his early work
on asylums and prisons through to his later work
on the care of the self, Foucault explored how
the disciplinary power that was exercised in
institutions became part of the humanist subject.
Disciplinary power shifted from something
brought on the individual, from outside the self,
to a form of power relations taken up and internalized
by individuals as their own responsibility.
Similarly, women have sometimes been seen
within feminism as complicit in their own
oppression, though those feminisms assumed
that once "false consciousness" was revealed,
women would be free. Within poststructuralist
conceptions of power, and the knowledge that
power produces, there is no freedom from
power relations, nor is there any place outside
discourse. But just as within discourse we might
find the possibilities for deploying new discourses,
power relations also contain their own
possibilities for resistance, albeit resistance that
is "local, unpredictable and constant" (St.
Pierre, 2000a, p. 492).
The concept of power in Foucault's (2000c)
work then circles back, inevitably to the concept
of discourse that he developed in his early work
as he struggled to analyze power and its quotidian
operations. Political thought from neither
the Right nor the Left gave him the tools with
which to think about power:
The way power was exercised--concretely and in
detail--with its specificity, its techniques and
tactics, was something that no one attempted
to ascertain; they contented themselves with
denouncing it in a polemical or global fashion . . .
the mechanics of power in themselves were never
analyzed. This task could only begin after 1968,
that is to say, on the basis of daily struggles at
grass-roots levels, among those whose fight was
located in the fine meshes of the web of power.
This is where the concrete nature of power
became visible. (p. 117)
The concrete nature of power is materialized
in women's desires, in their bodies, and in social
relations and institutional structures, and these
areas remain the focus of much feminist poststructural
empirical research (Davies & Gannon,
2005, 2006; St. Pierre & Pillow, 2000).
Foucault's work provides concepts with
which we might think differently through what
we still call "data" (though that term belongs
squarely in positivist regimes of thought), about
the truth games within which disciplinary and
other knowledge is produced and reified. He
provides us with a toolbox of strategies: archaeology,
genealogy, and technologies of the self.
Rather than distinct methods for analysis, these
are intertwined modes of thought that make possible
particular inquiries into games of truth,
as sets of possibilities that we might take up
because they are useful to us. Foucault's initial
strategy of archaeology studies the conditions of
possibility through which disciplinary knowledge
is formed and becomes sedimented. It
looks at discursive formations, at historical
archives; it searches for subjugated knowledges.
Rather than the human subject as the source of
knowledge, which Foucault called "anthropological"
history, archeology works in the
labyrinth of the archive, in "the domain of
things said" (Foucault, cited in Eribon, 1992,
p. 191). Archeology interrogates the edifices of
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the disciplines, tracing how knowledge has
come to define a particular domain, and to
underpin its associated regimes of truth. It analyzes
groups of statements to ascertain how they
achieved "unity as a science, a theory or a text";
beneath the surface continuities we find "discontinuities,
displacements and transformations"
(Smart, 2002, p. 38). Foucault (1984) is
interested in the modes of transformation of discursive
practices and his strategy of genealogy
is directed at interrogating knowledge and
power relations particularly as they operate at
the level of the body, where the body is the
object of the operations and technologies of
power. The body is understood as
The inscribed surface of events (traced by language
and dissolved by ideas), the locus of a dissociated
self (adopting the illusion of a substantial
unity), and a volume in perpetual disintegration.
Genealogy as an analysis of descent is thus situated
within the articulation of the body and
history. (p. 83)
Foucault (1984) talks about genealogy as
"gray, meticulous and patiently documentary"
(p. 76). It has been taken up by researchers in
many different ways--including as a contemporary
catchall phrase for any sort of historical
analysis--thus, how the subject is treated within
genealogical studies differs greatly (Hekman,
1990). But it is in his final work on the care of the
self that Foucault (1985, 1997b, 1997c, 1997d,
1999, 2005) turns his attention most explicitly to
individual subjects rather than larger systems of
thought and relations of power.
Although we sketch out some component
parts of what Foucault called his "little toolboxes"
(Foucault, cited in Mills, 2003, p. 7), it is
important to note that Foucault was not dogmatic.
His whole corpus was dedicated to the
dismantling of dogma, of received and sedimented
"truth." This included others' use of his
own work: "A discourse is a reality which can
be transformed infinitely. Thus, he who writes
has not the right to give orders as to the use of
his writings" (Foucault, cited in Carrette, 1999,
p. 111). Mills (2003) suggests that "we should
draw on his work as a resource for thinking,
without slavish adherence, and we should be
very aware of Foucault's weaknesses and blind
spots" (p. 7). Deleuze (1988) argued that we
should see Foucault not as a guru but as someone
whose work might be useful in our everyday
lives. Following Foucault, feminists might work
with the cracks and fissures of dominant discourses,
and the contradictory detail of the
everyday, to multiply and enable alternative discourses.
We might keep in mind, as we take up
those aspects of Foucauldian thought that might
be useful to us, that "a truly Foucauldian reading
or method is one that moves beyond
Foucault's writing and thinking" (Mills, 2003,
p. 31). The potent pleasures for feminists in
poststructural deconstructive work lies in the
potential for finding the means to undo sedimented
truths through which they might otherwise
be held captive.
Poststructural Analytic
and Textual Strategies
In our discussion of the work of Foucault,
whose troubling of concept--including truth,
power, knowledge, discourse, and the subject--
underpinned the emergence of poststructural
thinking, we have already introduced some of
the analytic strategies that feminist poststructuralists
have found useful. The generic term
discourse analysis is sometimes used to signal
the close textual work that researchers are
engaged in, and reflects the turn to language as
a constitutive force that underpins poststructuralism;
however, it is imprecise and applied
within a wide range of theoretically incompatible
paradigms. In the remainder of this section,
we will focus on explicitly poststructural
approaches and strategies that have been important
in feminist work.
Deconstruction
The term deconstruction has also migrated
into populist discourse but, more precisely, it
emerged from the work of Jacques Derrida. His
analytic strategies work into the inconsistencies
and weaknesses in meaning that are inherent
within any text. Deconstruction was rapidly popularized
in American literary studies partly
because of its complementarity with the work
of the Yale New Critics (Royle, 2000, p. 5).
Meaning is to be found within the text for literary
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deconstructionists, but that meaning will always
be multiple, shifting, and deferred. The text can
be provoked to reveal its own contradictions and
(im)possibilities through deconstructive analysis.
Analysis does not produce definitive new readings
of a text but is oriented toward the continuous
deferral and displacement of meaning, which
Derrida (1976) calls différance. Derrida's work
began from the linguist Saussure's separation of
the signified (the concept) from the signifier (the
word representing the concept). Derrida argued
that the relationship between word and meaning
is arbitrary. Rather than being fixed or transcendental,
meaning emerges in specific temporal and
discursive contexts. As we suggested in the first
section of this chapter, deconstruction pays particular
attention to detecting and displacing
binary pairs. In its narrowest application, deconstruction
is a strategy for identifying and disrupting
binary pairs. As Royle (2000) describes it,
this form "took hold (like a virus or parasite)"
and could be "stupidly formalistic" (p. 5). On the
other hand, in its widest context, deconstruction
has come to mean almost any analytical operation
on any sort of text. McQuillan (2001) defines
deconstruction as "an act of reading which allows
the other to speak"; that is, as a practice that
resists closure, a "situation or event of reading"
rather than a method applied to a text (p. 6).
Derrida prefers to consider "deconstructions,"
and he stresses that it has "never named a project,
a method, or a system" (Derrida & Ewald, 1995,
p. 283). Although Derrida's work can be usefully
applied to specific texts, which may be its most
prolific application, deconstruction is applicable
to social institutions and discursive regimes that
exceed a single text or set of texts. Deconstruction
as it is useful for feminist poststructural research
can be applied as an everyday everywhere practice,
something we might use in our lives, something
active that might help us "make sense" of
lived experience but that is most likely to trouble
our sense making, even to reach "into the bare
bones" of who we see ourselves to be (LenzTaguchi,
2004).
Whatever its object or its scope, or its particular
strategy, deconstructive work aims to unfix
meaning so that it remains incessantly at play,
mobile, fluid, unable to come to rest or ossify
into any rigid structures of meaning. Derridean
deconstruction opens language to différance, a
principle that captures both "difference" and
"deferral." Deconstruction attends to the spectral
logic of absences that haunt the text. It is
productive, inventive, and creative, concerned
with excess and ceaseless iteration. It "opens a
passageway, it marches ahead and leaves a trail"
(Derrida, 1989, p. 42), and the trails crisscross
to create new trails and surprising openings and
closings. Deconstruction can, perhaps, be anything:
"and indeed, one starts laughing, and I'm
tempted to add `deconstruction and me, and me,
and me . . .,' to parody the parody of a famous
French song--`50 million Chinese and me and
me and me" (Derrida, 2000, p. 283). Parody is
one of numerous strategies that Derrida--and
those who have found his work useful--have
taken up to dislodge the fixity of meaning in a
text (see Kamuf, 1981; Spivak, 1976). Gayatri
Spivak (1976), translator of Of Grammatology,
describes the difficulties of capturing his work
in language:
The movement of "difference-itself," precariously
saved by its resident "contradiction" has many
nicknames . . . trace, différance, reserve, supplement,
dissemination, hymen, . . . and so on. They
form a chain where each may be substituted for
the other, but not exactly (of course, even two uses
of the same word would not be exactly the same):
"no concept overlaps with any other" . . . Each
substitution is also a displacement and carries a
metaphoric change (p. lxx).
Although Derrida has used particular figures
to work as "hinges"--as analytic devices to
double and displace meaning--in particular
texts under analysis, the figures available to
feminist researchers for this sort of work are
limited only by our imaginations and the texts
we take up. Along with Spivak, who has used
deconstruction to take on the fields of cultural
studies (2000) and politics (2001), literary theorists
Diane Elam and Peggy Kamuf have found
Derridean strategies particularly fruitful for
deconstructing "feminism" (Elam, 2000), "sexual
difference" (Elam, 2001), "love" (Kamuf,
2000), and "critique" itself (Kamuf, 2001). Yet
deconstruction as an analytic approach exceeds
its origins and its originator. Judith Butler (1990,
1993, 1997a, 2004b), for instance, makes only
passing reference to Derrida in the articulation of
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her radically deconstructive theory of gender
performativity.
Rhizoanalysis and Nomadism
The rhizoanalytic work of Deleuze and
Guattari (1972, 1987) has also been of great
interest to feminists working within poststructural
paradigms. In contrast with the linear, systematic
branching of tree roots, the rhizome is a
secret, unseen, underground, creeping, multiplying
growth that can strangle the tree or the
root of conventional thought, that "plots a point,
fixes an order" from beneath (Deleuze &
Guattari, 1987, p. 7). Rhizomatic plants, like
heliconias, are knobbly, unpredictable, unstable,
vigorous, prolific, extending in multiple directions
at once, moving underground, splitting off,
and springing up anew in unexpected places.
Thought modeled on the rhizome links unexpected
texts and events to make surprising new
connections and unpredictable, unreplicable,
insights. Such analysis is also concerned with
the dissolution of the transcendental and unitary
rational subject, of he who "knows." Deleuze
and Guattari modeled many strategies--cartography,
rhizomatic analysis, assemblages, figurations,
becomings, flows, and intensities--that
have been taken up and extended in interesting
and provocative work by feminists (Braidotti,
1991, 1994, 2002; Colebrook, 2002; Gatens,
2000; Grosz, 1994a, 1994b; Probyn, 2000; St.
Pierre, 1997a, 1997b, 1997c). This provocative
philosophical shift has also been critiqued by
feminist scholars. For example, provocative
concepts, such as "bodies without organs"
(BwO), emphasizing the corporeal as "nonstratified,
unformed, intense matter" (Deleuze &
Guattari, 1987, p. 153), as intensity and energy
rather than matter, have been both vehemently
rejected by feminists concerned about the erasure
of the materiality of embodied experience
(Irigaray, 1977, cited in Braidotti, 2002, p. 76),
and taken up by other feminists as productive
ways to rethink female corporeality. Rosi
Braidotti (1994, 2002) has used the figuration of
the nomad to generate a feminist nomadic subjectivity
that emphases "flows of connection"
and "becomings" that rely on "affinities and the
capacity both to sustain and generate interconnectedness"
(Braidotti, 2002, p. 8). The
feminist nomadic subject "critiques liberal individualism
and promotes instead the positivity of
multiple connections"; it emphasizes "the role
of passions, empathy and desire as non-selfaggrandizing
modes of relation to one's social
and human habitat" (p. 266). The sort of feminist
subjectivity that Braidotti theorizes emerges
from an "empathic proximity and intensive
interconnectedness" (p. 8) rather than from any
independent, separate, or selfish mode of being
human. In contrast to theories of the self that
emphasize individualism, subjectivity is always
already a "socially mediated process" (p. 7).
Feminists who think through Deleuze and
Guattari also attend to questions about imagination
and creativity in their search for ways to
think differently, and playfully, against the grain
of dominant discourses and sedimented truths.
Another feminist figuration, analogous to
Braidotti's nomad, is Donna Haraway's (1991)
cyborg, a type of nonsentimental Deleuzean
BwO, neither girl nor woman, human nor animal,
nature nor culture, corporeal nor technological
but composite of all of them, becoming
all of them. Yet the cyborg is a material and
political figure as well, representing the human
exploitation of underpaid workers, the invisible
underclass of white capitalist production.
Haraway brings Deleuzian thought together with
an update of Foucault's conception of bio-power,
showing that "contemporary power does not
work by normalized heterogeneity any more, but
rather by networking, communication redesigns
and by multiple interconnections" (Braidotti,
2002, p. 242). Haraway's dissolution of the
binary of subject/object through the figuration of
the cyborg is a call for a feminist poststructuralism
that entails both pleasure and responsibility.
In Volatile Bodies, Elizabeth Grosz (1994a) also
brings Deleuzian and Foucauldian concepts
together to develop a deconstructive corporeal
feminism. The body is the inscribed surface of
events--as Foucault theorized--but in her cartography
of the female body she theorizes a
fleshy volatile body, subject to flows and intensities
of desire and of substances, particularly fluids
(e.g., blood, milk, vomit). She deconstructs
inside/outside to show that the female body is "an
assemblage of organs, processes, pleasures, passions,
activities, behaviors linked by fine lines
and unpredictable networks to other elements,
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segments and assemblages" (p. 120). Where
poststructural philosophy had been accused of
abstraction and elision of bodies, Grosz writes
the fleshy carnality of the body back into that
domain and addresses both the "somataphobia"
of Western philosophy (p. 5) and the "universal,
innate, nonhistoric" subject of biology (p. 187).
All the feminists we have discussed here have
appropriated and furthered the ideas generated by
Deleuze and Guattari to open up new ways to
think through the body in feminist theory.
Deconstructive Writing
The feminist poststructuralists we have discussed
thus far take up theoretical concepts
creatively and put them to new uses but, for the
most part, their writing remains clearly on the
side of theory. Other feminist writers take
the deconstructive challenge into radical play
with form and genre, defying binaries that organize
writing into either analytical or creative
writing and disregarding categories like theory,
prose, poetry, drama, and film. As we have suggested
earlier in this chapter, critical, postmodern,
and particularly poststructural paradigms
bring with them a hypervigilance to the politics,
effects, and rhetorical tropes of language.
Language is not a transparent tool for transmitting
some truth that exists elsewhere, apart from
the text. A text is never innocent but is constitutive
of certain truths and exclusive of others, and
thus must always be placed under interrogation.
Language within poststructural frameworks
tends to draw attention to its constructedness
and to its multiplicity. The writers whose work
we explore in the following paragraphs push
language to the brink, using its creative possibilities
to do highly original feminist textual
work that is authorized by postmodern or poststructural
paradigms.
Writing itself is a method of inquiry, as
Laurel Richardson (1997) has demonstrated,
rather than a transparent medium for re-presenting
data. Richardson re-presents interview transcripts
and other research "data" in poetic form,
shifting the epistemological and ontological terrain
in the process. With Richardson, Elizabeth
St. Pierre theorizes writing as a "nomadic" practice,
as a Deleuzian "line of flight" that asks the
question: "What else might writing do except
mean?" (St. Pierre, cited in Richardson & St.
Pierre, 2005). With this shift, writing is no
longer "a tracing of thought already thought"
but a provocation to différance (St. Pierre, cited
in Richardson & St. Pierre, 2005). Trinh T.
Minh-Ha is a filmmaker whose writing has been
particularly important for postcolonial and
feminist poststructural scholars. Her films
problematize the Eurocentric ethnographic gaze
on the Other as "native" and as "woman" and
her writing enacts a textual practice where
Otherness is retained and given voice. Writing
itself is the site of theorizing, and of interrogating
theory through displacement and disintegration
of the subject writing, the reader, of writing.
Trinh (1989) claims a "hyphenated" textual
space, a space where writing is both one thing
and another, as the site for women's writing:
"So where do you go from here? where do I go?
and where does a committed woman writer go?
Finding a voice, searching for words and sentences:
say some thing, one thing, or no thing;
tie/untie, read/unread." (p. 20).
Her writing brings together theory and
fiction, analysis and creativity. Trinh (1992)
develops a "politics of form" of "irrespectfully
mixing . . . theoretical, militant and poetical
modes of writing" (p. 154). She provokes a collision
where "theorizing and practices of representation
[are brought] into the same space each
to bring the other into crisis" (Clough, 1994,
p. 118). Trinh (1999) refuses the separation of
theoretical and creative linguistic practice:
Word as idea and word as word. These two movements
of language are interdependent and always
at work in the space of writing. When the telling
and the told remain inseparable, the dichotomy
between form and content radically loses its pertinence.
That is the way I would try to describe the
way I proceed in writing. The way a thought, a
feeling, an argument, a theory, or a story takes
shape on paper is at the same time "accidental"
and very precise, very situated, just like a throw of
the dice . . . if language is subjected to being a
vehicle for thought and feeling, or if the focus is
only laid on the told, the message, or the object of
analysis, then the work will never resonate. And
without resonance, writing becomes primarily a
form of information retrieval or of administrative
inquisition. (p. 35)
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Trinh's work plays with the aesthetics and
effects of language, and is simultaneously
intensely and provocatively political.
Hélne Cixous, likewise, works in another
highly original textual location. Although she
has been positioned for English readers as a
theorist, she refuses that name. She writes fiction,
criticism, psychoanalysis, and philosophy
"without enclosing herself in any of them"
(Conley, 1991, p. 12) and often within the same
texts. In conversation with Conley, she locates
her work in relation to "theory":
I am obviously not without a minimum of philosophical
and analytical knowledge, simply
because I am part of a historical period. I cannot
act as if I were not a contemporary of myself.
Neither do I think that I must wage a mortal war
against a certain type of discourse . . . I do have
knowledge of theoretical discourses. Yet the part
that represses women is a part which I quickly
learned to detect and from which I keep my distance.
One leaves these parts aside. (Cixous, in
Conley, 1991, p. 147)
Cixous's (1981, 1986) explication and practice
of écriture feminine, of a feminine writing
that exceeds the phallogocentrism of rational
thought, has influenced diverse feminists,
including Trinh. Écriture féminine is a practice
of writing that Cixous (1986) says "will never
be able to be theorized, enclosed, coded, which
does not mean it does not exist" (p. 92).
Nevertheless, Cixous's work can be understood
within a theoretical landscape. Cixous's texts
are dense, enigmatic, intensely lyrical texts of
desire, and of loss that might be understood as
texts of bliss (Barthes, 1975).
Cixous's (1991) writing is deeply metaphorical.
Her writing shimmers with "signifiers that
flash with a thousand meanings" (p. 46). Her
writing entails careful attention to the possibilities
of language, sensitivity to the multiplicity,
and excess of language. Like Trinh she shows
that the simple truth (if such a thing can be said
to exist) is neither desirable nor possible. She
attends to other sources of language beyond the
conscious, beyond reason. She locates her
imagery and understanding of the corporeal
effects of language in dreams, in the unconscious,
and in what she calls zones in(terre)conscious
(Cixous & Calle-Gruber, 1997, p. 88). Language
emerges in zones between earth and consciousness,
deep in the body and memory (Davies,
2000b).
Cixous (1991) reads her body as a text. She
sources the "truths" of life and of writing within
the body, which always mediates every experience
and which is itself the ultimate text (of life):
History, love, violence, time, work, desire inscribe
[life] in my body. I go where the "fundamental language"
is spoken, the body language into which all
the tongues of things, acts and beings, translate
themselves, in my own breast, the whole of reality
worked upon in my flesh, intercepted by my nerves,
by my sense, by the labor of all my cells, projected,
analyzed, recomposed into a book. (p. 52)
The body is the fundament of writing, and
the poetic writing practice that Cixous developed
derives from the body and reverberates
with the body and with other bodies. It resonates
in and with the body--like music or like blood.
Bodies are texts of lives and can be written
within an embodied writing practice of écriture
feminine, a writing that seeks to preserve
Otherness. It was in theater that Cixous found
the medium where the writer, as ego, could let
go and make space for the multiplicity of the
other: "In the theater one can only work with a
self that has almost evaporated, that has transformed
itself into space" (Cixous, cited in
Sellers, 1996, p. xiv). In the space of theater, the
writer must imagine and create and be everyone.
She can encounter and inscribe the other, and in
writing the other she puts herself under erasure.
It is in writing for theater that the self will "consent
to erase itself and to make space, to
become, not the hero of the scene, but the scene
itself: the site, the occasion of the other"
(Cixous, cited in Sellers, 1996, p. xv). She sees
her writing for theater as a critical component of
her scholarly practice and as the place where an
ethics of writing becomes possible.
These authors, as well as ourselves, have also
been influenced by Roland Barthes who, like
other French "founding fathers" of contemporary
theory, marked the movement from structuralism
into poststructuralism through his body
of work. Barthes (1989) explicitly rejected the
binary of science and literature in academia:
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Science will become literature, insofar as
literature--subject moreover to a growing collapse
of traditional genres (poem, narrative, criticism,
essay)--is already, has always been, science; for
what the human sciences are discovering today, in
whatever realm: sociological, psychological, psychiatric,
linguistic, etc., literature has always
known; the only difference is that literature has not
said what it knows, it has written it. (p. 10)
In his later works, Barthes (1977, 1978) troubled
the category of the individual writer and
the practices of writing the self. His work, with
that of the other writers in this section, has been
inspirational in our own writing, provoking
Gannon (2001, 2002, 2004a, 2004b, 2004c,
2005, in press) to develop a poststructural practice
of autoethnography, and to (re)work data as
fiction, drama, and poetry in a range of feminist
textual interventions. This work has also been
concerned to disrupt the binary of academia and
the world, so that a text that began as a research
project in a feminist academic context reemerges
as a fictional play on a public stage and vice
versa (Gannon, 2004b, 2005), and memory
becomes the site for collectively theorizing a
feminist poststructuralism (Davies, 2000a,
2000b; Davies & Gannon, 2005, 2006).
The writers we discuss in this section aim to
bring language into crisis, to push at the boundaries
of understanding so that multiple meanings
can be provoked and multiple readings
invited through a politics of form that disrespects
generic integrity and disciplinary boundaries.
They work at the limits of language
where, as Trinh (1991) says, the aim is
to listen, to see like a stranger in one's own land; to
fare like a foreigner across one's own language . . .
It is, to borrow a metaphor by Toni Morrison "what
the nerves and the skin remember as well as how it
appeared. And a rush of imagination is our flooding."
"What she wishes to leave the reader/viewer
with, finally, is not so much a strong message, nor a
singular story, but "the fire and the song." (p. 199)
CONTROVERSIES AND GAPS, CRITIQUES
The intersection of feminist and poststructural
theories has been a vehemently contested but
productive site. Although some readings of the
debates suggest that poststructuralism has
closed off possibilities for feminist work, vigorous
new fields such as queer theory and feminist
postcolonial theory have emerged in part from
this collision. We have already explored some of
the new work done by feminists and have discussed
some of the concerns. In this final section
of the chapter, we will further delineate
feminist criticisms of these paradigms. Many of
the accusations with which poststructural and
postmodernist work have been charged by feminists
hinge on their apparent relativism, explicitly
their rejection of fixed truths and certainties.
In contrast, researchers who locate their work as
"critical theory," who claim emancipatory agendas
and privilege praxis over (or alongside)
theory, are not generally subjected to this critique.
Accusations of relativism work along
various axes in critiques of poststructural theorizing.
Each axis rests on a binary way of thinking
that asserts particular possibilities and
impossibilities entailed in poststructuralism.
Relativism and Social Action
The first axis relates to action. The history of
the feminist movement, as "women's liberation,"
was characterized by individual and collective
action directed at political and social
change. The relativism of poststructural feminism
is seen by some critics as incapable of
provoking any action to improve the lives of
women. If "women" as a coherent category has
been deconstructed, and "power" is seen as a
capillary and localized operation, then how and
where can feminists work to improve social
worlds? And who is a feminist anyway in these
times? Delmar (1986) suggested,
At the very least a feminist is someone who holds
that women suffer discrimination because of their
sex, that they have specific needs which remain
negated and unsatisfied, and that the satisfaction
of these needs would require a radical change . . .
in the social, economic and political order.
(Delmar, cited in Beasley, 1999, pp. 27­28)
Appropriate feminisms, and feminists, are
driven by the imperative for social critique and
the possibility of radical social change. Social
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theory that does not foreground radical social
action is suspect for feminist purposes. This
position is evident in critiques of postmodern or
poststructural feminism, where the focus on discourse
is seen as inconsistent with an orientation
to social change. Waugh (1998), for
example, parodies this with:
Rather than searching for scientific proof or metaphysical
certainty, or a structural analysis of
economic or social inequality, we should now recognize
that the way to understand and to change
our world is through the artificial mutation and
manipulation of vocabularies. (p. 183)
Not surprisingly, she goes on to claim that (her
version of) what she calls a "strong" postmodern
position "raises enormous difficulties for any
emancipatory collective movement concerned
with profound economic and social inequalities"
(p. 183). This "emancipatory collective movement"
stands in for "feminism" in the sentence
and in her argument. Differences between and
within feminism(s) are elided to allow feminism--as
a collective and unitary movement--to
right the wrongs of patriarchy. Feminism is
equated with and defined by its action orientation,
much as an orientation to praxis and social
transformation is definitive of Marxist, socialist,
and critical theories. The argument rests on a set
of binary oppositions whereby postmodernism or
poststructuralism is set on one side of a binary
against feminism, and the former is associated
primarily with language and the latter with
action. Each side of the binary excludes the other
and is defined by that exclusion.
Taking a similar line through the axis of social
action, Francis (1999) critiques deconstructive
paradigms in educational research by imagining
what she calls a "pure poststructuralism" that
might be set against the sort of "applied
poststructuralism" that she sees in Davies's
deconstructive work with children and gendered
identities (Davies, 1989, 2003; Davies &
Kasama, 2003). The binary that Francis constructs
does not hold, in our view, within
poststructuralism where thinking differently necessarily
and inevitably leads to acting differently
in the world. Her argument seems to be that if it
can be applied in social worlds, then theory isn't
"pure" or "true." Thus, deconstructive paradigms
are seen to be forever and necessarily precluded
from social action. As we have previewed in our
earlier discussions of Foucault, Derrida, and
Butler, we do not see this to be the case. The
problem, rather, if there is a problem, lies in how
we might bring together postmodernism and
poststructuralism with all that they entail (including
a deconstructive stance toward language and
the social world) together with the action orientation
of feminist politics.
Of course, the dismissal of postmodern and
poststructural thought from the arena of
"action" in the critique we have just discussed
relies on the definitions of social activism and of
emancipation that are used and on the scale on
which they are imagined. Waugh and Francis
assert that worthwhile social action is underpinned
by grand narratives (such as the relentless
oppression of women by patriarchy) that
imply large-scale social action as the ideal goal
for feminists. We do not see this as the only possibility.
Neither do we see a necessary dilution
of the "purity" of the paradigm--an idea that we
find antithetical to these paradigms--as resulting
from moments of social critique, action, or
of agency. Although it does not provide broad or
simple answers to social problems, poststructural
critique does enable close analysis of the
operations of power. It enables us to examine
how power operates to construct our desires, our
thoughts, our ways of being in the world--our
subjectivities--in ways that can make us unconsciously
complicit in our own oppression.
Poststructural analysis of subjectification--that
is, of how power works on bodies to produce us
as subjects--enables individuals and groups to
undertake close readings of lived experience
(Davies & Gannon, 2005, 2006). With subjectification,
we focus on the processes through
which the subject is produced, on subjectivities
that are "precarious, contradictory and in
process, constantly being reconstituted in discourse
each time we speak" (Weedon, 1997,
pp. 32--33). The poststructural research and
writing strategy of collective biography that we
have developed from the memory work of Haug
et al. (1987) works at this level to map the operations
of power on bodies (Davies, 1994, 2000b;
Davies & Gannon, 2005, 2006).
As critics like Waugh have noted, the dislodging
of habitual ways of thinking and being
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that underpins poststructural work also entails
the dislodging of fixed notions of the subject.
This abandonment of the stable subject as the
foundation for agency is seen as detrimental to
action, as potentially paralyzing for feminists.
However, the contrary has been the case for
some feminists working with poststructuralist
notions of the subject. For example, one woman
tells how poststructuralist thought provides "a
map through a crisis" when she discovers that
her fiancée has sexually abused her daughter (in
Davies, 1994). In the subsequent weeks, intersecting
discourses of "legality, brotherhood,
childhood, sexuality and psychology" work
against each other to construct the woman and
her daughter in ways that are disempowering.
The analysis enables her to see by "pulling out
the discursive frameworks why [she feels] so
crazy and [how she is] being pulled to pieces"
(p. 34). Reconstructing the way she thinks about
the event is itself a powerful action and provides
a clearer way forward into further action. She is
able to move more easily between those discourses
within which she felt trapped and can
better "judge when she could resist and when
she had little realistic choice but to comply"
(p. 34). Feminist work that takes deconstruction
seriously puts it to use in everyday social life.
Social change cannot be held apart from
transformation that becomes possible at the
levels of individuals and groups. Yet the social
and personal transformation that might be possible
in these paradigms is an ongoing and continuous
process of self and societal critique and
engagement rather than a step forward in a linear
progress narrative toward something we
might recognize as "emancipation," into which
we might relax with satisfaction as though we
have achieved the social changes we desired. As
we suggested earlier in this chapter, at the
beginning of this millennium the achievements
of second-wave liberal feminism are proving
remarkably fragile in the face of neoconservative
discursive regimes. We do not see that an
interest in deconstructive philosophies of the
subject prevent us from participating in largescale
social activism, nor from seeking social
justice in all the arenas of our lives. Nevertheless,
within this paradigm, the claims we
(and others) make about our projects, the language
we (and others) use, and the actions we
(and others) take will be subjected to rigorous
and continual reflexive examination rather than
accepted as taken-for-granted truths or emancipatory
programs. The social transformation of
gender relations remains the focus of feminism
and, as Butler (2004b) has recently argued,
though "theory is itself transformative," it is not
"sufficient for social and political transformation"
(p. 205).
Relativism and Politics
Obviously then, related to the charge that the
supposed relativism of poststructuralism is detrimental
for social action is the charge that
poststructuralism is apolitical, or politically conservative.
Braidotti (2000) argues that rather than
being apolititical, "post-structuralists are politically
to the far Left of the spectrum. They deconstruct,
build genealogical approaches that clash
with the dogma of historical materialism" though
they emphasize the continuous "process of
`becoming,' that is the social, political and personal
pursuit [italics added] of radical change and
transformation" rather than any utopian achievement
of transformation (p. 717). The subject is
always in motion and it is in this movement, these
mo(ve)ments of becoming, that the imperatives
of political activism will call us into action.
Braidotti sees that the radicalism of poststructuralism
lies in the very qualities that some feminist
critics have claimed make it useless for
political activism: "This radicality consists in
unhinging the very foundations of the subject,
freeing him/her from the linearity of a telos
where reason, justice and revolution always end
up playing the last hand" (p. 717).
Nevertheless, no theory can be purely "left"
or "right" or any other category. Nor is sophisticated
theoretical work necessarily distant from
praxis. Foucault's (1977) analysis of prisons in
Discipline and Punish was accompanied by his
active involvement in the establishment of a
prison reform movement (Mills, 2003, p. 76).
Nevertheless, it is imaginable that fragments of
Foucault's work could be used to justify fascism
or deny the Holocaust (p. 7). This is not to suggest
that theory can be inherently good or evil.
Rather, we should ceaselessly interrogate the
political use to which theory is put, we must
situate our own with care and continuous
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attention. For example, the radically disruptive
works of Butler (1990, 1993) have influenced
diverse fields. In her early works, she unhinged
the sex/gender distinction and theorized the performativity
of gender in ways that have been
useful for queer politics. The questions she
raises in Undoing Gender (Butler, 2004b) about
the conditions of normativity that produce unintelligible
and unviable subjects, precluding
some from the very category of the human,
reverberate across current neoconservative
domains of social and political life. In the different
spheres of global politics, beginning with
her discussion of the first war in Iraq (Butler,
1992) through to Precarious Life (Butler,
2004a), she has continued her relentless interrogation
of the practices of Othering that underpin
Western neocolonialism as it plays out from the
bloody arena of the Middle East to the indefinite
detention of prisoners held by the U.S. military
in Guantanamo Bay. In an earlier work, Butler
(1995) describes the work of herself and her fellow
philosophers as though it was removed from
the world:
We toil in the domain of philosophy and its critique,
and in that way dwell within a presupposed sense
that theoretical reflection matters. As a result,
though, the important questions raised concerning
the rarefied status of theoretical language, the place
of narrative in or as theory, the possibility of a theoretical
activism, the tension between theory and
empiricism . . . are not interrogated. (p. 132)
Nevertheless, we believe that it is necessary
to have different thoughts to work the world differently,
and, as an exemplar, the work of Butler
has been useful for particular domains of social
life. This highlights another issue for feminists
who are working in densely theoretical arenas.
Academic intellectual thought is marginalized
in the English speaking world. If we see the role
of "public intellectuals" as part of our responsibility
as feminists then how are we to cross back
and forth between the academy and the world?
How might we increase our communicative
repertoires without sliding into a simplistic
reductionism of complex ideas? How are we to
act and speak in the world, as well as work to
think it differently? How might we be "specific
intellectuals" (Foucault, 2000d, p. 384) who
might critique repressive systems of thought and
collaborate with practitioners to change institutional
practices? The work of the specific intellectual
who talks about an area of specific
knowledge is also a form of "action" that might
have a transformative effect in the social world.
Theory and praxis cannot be understood as
mutually exclusive binaries, indeed they might
rather be understood as mutually constitutive.
Relativism, Morality, and Ethics
Another axis for critiques of postmodern and
poststructural theories rests on the question of
morality. Although these paradigms--like any
theoretical model--are not in themselves
"moral" or "immoral," they do question the
absolutist foundations of any system of morality.
This is the work that postmodern and poststructural
researchers set out to do. Entangled
with the idea of morality are questions of ethics,
what makes some behavior more moral or ethical
than other behavior.4
In humanist philosophy,
ethics operates as an appeal to autonomous,
rational subjects who are able to act impartially
to choose their actions. Rather than relying on
an autonomous subject or promoting any set of
absolute rules, approaches to ethics or morality
within a poststructural framework will shift to
analysis of the forms of thought and action that
are made possible in any particular context.
Multiple readings of a particular event might
elaborate different discursive effects and operations
within that event. If feminist morality and
ethics are contingent on absolutisms, then poststructuralist
approaches are problematic for
feminism. But if feminists take up and further
poststructural interrogations of these concepts,
then inventive and radical work becomes possible.
Early feminist work in this field theorized
an ethics that was based on "mothering" and
was characterized by "caring and interpersonal
relations" (see McNay, 1992, p. 93). In this
framework, characterized by the work of Carol
Gilligan (1982), morality and questions of right
behavior are relativized within a network of
relationships and responsibilities but they tend
to rest on ahistorical and acultural essentialist
notions of the feminine that are incompatible
with the antifoundationalism of poststructural
thinking. The work of reconfiguring ethics for
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feminists within poststructuralism entails insisting
on responsibility and on judgment, but at the
same time destabilizing the subject and the social
contexts within which she is constituted and constitutes
herself. In a poststructural feminist ethics,
the subject is "neither sovereign nor autonomous
but always caught up in a network of responsibility
to others" (Elam, 1994, p. 105).
Ethics and morality are necessarily closely
entwined in poststructural analyses. Foucault
attempts to disentangle them by describing
morality as having two elements--prescriptive
codes of moral behavior that are externally
imposed (though they may be taken up as our
own desires) and ethical projects of the self on
the self (Foucault, 1985). The second form of
morality is intimately connected with the "biographical
project of self-realization" (Rose,
1991, p. 12). Rather than a revelation (or an
imposition) of right thought, poststructural conceptions
of morality imply that we must engage
constantly in the project of "self-reflection, selfknowledge,
self-examination . . . the decipherment
of the self by oneself, . . . the transformations
that one seeks to accomplish with oneself as
object" (Foucault, 1985, p. 29). The process of
seeking to behave "morally" entails the intersection
and effects of both of these sets of moral
practices. The poststructural interest in morality
lies particularly in these reflexive processes,
unconscious as well as conscious, which
Foucault calls "technologies of the self." These
are the everyday practices through which we
shape our bodies into particular bodies, historically
and culturally specific bodies. Thus, we
are simultaneously governed and govern ourselves.
We are individualized and totalized
through the same processes. Through continuous
reflection and adjustment--unconscious
and conscious--we shape ourselves appropriately
for our contexts. In his examination of the
history of sexuality, Foucault (1980, 1997b,
1997c, 1997d) traced technologies of the self
through two conflicting imperatives--the obligation
to "care for the self" and the obligation to
"know the self." Morality lies in "the kind of
relationship you ought to have with yourself,
rapport  soi, which I call ethics, and which
determines how the individual is supposed to
constitute himself as a moral subject of his own
actions" (Foucault, 1997b, p. 263).
Foucault's (1978, 1985, 1997b, 1997c,
1997d, 1999, 2005) work on the technologies of
the self looked at how journal and letter writing,
verbal self-criticism, and confession were taken
up as reflexive and ethical strategies that contributed
to the constitution of subjects in classical
societies. However, his work set out to
explore the formation of men as subjects in classical
and premodern Western societies. Women
(as well as children, slaves, and others) were
explicitly excluded from the processes of subjectification
that would have made them free
and ethical subjects. In its implication that
"questions of moral self-regulation were not relevant
to women" (Grosz, 1994a, p. 159), feminists
might have been tempted to reject this
work as patriarchal or exclusionary. However, it
has been more productive for feminists to view
these gaps and omissions as invitations for feminist
interventions and reconfigurations. St. Pierre
(2004), for example, uses Foucault's work to
interrogate the category "older woman" in ethnographic
fieldwork in her home town in the rural
American south. She uses his theories on the care
of the self to examine how through their daily
lives the women she interviewed enact "a particular
aesthetics of existence in ethical relations
with oneself and others" (p. 333). The subject of
women, she theorized (of these women in this
place), is constituted in practice, realized in the
details of everyday interactions, through friendships
that are played out in intimate neighborhood
spaces and in each others' homes. These
private spaces act as "loopholes . . . that encourage
subversive citation and the disruption of the
fierce moral codes that aim to keep women in
their place . . . Christianity, patriarchy, racism and
. . . the `white southern woman's code'" (p. 342).
St. Pierre describes the practices she examines in
Foucauldian terms as representing "the mode of
subjection--the way in which one is invited to
become ethical . . . to have a beautiful existence"
and as manifesting in attention to detail and in a
particular "care for others" (p. 343). In poststructural
practice, morality is manifest in part through
these arts of existence and practices of the self.
From the perspective of Derridean deconstruction,
Bennington (2000) claims that
"ethics" is impossible. As a metaphysical concept--one
of those which has been put under
erasure by poststructuralism--ethics must be "a
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theme and object of deconstruction" rather than
something that can "simply be assumed or
affirmed" (p. 64). He warns against any illusion
that sharp-eyed deconstruction might deliver us
"into the clear light of ethical felicity and selfrighteousness"
(p. 64). Nevertheless, he argues
that "deconstructive thought will have specific
interventions to make in the traditional metaphysical
vocabulary of ethics, around concepts such as
responsibility, decision, law and duty" (p. 65).
The core of any system of ethics, in philosophy as
in the small southern U.S. town where St. Pierre
did her research, is located in relations to others.
Bennington differentiates between ethic and duty:
Simply following one's duty, looking up the
appropriate action in a book of laws or rules, as it
were, is anything but ethical--at best this is an
administration of right and duties, a bureaucracy
of ethics. In this sense an ethical act worthy of its
name is always inventive, not at all in expressing
the "subjective" freedom of the agent, but in
response and responsibility to the other" (p. 68).
Rather than poststructural thought having abandoned
ethical practice, Derrida's work locates it
within social relations:
The other has a radical prior claim on me, or even
allows `me' to exist as essentially responsible to
and for the other. I do not exist first, and then
encounter the other: rather the (always singular)
other calls me into being as always already
responsible for him. (Bennington, 2000, p. 69)
Feminist poststructuralists have also found
the work of Deleuze productive in reconceptualizing
questions of ethics within the social. Bray
and Colebrook (1998), for instance, argue that
appropriation of his work opens the possibility
for positive, active, and affirmative ethics with
the potential to vitalize feminism. Braidotti
(2002) describes the Deleuzean reconceptualization
of the self as
A relay-point for many sets of intensive intersections
and encounters with multiple others, a self
that "can envisage forms of resistance and political
agency that are multilayered and complex . . .
an empirical transcendental site of becoming . . .
[that] actively desires processes of metamorphosis
of the self, society and its modes of cultural
representation . . . [that] results in a radical new
ethics of enfleshed, sustainable subjects. (p. 75)
The work of reconfiguring ethics in which
feminist poststructuralists are interested destabilizes
both the subject--who is always already
caught up in networks of responsibility to
others--and the social world. It rejects essentialist
categories and foundational assumptions
and attends to the constant work of becoming
that an ethical life entails. As Elam (1994)
points out, this can seem paralyzing because
"the words that the patriarchy have left us
for this are anarchy and chaos" (p. 109). For
feminist ethics, poststructuralism offers the
possibility of a "groundless solidarity" with
the "possibility of a community which is not
grounded in the truth of a presocial identity" but
in a contingent, precarious, and vital solidarity
that "forms the basis, although not the foundation,
for political action and ethical responsibility"
(p. 108). Thus, in community, we "try to do
the right thing, here, now, where we are . . . in
our pragmatic context" with no "transcendental
alibi to save us" (p. 108).
Male Theory/Patriarchal Theory
Some feminists claim that postmodern and
poststructural theories are patriarchal white
male theories (e.g., Brodribb, 1992). The influence
of male theorists on contemporary feminist
theory is clear throughout this chapter but we
have argued that this is irrelevant to the uses to
which feminists might put their ideas to critique
gender. Critiques of the canonical "French feminists"
also assert the primacy of sex in policing
what can be considered feminist. Kristeva,
Irigaray, and Cixous--packaged in the early
1980s for English readers as the triumvirate of
feminist poststructural theorists (Marks & de
Coutrivon, 1981; Moi, 1985)--rely primarily on
male theorists--Lacan, Foucault, and Derrida.
Cixous (1981) insists that the poetic practices of
écriture féminine are as available to men as they
are to women. Kristeva's (1984) avant-garde
poetic writers are all men. But, as happens with
poststructural thought, categories slip about,
become unstable, canons tend to topple over. The
French feminists are not feminists, according to
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Moses's (1998) history of French feminism;
nor are they French--but "Belgian, Algerian
and Bulgarian-born" as Rosi Braidotti (2000,
p. 720) reminds us, nor are they necessarily
poststructuralist. Moses and Braidotti each produce
a careful rereading of their emergence and
commodification for the English-speaking
world illustrating the use to which feminists
might put their skepticism of familiar stories
and the attention to detail that characterizes
genealogical work. They draw attention to the
discursive regimes of consumption and circulation
within which knowledge and power are
produced and commodified in postmodern
times. Retracing histories for cracks and ruptures
is important work but what matters most is
not the origin of an idea but the use to which
it might be put and the resonance it has with
your own work. Whether we turn to Foucault,
Deleuze, or Butler--or any other theorist--is
determined by the moment and creative potential
that we find in a concept and that provokes
us to think differently about our data.
Feminists have taken Derrida to task for his
appropriation of figures from women's bodies to
use as deconstructive tools, such as "hymen" and
"invagination." Derrida has been characterized as
misogynistic and overtly antifeminist. Yet
Derrida has claimed that feminism that remains
committed to Enlightenment ideals and positivist
paradigms is implicated in phallogocentric
thought: "Feminism . . . is the operation through
which a woman desires to be like a man, like a
dogmatic philosopher, demanding truth, science,
objectivity; that is to say, with all masculine illusions"
(Derrida, 1978, cited in Elam, 1994, pp.
15­16). Elam carefully evaluates the charges and
finds that, despite cautions, there are diverse
points of intersection between them, indeed
"there is a sense in which feminism already `is'
deconstruction, and deconstruction already `is'
feminism" (p. 19). Nevertheless, it is true that "if
Derrida is positioned `as a woman'in philosophy,
he is still not a woman" (p. 64). The question
then, for feminists, is to what extent does this
matter? Derrida might even be applauded for his
figurative use of the materiality of the body to
achieve the displacements and deferral of meanings
that characterize textual deconstruction. In
"Circumfession" (Bennington & Derrida, 1993)
and "A silkworm of one's own" (Cixous &
Derrida, 2001), he uses male circumcision as the
figure that defers and displaces the integrity of
the text and the speaking self. The sex of the
figure is less important than the work it might be
put to displace the truth claims in a text.
Nevertheless, it is relevant here to note that the
poststructural theories and theorists we have discussed
in this chapter also tend to be "Western"
and "white." Although categories of cultural and
geographic location are themselves complex and
contradictory, feminist postcolonial theory
emerges in part from the work of important poststructuralist
thinkers (e.g., Spivak) and is discussed
in detail elsewhere in this volume.
Lack of Relevance
Poststructural feminists have been accused
of irrelevance, as though relevance is some pure
state of moral value. Some critics claim that
these ivory tower feminists--spinning language
renowned more for its opacity than for its
sense--rarely leave "their blissful surroundings,
and as time passes their sayings become
increasingly irrelevant to the majority of
women" (Tong, 1998, p. 207). Of course, such
criticisms are predicated on the existence of
a cohesive "majority of women" who can be
neatly positioned in opposition to the academic
feminists. Who are these women and who
decides what is relevant or irrelevant, or what
these terms mean, what discursive regimes of
truth they re-present?
A similar criticism of poststructuralist feminist
theory in terms of irrelevance or relevance
harnesses the Other women of the world to construct
a sort of moral hierarchy. The final paragraph
of a recent book on feminist methodology
states that "for many women around the world,
caught up in struggles to survive, raise children,
cope with poverty, natural disasters, corrupt
regimes or varieties of social exclusion,
resources for thinking are irrelevant luxuries"
(Ramazanoglu, 2002, p. 169). The work of postcolonial
feminist theorists (e.g., Alexander &
Mohanty, Trinh, Spivak) alerts us to the dangers
of assuming that any women in the privileged
West might be able to speak for these "many
women" who are placed as abject others to those
of us who peddle the "irrelevant luxuries"
of critical thought. Although Ramazanoglu's
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criticism rests on an unsustainable essentialist
view of all non-white and non-Western women
as too poor and too busy to theorize, it implies
the more important critique that these theories
are grounded in assumptions of the white, nonindigenous
subject as the unmarked subject of
feminism. Postcolonial feminists are ambivalent
about the effects of postmodern thought for
women other than those in the hegemonic West.
Although liberal humanist feminism simultaneously
appropriated and marginalized women of
color, postmodernism generates "epistemological
confusions regarding the interconnections
between location, identity and the construction
of knowledge," according to Jacqui Alexander
and Chandra Mohanty (1997, p. xvii). They
explain how global realignments and fluid
movements of capital in postmodernity have led
to "processes of recolonization" (1997, p. xvii)
that have been particularly destructive in the
lives of women.5
The charge of irrelevance is implied in the
metaphor of the "garden of intellectual delights"
as a retreat from the world for feminist poststructuralists
(Tong, 1998, p. 207). Dense language,
replete with language games and
strategies intended to destabilize and displace
meaning, is an irritant to many critics. Calls for
"clarity" assume that transparency is possible
and that simplicity is desirable (Lather, 1996;
St. Pierre, 2000b). Lather (1996) claims that
clarity forecloses thought:
Rather than resolution, our task is to live out the
ambivalent limits of research as we move towards
something more productive of an enabling violation
of its disciplining effects. Inhabiting the
practices of its rearticulation, "citing, twisting,
queering" to use Judith Butler's words (1993,
p. 237), we occupy the very space opened up by
the (im)possibilities of ethnographic representation.
(p. 541)
Thus, poststructural work entails a politics
and practice of writing differently. It is through
writing differently that thinking differently
becomes possible. Neither comes prior to the
other but they are simultaneously realized
through the folds and hinges of language.
Poststructural theory can be "of use in a time
when the old stories will not do" (Lather, 1996,
p. 541). Familiar research practices in the social
sciences, such as ethnographic research, become
sites of doubt rather than certainty (Britzman,
2000; St. Pierre, 1997a, 1997b, 1997c).
Another criticism locates poststructural
thought as an exclusionary mechanism within the
power/knowledge regimes of the academy.
Ramazanoglu (2002) claims that these paradigms
are intellectually elitist and disadvantage many
feminists: "The difficulties and abstractions of so
much postmodern thought have coincided with a
period of competitive career pressures in higher
education so that only certain kinds of feminist
thought are deemed worthy of respect, funding
or promotion" (p. 166). She describes scenarios
where "terms such as `empiricist,' `essentialist,'
`foundationalist' . . . are fashionable weapons for
trashing traces of modern thinking . . . (Pity the
unsuspecting empiricist caught in a circle of contemptuous
postmodern thinkers--and vice
versa)" (p. 166). Apart from its implicit denigration
of the intellectual capacities and flexibilities
of women, and its assumptions that different feminisms
must necessarily be combative, this claim
rests on a rhetorical strategy of generalization
that is difficult to uphold within deconstructive
paradigms. It assumes a monolithic, even conspiratorial,
new feminist oppression that disregards
the specificity and capillary operations of
power/knowledge. Poststructural analysis would
seek out the particularities and specificities of
social sites--faculty meetings, interview panels,
corridor conversations--to interrogate and to
challenge the local practices shaping academic
feminism.
Erasure of Body and Materiality
Another criticism of philosophically oriented
theoretical frameworks is that they valorize discourse
at the expense of the carnal body. How
can postmodern or poststructural theory account
for the corporeal enfleshed events that impact
on women's lives? How can theory help to
explain menstruation, birth, rape, breast cancer
and how these are lived in the flesh of women's
bodies? Does this theoretical work inevitably
entail a degree of "somatophobia" (Grosz,
1994a; Kirby, 1991) that is unhelpful for feminists?
Although for Foucault (1984) "the body is
the inscribed surface of events" (p. 83), it is
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feminist poststructuralists who have brought the
corporeal sexed body into poststructural theory.
This can be a risky strategy for poststructural
work in that sex, gender, and desire are put under
erasure and troubled by deconstructive work
(e.g., Butler, 1990, 2004b). Feminists who attend
to the body can risk slippage into an essentialism
that would be disavowed within poststructuralist
paradigms. Yet some of the most sophisticated
and subtle poststructuralist work has come from
feminists rethinking the body theoretically within
poststructural philosophical paradigms. For
example, Susan Bordo (1993) uses Foucauldian
language and ideas to refine her readings of
women's bodies in Western culture. Moira
Gatens (1991) deconstructs the sex/gender distinction
of liberal feminism that served to separate
biological and social dimensions of women's
lives, and centers a corporeal feminism in her
feminist approach to ethics (Gatens, 1996). Vicki
Kirby (1991, 1997) interrogates essentialist
thinking and further disrupts the nature/culture
binary as she theorizes the material body at the
(as the) scene of writing. Elizabeth Grosz, in particular,
has been influential in her theorizing of a
corporeal feminism.
Grosz (1994a) argues that there has been "a
conceptual blind spot" in both philosophy and
feminism and argues that feminism is "complicit
in the misogyny that characterizes Western
reason" (p. 3) in uncritically adopting philosophical
assumptions about the implicitly masculine
rational body of Enlightenment thought.
The female body is abject and expelled from
(male) normativity as "unruly, disruptive, in
need of direction and judgement" (p. 3). Grosz'
project is feminist because that universal body
has, she suggests, always functioned as "a
veiled representation and projection of a masculine
which takes itself as the unquestioned
norm, the ideal representative without any idea
of the violence that this representational positioning
does to its others" (p. 188). Although
Grosz admits that her program is a preliminary
one and does not neatly provide "materials
directly useful for women's self-representation"
outside of patriarchy (p. 188), she does begin the
hard work of rethinking what has been impossible
to think in ways that other feminists have
been able to work with. Prior to this work, feminist
philosophy had generally been "uninterested
in or unconvinced about the relevance of
refocusing on bodies in accounts of subjectivity"
(p. vii). Her work on inverting the
inside/outside dichotomy to characterize female
bodies as corporeal flows and intensities began
to move poststructural feminists beyond this
impasse. Elspeth Probyn (1991, 1993, 2000) has
also brought the lived body to the foreground to
explore the nexus of body and theory. She
describes how reconfiguring her (anorexic)
body with theory made "postmodernists nervous"
and "feminists angry" (Probyn, 1991,
p. 113). Vicki Kirby (1997) describes how poststructural
feminists, despite their disavowals of
binary thought, have inadvertently reified the
central Cartesian binary:
Perhaps commerce with the body is considered
risky business because the split between mind and
body, the border across which interpretations of
the body might be negotiated, just cannot be
secured. This fear of being discovered unwittingly
behind enemy lines, caught in the suffocating
embrace of that carnal envelope, menaces all conciliatory
efforts. (p. 73)
Indeed, it has been argued that the body is
only glimpsed, in much feminist poststructural
work, just as it is disappearing from view
(Somerville, 2004). Nevertheless, we suggest
that it is here that much potential exists for feminism.
The works of Grosz and others enable a
theoretical engagement with the messiness of
the lived corporeal body. The fleshy body is neither
separate from nor inferior to a discursive
poststructural body, but is the inscribed surface
of discourse, the material effect of discursive
practices made manifest in the flesh. The body
for Grosz (1995) is "concrete, material, animate
organization of flesh, organs, nerves, and skeletal
structure, which are given a unity, cohesiveness,
and form through the psychical and social
inscription of the body's surface" (p. 104).
Rather than absented through poststructural
theory, the body might be privileged by it. Bell
(1994), for example, claims that the body is the
"only irreducible in Foucault's theorizing . . .
simultaneously a biophysical given and a
cultural construct" (p. 12). Bodies are also critical
to Judith Butler's theorizing because:
"Discourses do actually live in bodies. They
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lodge in bodies; bodies in fact carry discourses
as part of their own lifeblood" (Butler, cited in
Meijer & Prins, 1998, p. 282). Butler (1997a)
rejects the binary opposition between discursive
construction and the lived body in part by
emphasizing the "fundamentally dramatic"; the
body is not
Merely matter but a continual and incessant materializing
of possibilities. One is not simply a body,
but, in some very key sense, one does one's body
and indeed, one does one's body differently from
one's contemporaries and from one's embodied
predecessors and successors as well. (p. 404)
Despite claims that these paradigms elide the
body, work that foregrounds and simultaneously
deconstructs the body as the foundation for
knowledge can be found in much critical and
poststructurally oriented feminist research. The
work of Haug et al. (1987), using memories of
lived experience to unpack how the female body
is materially inscribed by discourses of appropriate
feminine deportment, demonstrates how
critical theory can be held to account by female
corporeality. In our own adaptations of this
work (Davies, 1994; Davies & Gannon, 2005,
2006; Gannon, 2001, 2004c), we generate texts
of the body to interrupt poststructural theory
with our own flesh and expand theory in directions
that are amenable to feminist readings of
bodies and the world. Lather and Smithies
(1997) conduct poststructurally inflected ethnographic
research in a community of women who
are HIV positive producing a textual mosaic that
is concerned to retain "the weight and density"
of the women and to resist the allure of the
"comfort text" by using a range of disruptive
textual strategies to trouble any easy reading
(Lather, 2001, p. 212). Sedgwick (1999) takes
what she calls an "adventure in applied deconstruction"
in writing of her own experience with
breast cancer within a poststructural analytical
framework. Acknowledging the astonishment
that some readers might have at the possibility
"that deconstruction can offer critical resources
of thought for survival under duress," Sedgwick
responds that she encountered breast cancer "as
someone who needed all the cognitive skills she
could get," including "some good and relevant
ones from my deconstructive training" (p. 156).
At the ethnographic coalface, many feminist
researchers working with girls and women use
corporeal feminism and poststructural approaches
to female bodies to think their data differently. In
turn, their work, theoretically informed and politically
oriented, feeds back into theory. A sampling
of recent feminist empirical research shows how
poststructural research interrogates the fleshy
subjectivities of girls and women. Working with
preteens, Gonick (2003) analyzes the discourses
and practices of feminine sexuality, embodiment,
desire, and relationship to others through
which these girls imaginatively and corporeally
construct femininity. Pillow (2000, 2004) takes
up the body as a "deconstructive practice" in
her study of pregnant teenager mothers and
schooling. In a study of Danish university
students, Sndergaard (2002) examines enactments
of desire in the "signs on the body"
inscribed by sexual and romantic storylines.
Malson (1998) deconstructs the ideal of
"the thin woman" underpinning anorexia nervosa.
Each of these empirical investigations
thinks back into theory from enfleshed female
bodies.
Feminist theoretical and empirical work must
engage with sexed bodies in one way or another.
We are inclined to agree with Grosz (1994a) that
corporeal interventions into theory--across the
mind and body split--will bring theory toward
new and productive horizons because, after all,
"bodies have all the explanatory power of
minds" (p. vii) and vice versa. We might go further
in deconstructing this split by claiming that
"theory-making is a labor of the body" (Zita,
1998, p. 204). Feminist appropriations of critical,
postmodern, and poststructural theories
foreground the body and make use of it as the
volatile, unstable, and inventive ground for theorizing
around the discursive production of
sexed corporeal subjects.
CONCLUSION
In closing, we would like to reiterate the strengths
of feminist postmodern, poststructuralist, and
critical discourses. Rather than conceive of
this work as nihilistic, excessively relativist,
amoral, or apolitical, we hold that poststructuralist
thought opens us into new futures. When
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dominant discourses that hold us in place and
lock us into sedimented ways of thinking and
being are dislodged, then we might shift into
other--more hopeful and often more radical--
modes of thought and existence. How we might
relate this work to feminist research in other paradigms
is an ongoing and irresolvable question.
We might argue, in contrast to the implications of
the critics, that feminism and critical, postmodern,
and poststructural paradigms have much in
common to begin with in that they share a
"hermeneutics of suspicion" (Braidotti, 2002, p.
68). Feminist work has been characterized as celebrating
interdisciplinarity; indeed, it is likely
that a "disciplinary approach to feminist theorizing
is untenable" (Clough, 1994, p. 168). Beasley
(1999) describes contemporary feminism "as a
kind of empty shell into which may be poured
any number of different concerns, details and
explanations" (p. 28). In the academy, despite the
academic institutionalization of women's studies--"contemporary
feminist scholarship is not
[engaged] in mass group conversation but is,
rather, engaged with respective disciplines, or
bodies of theory, that are themselves rarely
engaged with each other" (Brown, 2001, p. 33).
We suggest, as savvy bricoleurs, that disciplinary
borders should be treated by feminists with some
disdain. They are not pure states or bodies of
knowledge but, as archaeological analysis would
demonstrate, they are inventions of the commodification
of knowledge and of thought emanating
from the Enlightenment. It is in the interstices
between disciplines, as between discourses, that
new thought might fruitfully be generated.
Additionally, we would stress that we do not
intend to locate critical, postmodern, and poststructural
paradigms as successor regimes within
a history of feminist ideas. Rather than abandoning
discourses emanating from liberal or radical
feminisms--those allied with humanist Enlightenment
ideals--we would hold onto what we can
of the "ruins" of such thought. There are many
discourses of feminism in circulation and we
need, at times, to deploy them all. We cannot
abandon discourses, like humanism, that have
shaped how we know and live in the world
(Foucault, 1997a; St. Pierre, 2000a). Rather than
rejecting them we need to become adept at mobilizing
these discourses alongside and within a
poststructural postpositivist skepticism, aiming to
become able to think different, even contradictory,
thoughts simultaneously. Taking up the
poststructuralist dissolution of the subject as our
project, what feminist poststructuralism allows
for is a "new" subject of feminism who is "not
Woman as the complementary and specular other
of man but rather a complex and multi-layered
embodied subject who has taken her distance
from the institution of femininity . . . a subject-inprocess"
(Braidotti, 2002, p. 11).
How might we conclude this chapter on postmodern,
poststructural, and critical theories and
their sometimes uneasy relation to feminism?
Early in this chapter, we introduced the figure
of the woman weaver, engaged in the constant
and simultaneous processes of weaving and
unweaving herself in the discursive texts of the
wor(l)d. This figure recalls Penelope, the wife
of Odysseus, from Greek mythology, who for 20
years, wove in daylight and unpicked her work
by moonlight.6
Through this tactic she was able
to fend off the suitors who would replace the
missing king in her bed and on the throne.
Resolution of her work--completion of the
cloth she wove--was stalled, deferred, postponed,
undone. In the endless iteration of her
daily and nightly work, she came to it each time
anew. Each time, no doubt, it changed. She
changed. The threads would fade and thin and
twist, as did her fingers. One day the light would
draw to her attention a tiny part of the design
that might be better. Another day the particular
blue of the sky, the dark of clouds, or her own
longings, would provoke a subtle variation. The
themes of the work would change as time
passed, or would change in response to the company
she kept. There may have been as many
versions as there were days. Penelope is usually
read as the quintessential devoted wife; indeed,
her story is shaped by her responsibility to this
other, her husband. But she managed the estates
and the nation in his absence. She was trapped
in a patriarchal system, the wife whose only
likely option was a change in husbands, a
woman trapped in a tale told by a man. Not even
a central character. Yet she found the possibility
to make something her own, something new,
something that was not an answer, not freedom,
not escape, not truth, but a way to live in the
place and time where she found herself, a way
to live that had integrity, which was hers.
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NOTES
1. Or "neonmarxism" in Lather (1998, p. 487).
2. Butler's chapter "Contingent Foundations"
appears in both Butler and Scott (1992) and in
Benhabib et al. (1995). Butler's "For a Careful
Reading" appears only in the 1995 edition, along
with the essays by Fraser and Benhabib that we refer
to in this chapter.
3. The formulation "mo(ve)ments" brings together
"movement" and "moment" to stress that opportunities
for agency, for ways of moving into different discursive
frameworks, open and close in unexpected and transitory
spaces. We use "mo(ve)ment" also to signify the
simultaneity of memory and movement in the methodology
of collective biography through which we shift
analysis of lived experience from individual biography
toward collective readings of discursive regimes, and
through which we aim to dislodge habitual ways of
thinking (Davies & Gannon, 2006).
4. Hoffmann (2003) suggests that while in everyday
language morals and ethics are used interchangeably,
in philosophy they slightly differ:
moral is typically used to refer to specific, prescriptive
rules, principles or behaviours, whereas
"ethics" is used in a more general sense to
describe entire theories, codes and systems of
conduct, both prescriptive and descriptive. But
this distinction is not absolutely hard and fast, and
little turns on demarcating strictly between these
two words. (p. 104)
5. See, for example, The Globalised Woman
(Wichterich, 2000).
6. It also recalls and appropriates the trope of
weaving that Derrida uses in "A Silkworm of One's
Own" (Cixous & Derrida, 2001). The weaving he
talks of here is within a male ordered system of
Jewish law where the silk tallith, the men's prayer
shawl, is the text that he unravels or ravels. It references
also Barthes's (1989) view of text as "tissue"
where "lost in this tissue--this texture--the subject
unmakes himself, like a spider dissolving in the constructive
secretions of its web" (p. 64).
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715
ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS
Kum-Kum Bhavnani is Professor of Sociology
at the University of California at Santa Barbara
and chairs the program in Women Culture
and Development in Global and International
Studies. She has written books, articles, and
essays on several topics, including feminist
methodologies, women in prison and feminist
theory. She has also been studying the relationships
between and interconnected configurations
of "race"/ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and
class. She now conducts research on women in
the Third World where she, along with coauthors
Peter Chua, John Foran, Priya Kurian, and
Debashish Munshi, has been developing a new
approach to development studies--the women,
culture development paradigm. From that theoretical
frame, she has recently completed a 2006
documentary, The Shape of Water (www.theshapeofwatermovie.com),
which centers women
making change in Brazil, India, Jerusalem, and
Senegal.
Katherine Borland is Associate Professor of
Comparative Studies in the Humanities at Ohio
State University at Newark, where she teaches
Folklore, World Literature, and Post-Development
Theory. She has published articles in the
Radical History Review, the Journal of American
Folklore, and in several edited collections.
She has also published two ethnographically
grounded, book-length studies: Unmasking Class,
Gender and Sexuality in Nicaraguan Festival
(2006) and Creating Community: Hispanic
Migration to Southern Delaware (2001). She is
currently embarking on an ethnography of the salsa
scene in North Jersey. Outside the academy, she has
worked as a public folklorist and as director of a
nonprofit educational organization serving
inner-city youth.
Sharon Brisolara is a program evaluator, and
she founded and owns Evaluation Solutions, an
evaluation organization operating in Northern
California. Her areas of expertise include feminist
evaluation, participatory evaluation, qualitative
methodology, and mixed-method studies.
She is an active member of the American
Evaluation Association and of the Feminist
Evaluation Topical Interest Group (TIG), and she
is currently serving as the group's program chair.
She coedited Feminist Evaluation: Explorations
and Experiences: New Directions for Evaluation
(2002) with Dr. Denise Seigart and has written
and presented in various forums on feminist evaluation
and feminist theory. She received her
doctorate from Cornell University in program
evaluation and planning with concentrations in
women's studies and rural sociology.
Abigail Brooks is a PhD candidate in sociology
at Boston College. Her areas of interest include
feminist theory, sociology of gender, critical
gerontology and feminist age studies, sociology
of the body, science and technology studies,
and social theory. Her dissertation investigates
women's lived experiences and interpretations of
growing older against the contextual backdrop
of growing prevalence, acceptance, and approval
of cosmetic surgery. She recently published an
article titled "`Under the Knife and Proud of it:'
An Analysis of the Normalization of Cosmetic
Surgery" in the Journal of Critical Sociology.
Kathy Charmaz is Professor of Sociology and
Coordinator of the Faculty Writing Program at
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Sonoma State University, a program to assist
faculty in writing for publication. She has
written or coedited six books, including her
2006 volume, Constructing Grounded Theory:
A Practical Guide Through Qualitative Analysis
(Sage, London) and Good Days, Bad Days:
The Self in Chronic Illness and Time, which won
awards from the Pacific Sociological Association
and the Society for the Study of Symbolic
Interaction. She has also written numerous
papers on grounded theory methods as well as
on medical sociology and social psychology.
She serves as vice president of Alpha Kappa
Delta, the international honorary society for
sociology, and she has served as president of the
Pacific Sociological Association, vice president
of the Society for the Study of Symbolic
Interaction, editor of Symbolic Interaction, and
chair of the Medical Sociology Section of the
American Sociological Association.
Adele E. Clarke is Professor of Sociology and
Adjunct Professor of History of Health Sciences
at the University of California, San Francisco. Her
work centers on studies of science, technology,
and medicine (with special emphasis on medical
technologies and women's health) and qualitative
research methods. Her latest book is Situational
Analysis: Grounded Theory After the Postmodern
Turn (Sage, 2005). She is best known for her
study of the reproductive sciences in biology,
medicine, and agriculture, Disciplining Reproduction:
American Life Scientists and the "Problem
of Sex" (1998). She coedited Revisioning Women,
Health and Healing: Cultural, Feminist and
Technoscience Perspectives (1999) with Virginia
Oleson and anticipates her forthcoming book,
Biomedicalization: Technoscience and the
Transformation of Health and Illness in the U.S,
which she coedited with Janet Shim, Laura
Mamo, Jennifer Fosket, and Jennifer Fishman
(2006).
Elizabeth R. Cole is Associate Professor of
Women's Studies and Afro-American and
African Studies at the University of Michigan.
She coauthored Speaking of Abortion: Television
and Authority in the Lives of Women with Andrea
Press (1999). She and Joan Ostrove coedited an
issue of the Journal of Social Issues (Vol. 59,
No. 4, 2003) that focused on the psychological
meanings of social class in educational contexts.
She earned her BA from Boston University and
received her doctorate in psychology from the
University of Michigan. Her research focuses on
how individuals' sense of themselves as connected
to social groups (such as race, gender, or
social class) is related to how they understand
their social environments, issues of public concern
(such as abortion or affirmative action), and
their choices about political participation.
Judith A. Cook is a professor of psychiatry at
the University of Illinois at Chicago. She directs
the Center on Mental Health Services Research
and Policy, and her recent research explores the
lives of women with psychiatric disabilities and
those living with HIV/AIDS. She is also focusing
much of her research on the intersection of
gender, class, and race in health and human
services public policy.
Erzulie Coquillon holds a master's degree in
counseling psychology from Boston College
and a BA in history from Harvard College.
Bronwyn Davies is Professor and chair of the
Narrative Discourse and Pedagogy Research
Group at the University of Western Sydney. Her
publications include Poststructural Theory and
Classroom Practice (1994), (In)scribing Body
Landscape Relations (2000), A Body of Writing
(2000), Gender in Japanese Preschools: Frogs
and Snails and Feminist Tales in Japan (2004),
and she also published second editions of
Frogs and Snails and Feminist Tales (2003) and
Shards of Glass (2003). She coauthored the
chapter on "Feminism/Poststructuralism" in the
Sage Research Methods in the Social Sciences
(2005) with Susanne Gannon, and they also
coedited the book Doing Collective Biography
(2006).
Marjorie L. DeVault is Professor of Sociology
and a member of the Women's Studies Program
at Syracuse University. She has been learning
about institutional ethnography from Dorothy
Smith and others in the "IE network" since the
1980s, and she currently works with graduate
students on IE projects. Her research has
explored women's "invisible work" in families
and in the historically female field of dietetics
and nutrition education. Trained in the ChicagoSchool
fieldwork tradition and deeply influenced
by the feminism of the 1970s, she has
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written extensively on qualitative and feminist
methodologies. She also maintains an IE website
at http://faculty.maxwell.syr.edu/mdevault.
She is the author of Feeding the Family: The
Social Organization of Caring as Gendered
Work (1991) and Liberating Method: Feminism
and Social Research (1999).
Bonnie Thornton Dill is Professor and Chair of
the Women's Studies Department and Program
and Director of the Consortium on Race, Gender,
and Ethnicity at the University of Maryland.
Her research focuses on intersections of race,
class, and gender with an emphasis on African
American women and families and has been
reprinted in numerous collections and edited volumes.
Before coming to Maryland in 1991, she
was professor of sociology at the University of
Memphis, where she founded and directed the
Center for Research on Women. Under her leadership,
this organization gained national prominence
for outstanding work on the intersections
of race, class, and gender. Her more recent publications
include "Disparities in Latina Health: An
IntersectionalAnalysis" (with R. E. Zambrana) in
A. Schulz and L. Mullings, Gender, Race, Class
& Health (2006), "Between a Rock and a Hard
Place: Motherhood, Choice and Welfare in
the Rural South" (with T. Johnson), in Sharon
Harley et al. (Eds.), Sister Circle: Black Women
and Work (2002), and "Poverty in the Rural
U.S.: Implications for Children, Families and
Communities," in Judith Blau (Ed.), Blackwell
Companion to Sociology (2001). Her work has
also been published in journals, including Signs,
Feminist Studies, The Journal of Family History,
and The Journal of Comparative Family Studies,
and these articles are widely reprinted. She has
received several prestigious awards, including the
Distinguished Contributions to Teaching Award
and the Jessie Bernard Award for research in
gender studies. These were both given by the
American Sociological Association.
Michelle Fine, Distinguished Professor of
Social Psychology, Women's Studies and
Urban Education at the Graduate Center, City
University of New York (CUNY), has taught at
CUNY since 1990. Her recent publications
include Working Method: Social Research and
Social Injustice (2004, with L. Weis), Off White:
Essays on Race, Privilege and Contestation
(2004, with L. Weis, L. Powell Pruitt, &
A. Burns), Brown v. Board of Education (2004),
and Changing Minds: The Impact of College in
Prison (2001, with Kathy Boudin, Iris Bowen,
Judith Clark, Donna Hylton, Migdalia Martinez,
"Missy," Rosemarie Roberts, Pamela Smart,
Maria Torre, & Debora Upegui).
Mary Margaret Fonow is Professor and
Director of the Women and Gender Studies
Program at Arizona State University. Her
research areas include global unions, feminist
methodology, and social movements. She is the
author of Union Women: Forging Feminism in
the United Steelworkers of America (2003), and
she is currently writing a book about feminists'
roles within global union networks as advocates
for women's transnational labor rights.
Susanne Gannon lectures in the School of
Education at the University of Western Sydney.
She is a founding member of the Narrative
Discourse and Pedagogy Research Group. Her
research has examined writing practices through
feminist poststructural theory. She has published
studies on research methodology and feminist
approaches to embodiment and writing in a range
of journals, including Sex Education, Qualitative
Inquiry, Qualitative Studies in Education, and
Auto/Biography. She coauthored the chapter
on "Feminism/Poststructuralism" in the Sage
Research Methods in the Social Sciences (2005)
with Bronwyn Davies, and they also coedited the
book Doing Collective Biography (2006).
Glenda Gross is a Doctoral student in sociology
at Syracuse University. Her research interests
include feminist theory; qualitative methods
and feminist methodologies; race, class, gender,
and work; studies in the social organization
of knowledge; institutional ethnography; and
antiracist feminist pedagogies. Her work explores
the social organization of antiracist feminist
educators' work in U.S. colleges and universities.
She earned her MA in sociology, with
a certificate of advanced studies (CAS) in
women's studies.
Sandra Harding teaches Philosophy of Social
Science and Postcolonial and Feminist Studies at
University of California at Los Angeles. She has
written or edited 14 books and special issues of
journals that focus on feminist and postcolonial
About the Contributors­ˇ­717
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epistemology, methodology, and philosophy of
science. The Feminist Standpoint Theory Reader:
Intellectual and Political Controversies was published
in 2004 and Science and Social Inequality:
Feminist and Postcolonial Issues appeared in
April 2006. She coedited Signs: Journal of Women
in Culture and Society from 2000 to 2005 and she
is currently working on Women, Science, and
Modernity.
Mary Hawkesworth is Professor of Women's
and Gender Studies at Rutgers University. Her
teaching and research interests include feminist
theory, women and politics, contemporary
political philosophy, philosophy of science, and
social policy. Her major works include
Globalization and Feminist Activism (2006);
Feminist Inquiry: From Political Conviction to
Methodological Innovation (2006); Beyond
Oppression: Feminist Theory and Political
Strategy (1990); Theoretical Issues in Policy
Analysis (1988); and The Encyclopedia of
Government and Politics (1992; 2nd revised
edition, 2003). She is currently the editor of
Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society.
Catherine Hundleby is Assistant Professor in
Philosophy and cross-appointed with Women's
Studies at the University of Windsor, Canada.
She focuses on feminist naturalism and feminist
standpoint theory, with special attention to the
relationships between cognitive and sociopolitical
values. Her papers on these topics have
appeared in Hypatia, Social Epistemology, and
Women & Politics. She received her doctorate in
philosophy from the University of Western
Ontario, and her research focuses on feminist
epistemology from an analytical perspective.
Toby Epstein Jayaratne is currently a research
psychologist at the University of Michigan
and directs the Beliefs and Understanding of
Genetics Project, a study exploring Americans'
perceptions about possible genetic influences on
perceived gender, class, and race differences
and on sexual orientation. Her academic interests
focus on the use of genetic explanations to
justify and support various social and political
ideologies. She has written and presented several
papers on the topic of feminist methodology.
She received her PhD in developmental
psychology from the University of Michigan.
Debra Renee Kaufman is the former founder
and Director of Women's Studies, a Matthews
Distinguished Professor, and Professor of
Sociology at Northeastern University. Among
her award nominated and selected books are
Achievement and Women (coauthored with
Barbara Richardson, honorable mention, C. W.
Mills Award), Rachel's Daughters: Newly
Orthodox Jewish Women (nominated for three
awards), and an invited guest-edited edition of
Contemporary Jewry titled Women and the
Holocaust. Her commitment to feminist scholarship
is evident in her published articles and
chapters on post-Holocaust Jewish identity politics
and her forthcoming books From the
Protocols of Zion to Holocaust Denial: Challenging
the Media, the Law and the Academy
(coedited with G. Herman, J. Ross, and D. Phillips)
and Post Holocaust Identity and an Ever-Dying
People: Contemporary Narratives. She is currently
researching intergenerational ties among
adult Jewish daughters and their mothers.
Hyun Sook Kim is Chair and Professor of
Sociology at Wheaton College in Massachusetts.
She teaches a range of courses in sociology,
women's studies, and Asian/American studies.
Her research and publications have focused on
postcolonial and transnational feminist studies
of nation/state violence, gender, ethnic conflicts,
nationalism, and history writing. She
recently coedited a special issue (April, 2005) of
Gender & Society that calls for retheorization of
the linkages between "Gender-Sexuality-StateNation"
and the development of transnational
feminist sociology.
Sally L. Kitch is Professor and Vice Chair in
the Department of Women's Studies at Ohio
State University, where she was Chair from
1992 to 2000. Her research focuses on the
mechanisms by which women in various historical
and cultural contexts have exerted pressure
on gendered expectations and developed their
own strategies of resistance. She has published
numerous articles and three books of interdisciplinary
scholarship analyzing gender, feminism,
and utopianism: Chaste Liberation: Celibacy
and Female Cultural Status; This Strange
Society of Women: Reading the Lives and
Letters of the Woman's Commonwealth; and
Higher Ground: From Utopianism to Realism in
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American Feminist Thought and Theory. Her
articles and book chapters on interdisciplinary
feminist scholarship include PhD Programs
and the Research Mission of Women's Studies:
The Case for Interdisciplinarity (2003) and
Disciplined by Disciplines? The Need for an
Interdisciplinary Research Mission in/and for
Women's Studies (1998, coauthor Judith Allen).
Both articles appeared in Feminist Studies.
Noretta Koertge is Professor Emeritus in
History & Philosophy of Science at Indiana
University and has written extensively on the
relationship between scientific research and
social values. Her coauthored and edited books
include Professing Feminism (1994, 2003),
A House Built on Sand (1998), Scrutinizing
Feminist Epistemology (2003), and Scientific
Values and Civic Virtues (2005). After working
in chemistry, she studied philosophy of science
in London during the time when Popper,
Lakatos, and Feyerabend were very influential.
Her earlier publications address problems in scientific
methodology and social science with an
emphasis on the conceptual issues that arise in
the study of homosexuality. Although she has
taught in Turkey, England, and Canada, she
has spent most of her academic life at Indiana
University. After receiving tenure, she published
two novels that deal with the lesbian experience
in pre- and post-Stonewall America: Who Was
That Masked Woman? (1981) and Valley of the
Amazons (1984). She is the current editor of The
New Dictionary of Scientific Biography.
Julie Konik is now a Scholar in Residence at
Antioch College, where she is continuing her
research on social identity and well-being, with a
special focus on sexual minorities. Her recent
research examines the role of individual differences
in the development of sexual identity and
the lived experiences of sexual minorities in a
variety of contexts. She completed PhD in psychology
and women's studies from the University
of Michigan, where her dissertation focused on
the negative effects of sexual harassment and heterosexist
harassment in the workplace.
Rachel Kulick is currently a doctoral candidate
in sociology at Brandeis University. Her areas of
interest include feminist theory and methodology,
visual sociology, media democracy, and
globalization. Her current research examines
the ways in which feminist artists aesthetically
confront injustices and asymmetries of power
across national, gendered, and racial borders.
She holds a master's degree in education from
Harvard Graduate School of Education.
Helen E. Longino is Professor of Philosophy at
Stanford University. Her teaching and research
interests are in philosophy of science, social
epistemology, and feminist philosophy. She is
the author of Science as Social Knowledge
(1990), The Fate of Knowledge (2001), and
many articles in the philosophy of science, feminist
philosophy, and epistemology. Her many
coedited volumes include Feminism and Science
(with Evelyn Fox Keller, 1996) and Osiris 12:
Women, Gender and Science (with Sally Gregory
Kohlstedt, 1997), and the forthcoming Scientific
Pluralism (Vol. 19) of the Minnesota Studies in
Philosophy of Science (with Stephen Kellert &
C. Kenneth Waters, 2006). She is currently completing
a book-length comparative analysis of
four approaches in the sciences of human
behavior, focusing on research on aggression
and research on sexual orientation. This analysis
includes both an examination of the logical
structures and interrelations of these approaches
and study of their social and cultural reception
and uptake.
M. Brinton Lykes is Professor of CommunityCultural
Psychology at the Lynch School of
Education and Associate Director of the Center
for Human Rights and International Justice at
Boston College. She is an activist scholar whose
research explores the interstices of indigenous
cultural beliefs and practices and those of
Western psychology, toward collaborating in the
design and development of community-based
programs that respond to the effects of war in
contexts of transition and transformation and in
the development of training programs and postgraduate
diplomas for psychosocial trauma
workers. She has published extensively about
this work in journals and edited volumes and
is also a community activist, cofounder, and
participant in many local, national, and international
NGOs. These organizations include the
Boston Women's Fund, Women's Rights
International, and the Ignacio Martín-Baró Fund
for Mental Health and Human Rights.
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Sarah Maddison is Lecturer in the School of
Politics and International Relations at the
University of New South Wales. She is currently
working on the focused audits for women and
sexual minorities for the Democratic Audit of
Australia (http://democratic.audit.anu.edu.au)
and is engaged in ongoing research on Australian
Indigenous activism. She has been active in the
Australian Women's Movement since 1995, and
she has served as a national media spokesperson
for the Women's Electoral Lobby since 1999. She
has published many works in the areas of young
women and feminist activism, social movements,
nongovernment organizations, and democracy.
Her first book, Activist Wisdom: Practical
Knowledge and Creative Tension in Social
Movements (2006, with Sean Scalmer), addresses
important questions concerning the ways that
activists manage tension and conflict in social
movements. Her forthcoming book, Silencing
Dissent: How the Howard Government Is Eroding
Democracy in Australia (coedited with Clive
Hamilton) is due in early 2007.
Cris Mayo is Associate Professor in the
Department of Educational Policy Studies and
the Gender and Women's Studies Program at
University of Illinois at Urbana, Champaign.
Her work includes Disputing the Subject of Sex:
Sexuality and Public School Controversies
(2004) as well as articles in the areas of philosophy
of education, sexuality studies, gender
studies, and multicultural theory.
Amy E. McLaughlin is Associate Director of
the Consortium on Race, Gender and Ethnicity
(CRGE) and works to further the organization's
agenda of theoretical, methodological, and pedagogical
insights into intersectionality. Her research
agenda uses an intersectional lens to examine the
symbolic and physical role that violence plays in
the lives of women. She also pursues an interest
in processes of institutional change and is currently
working on a life history analysis of faculty
members who engage in advocacy for social
justice on university campuses.
Jennifer Bickham Mendez is Associate
Professor of Sociology at the College of William
and Mary. She wrote From the Revolution to the
Maquiladoras: Gender, Labor and Globalization
in Nicaragua (2005) and presents an ethnographic
case study of a Nicaraguan working women's
organization to demonstrate how globalization
affects grassroots advocacy for social justice,
particularly as it relates to the situation of
women maquila workers. She has published
articles in Social Problems, Organization,
Mobilization, Identities, and other journals. Her
current work focuses on Latino/a migration to
Williamsburg, Virginia, and explores migrants'
experiences of exclusion and incorporation in
this new immigration receiving site.
Maria Mies is former Professor of Sociology of
the Faculty of Applied Social Sciences at the
University of Applied Social Sciences, Cologne.
She worked for 5 years as a lecturer of German at
the Goethe Institute in Pune, India. On her return,
she wrote her PhD dissertation on "Indian
Women and Patriarchy" (1972). Her study of
Indian patriarchy helped her discover German
patriarchy, and this encouraged her to become
active in the international women's movement
and other various social movements. She always
combined theoretical work with social activism.
In 1979, she initiated the program "Women and
Development" at the Institute of Social Studies in
The Hague, The Netherlands. It is the first of its
kind in the world. She is the author of several
works that include Women: The Last Colony,
Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale,
Ecofeminism (with V. Shiva) and The Subsistence
Perspective.
Kathi Miner-Rubino is currently Assistant
Professor of Psychology at Western Kentucky
University. She teaches courses in social psychology,
psychology of women, and research methods.
She has published several papers in the areas
of gender, social class, and psychological wellbeing.
Her most recent publications focus on vicarious
exposure to the mistreatment (i.e., incivility
and harassment) of women in work settings. She
received her PhD in psychology and women's
studies from the University of Michigan.
Pamela Moss is Professor in the Studies in
Policy and Practice Program, Faculty of Human
and Social Development, University of Victoria,
Canada. Her research coalesces around themes
of power and body in different contexts--
feminist methodology, constructs of contested
illness, and activist practices. She draws on
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feminism and poststructural thinking to make
sense of women's experiences of changing environments
and uses autobiographical writing
analytically in her empirical and theoretical
work. She is also active in feminist politics on
issues of chronic illness and invisible or unapparent
disabilities. She edited Placing Autobiography
in Geography (2001) and Feminist
Geography in Practice (2002). She also coauthored
Women, Body, Illness: Space and Identity
in the Everyday Lives of Women With Chronic
Illness (2003) with Isabel Dyck.
Nancy A. Naples is Professor of Sociology and
Women's Studies at the University of Connecticut
where she teaches courses on feminist theory;
feminist methodology; sexual citizenship; gender,
politics and the state; and women's activism and
globalization. She is the author of Feminism and
Method: Ethnography, Discourse Analysis, and
Feminist Research (2003) and Grassroots
Warriors: Activist Mothering, Community Work,
and the War on Poverty (1998). She is also the
editor of Community Activism and Feminist
Politics: Organizing Across Race, Class, and
Gender (1998). She is coeditor of Women's
Activism and Globalization: Linking Local
Struggles with Transnational Politics and Teaching
Feminist Activism. Her next book, Restructuring
the Heartland: Racialization and the Social
Regulation of Citizenship, focuses on a long-term
ethnographic study of economic and social
restructuring in two small towns in Iowa. She is
currently working on a comparative intersectional
analysis of sexual citizenship and immigration
policies.
Angel David Nieves is Assistant Professor in
the School of Architecture, Planning, and
Preservation at the University of Maryland,
College Park. He is an affiliate faculty member
in the Departments of American Studies,
Women's Studies, African American Studies,
and Anthropology. He is also an affiliate
member of the Center for Heritage Resource
Studies. He completed his doctoral work in
architectural history and Africana studies at
Cornell University in 2001. His book manuscript,
"We Gave Our Hearts and Lives To It:"
African American Women Reformers and
Nation-Building in the Post-Reconstruction
South, 1877-1968, is currently being revised for
publication. His scholarly work and activism
critically engages with issues of heritage preservation,
gender, and nationalism at the intersections
of race and the built environment in the
Global South.
Daphne Patai is Professor of Brazilian Literature
and Adjunct Professor of Comparative Literature
at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She
spent 10 years in the Women's Studies Program
before deciding to leave it for reasons that are
explained in her essay in this volume. She is
the author and editor of 11 books, including
Heterophobia: Sexual Harassment and the Future
of Feminism (1998). Her 1994 critique of academic
feminism, written with Noretta Koertge,
was recently reissued in a new and expanded
edition as Professing Feminism: Education and
Indoctrination in Women's Studies (2003). Her
latest book, coedited with Will H. Corral, is
Theory's Empire: An Anthology of Dissent (2005).
Many of her essays on academic foibles have
appeared in The Chronicle of Higher Education.
A recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim
Foundation, the National Endowment for the
Humanities, and the National Humanities Center
(all for feminist projects), she has come to appreciate
that education and politics are not the same
thing.
Deborah Piatelli is an activist and doctoral candidate
in sociology at Boston College. She is
currently writing her dissertation on the challenges
contemporary mobilizations for peace
and social justice face as they work across race,
class, and gender. She works with the Global
Justice Project at Boston College (an undergraduate
student-led program) and a local community
group of the United for Justice With Peace
coalition based in Boston. Taking a feminist,
participatory approach, she collaborated with
activists over a 2-year period and uncovered
how hidden cultures of privilege were preventing
collective work across difference. Through
participatory discussions with activists, this
work has opened up a space for activists to
reflect and exchange dialogue to potentially
transform their beliefs, practices, and identities.
Wanda S. Pillow is Associate Professor in the
Department of Educational Policy Studies at the
University of Illinois at Urbana, Champaign.
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She is author of Unfit Subjects: Educational
Policy and the Teen Mother (2004) and coeditor
of Working the Ruins: Feminist Poststructural
Theory and Methods in Education (2000).
Judith Preissle (formerly Preissle Goetz) is the
2001 Distinguished Aderhold Professor in the
Qualitative Research Program at the College of
Education, University of Georgia (UGA), and she
is an affiliated faculty member of UGA's Institute
for Women's Studies. Although she began her
career teaching middle grades in 1965, Preissle
has worked at UGA since 1975 and teaches,
researches, and writes in educational anthropology,
qualitative research, gender studies, and
ethics. She founded the qualitative research program
at UGA that now offers a graduate certificate
program. She is the coauthor of Ethnography
and Qualitative Design in Educational Research
(1984, 1993), which was translated into Spanish
in 1988, and coeditor of The Handbook of
Qualitative Research in Education (1992). Her
most recent book, coauthored with Xue Lan
Rong, is Educating Immigrant Students (1998).
She and her spouse, a computer network manager
at UGA, have two miniature schnauzers and two
Chinese pugs. All five share her interest in philosophical
quandaries.
Diane Reay is Professor of Education at
Cambridge University. She is a feminist sociologist
working in the area of education but is also
interested in broader issues of the relationship
between the self and society, the affective and
the material. Her priority has been to engage in
research with a strong social justice agenda that
addresses social inequalities of all kinds. She is
particularly interested in developing theorizations
of social class and the ways in which it is
mediated by gender and ethnicity, and she has
worked extensively with Pierre Bourdieu's conceptual
framework. Recent research includes
understanding white-middle-class identities in
multiethnic urban spaces and the experiences of
working class students in higher education. Her
most recent book (with S. Ball & M. David) is
Degrees of Choice: Social Class, Race and
Gender in Higher Education (2005).
Shulamit Reinharz is the Jacob Potofsky
Professor of Sociology at Brandeis University.
She directed the Brandeis University Women's
Studies Program in the 1990s and founded the
Hadassah-Brandeis Institute (HBI) in 1997 to
develop fresh ways of thinking about Jews and
gender worldwide. In 2001, she founded the
Women's Studies Research Center (WSRC)
where research, art, and activism converge. The
WSRC is housed in a 10,000 square feet facility,
which she designed and for which she raised all
the funds. Both the HBI and the WSRC are
members of the National Council for Research
on Women. Reinharz is the author/editor of 10
books, including On Becoming a Social
Scientist (1979/1984), Qualitative Gerontology
(1987), Feminist Methods in Social Research
(1992), and American Jewish Women and
the Zionist Enterprise (2005). She is also the
chief editor of the Brandeis Series on Jewish
Women.
Laurel Richardson is Professor Emeritus of
Sociology at the Ohio State University. She specializes
in the sociology of knowledge, gender,
and qualitative methods. She has been honored
with visiting lectureships in many countries and
has published over 100 articles--many of them
demonstrating alternative writing formats,
including poetic representations. She is the
coeditor of Feminist Frontiers and author of
seven other books, including The New Other
Woman (translated into seven languages), and
the Cooley award winning book Fields of
Play: Constructing an Academic Life. Her most
recent book, Travels With Ernest: Crossing the
Literary/Sociological Divide (2004), was coauthored
with novelist Ernest Lockridge and models
a new writing format that preserves the
individual voice, breaks down hierarchies, and
demonstrates feminist communication strategies
across gender and disciplines. Her current
research expands her interest in alternative reading/writing
practices through an ethnographic
and textual study of Altered Books.
Judith Roof is Professor of English and Film
Studies at Michigan State University. She is
the author of A Lure of Knowledge: Lesbian
Sexuality and Theory, Come as You Are:
Narrative and Sexuality, All About Thelma and
Eve: Sidekicks and Third Wheels, and the forthcoming
The Poetics of DNA. She is coeditor
(with Robyn Wiegman) of Who Can Speak?
Authority and Critical Identity.
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Sue V. Rosser has served as Dean of the Ivan
Allen College of Liberal Arts at Georgia Tech
since 1999, where she is also Professor of
Public Policy and of History, Technology, and
Society. The author of nine books, Rosser has
also written more than 120 refereed journal
articles on issues of women and feminism in
science, technology, and health. Her most recent
book is The Science Glass Ceiling: Academic
Women Scientists and Their Struggle to Succeed
(2004).
Denise Seigart is Professor in the Health
Sciences Department at Mansfield University,
Pennsylvania, and is currently serving there as
Interim Associate Provost. She has been an active
member of the American Evaluation Association
and has served as Chair and Program Chair of
the Feminist Issues in Evaluation Topical Interest
Group. In collaboration with Dr. Sharon
Brisolara, she edited Feminist Evaluation: Explorations
and Experiences: New Directions for
Evaluation, a critical work regarding Feminist
Evaluation, which was published in December,
2002. She received her PhD in human service
studies/program evaluation from Cornell University
in 1999.
Dorothy E. Smith is Professor Emeritus at the
University of Toronto and Adjunct Professor at
the University of Victoria. Her published books
include Women Look at Psychiatry: I'm Not Mad,
I'm Angry (coedited with Sara David, 1975);
Feminism and Marxism: A Place to Begin, A
Way to Go (1977); El Mundo Silenciado de las
Mujeres (1985); The Everyday World as
Problematic: A Feminist Sociology (1987); The
Conceptual Practices of Power: A Feminist
Sociology of Knowledge (1990); Texts, Facts, and
Femininity: Exploring the Relations of Ruling
(1990); Eine Soziologie Für Frauen (translated
and edited by Frigga Haug, 1998); Writing the
Social: Critique, Theory and Investigations
(1999); Mothering for Schooling (coauthored
with Alison Griffith, 2005); Institutional
Ethnography: A Sociology for People (2005); and
an edited collection of essays by institutional
ethnographers, Institutional Ethnography as
Practice (2006).
Liz Stanley is Professor of Sociology at the
University of Edinburgh. Her main research and
writing interests focus on the questions of
methodology and epistemology, and many
projects were produced with Sue Wise.
Substantively, her research has been on historical
topics for the last two decades, in particular,
regarding South Africa. Relevant books include
Imperialism, Labour and the New Woman:
Olive Schreiner's Social Theory (2002), and
Mourning Becomes . . . Post/Memory, Commemoration
& the Concentration Camps of the South
African War 1899-1902 (2006).
Abigail J. Stewart is Sandra Schwarz Tangri
Professor of Psychology and Women's Studies at
the University of Michigan and director of
the UM ADVANCE project, supported by the
NSF ADVANCE program on Institutional
Transformation. She was director of the Women's
Studies Program (1989­1995) and the Institute
for Research on Women and Gender (1995­
2002), and she is a former Associate Dean in the
College of Literature Science and the Arts at the
University of Michigan (2002­2004). She has
published many scholarly articles and several
books that focus on the psychology of women's
lives, personalities, and adaptations to personal
and social changes. Her current research combines
qualitative and quantitative methods and
includes comparative analyses of longitudinal
studies of educated women's lives and personalities;
a collaborative study of race, gender, and
generation in the graduates of a Midwest high
school; and research and interventions on gender,
science, and technology with adolescent girls,
undergraduate students, and faculty.
Lynn Weber is Director of the Women's Studies
Program and Professor of Sociology at the
University of South Carolina. Cofounder of the
Center for Research on Women at the University
of Memphis, her research and teaching has
explored the intersections of race, class, gender,
and sexuality for over 20 years. Since the publication
of Understanding Race, Class, Gender, and
Sexuality: A Conceptual Framework (2001), her
work has focused on bringing the insights of intersectional
scholarship to the problem of persistent
social inequalities in health. Her recent publications
include "Intersectionality and Women's
Health: Charting a Path to Eliminating Health
Disparities," in Advances in Gender Research,
and "Reconstructing the Landscape of Health
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Disparities Research: Promoting Dialogue and
Collaboration Between the Feminist Intersectional
and Positivist Biomedical Traditions" in Race,
Class, Gender and Health, edited by Amy Schulz
and Leith Mullings. She is also coauthor of The
American Perception of Class.
Sue Wise is Professor of Social Justice at
Lancaster University, the United Kingdom. She is
interested in all aspects of social justice and
teaches and writes on social divisions and social
diversity. The oppression and exploitation of
children is a particular interest. She has written
many books and articles on feminist epistemology
and ontology with Liz Stanley. One of their
most noted collaborations is Breaking Out Again:
Feminist Ontology & Epistemology (1993).
Diane L. Wolf is Professor of Sociology at the
University of California, Davis. She edited
Feminist Dilemmas in Fieldwork (1996) and
authored Factory Daughters (1992) and Beyond
Anne Frank: Hidden Children, Family Reconstruction
and the State in Post-war Holland
(2006, in press). With Judith Gerson, she
coedited Sociology Confronts the Holocaust:
Identities, Memories and Diasporas (2007, in
press). She also studies the children of Filipino
and Vietnamese immigrants in California.
Alison Wylie is Professor of Philosophy at the
University of Washington. She works on epistemic
questions raised by archaeological practice
and feminist research in the social sciences. Her
analyses of evidential reasoning and normative
issues in archaeology are collected in Thinking
From Things: Essays in the Philosophy of
Archaeology (2002), and appear in Embedding
Ethics (2005) and Ethics Issues in Archaeology
(2000). She coedited Feminist Science Studies
(2004), and her essays on the philosophical implications
of feminist research practices and feminist
critiques of science appear in Science and Other
Cultures (2003), The Difference Feminism Has
Made (2001), Primate Encounters (2000), and
Changing Methods (1995). She has also been
active on equity issues as organizer of "Women,
Work and the Academy" (2005: www.barnard.
edu/bcrw/womenandwork) and as contributing
coeditor of Breaking Anonymity: The Chilly
Climate for Women Faculty (1995). She is currently
working on a monograph, "Standpoint
Matters," in Feminist Philosophy of Science.
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