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rejoicing in ‘the death of the subject’ for ‘if woman is a fi ction . . . then the
very issue of women’s oppression would appear to be obsolete and feminism
itself would have no reason to exist’ (de Lauretis, ‘Upping’ 83). Feminism
is said to be pulled in two opposing directions: in order to be effective as an
emancipatory and political movement designed to increase women’s access
to equality in male-dominated cultures, it supposedly needs to rely on an
essentialist defi nition of woman.35 At the same time, feminism cannot deny
the importance of anti-foundationalist theories that dismiss (or decentre) the
concept of the autonomous subject. Thus, at the moment when ‘postmodernism
is forging its identity through articulating the exhaustion of the existential
belief in self-presence and self-fulfi lment and through the dispersal of the
universal subject of liberalism’, feminism is ostensibly engaged in assembling
its cultural identity in what appears to be the opposite way (Waugh, Feminine
Fictions 6). According to this logic, the postmodern notion of the ‘subject in
process’ cannot be embraced whole-heartedly by feminism as this implies
the loss of political agency and action. As Linda Nicholson asks, ‘does not
the adoption of postmodernism really entail the destruction of feminism,
since does not feminism itself depend on a relatively unifi ed notion of the
social subject “woman”, a notion postmodernism would attack?’ (Nicholson,
‘Introduction’ 7).36
Postfeminism – interpreted in this academic context as the intersection
of postmodernism/multiculturalism and feminism – is the battlefi eld on
which these debates are fought out, as it attempts to negotiate between the
destabilisation of the notion of a feminist self and the historic mobilisation
of a politically engaged feminist we. There is a signifi cant conceptual
overlap between postmodern feminism and postfeminism, and the latter
clearly participates in the discourse of postmodernism as it discredits and
eschews the ideas of discursive homogeneity and a unifi ed subjectivity. It
understands that postmodernism’s fracturing of the universal subject pertains
to feminism’s own identity, and it rejects the concept of the essential
and coherent sovereign self in favour of a selfhood that is contradictory and
disjunctive. Postfeminism thus embraces a complexity of vision and gives
vent to the multivalent, inharmonious and confl icting voices of contemporary
women, including the ‘other’ voices of feminists themselves. The postfeminist
movement insists that feminism has to be viewed pluralistically,
and in this way, it ‘establish[es] a dynamic and vigorous area of intellectual
debate, shaping the issues and intellectual climate that has characterized
the move from modernity to postmodernity in the contemporary world’
(Brooks 210).
The shift to the ‘post’ – for example, in postfeminism and postmodernism
– has been discussed in terms of a nascent ‘post-theoretical’ movement that
Genz, S., y Brabon, B., Postfeminism, cultural texts and theories, Edinburgh University Press,
Edinburgh, 2009.