From an intellectual and erudite point of view, feminism post modernism is actually two different movements that have evolved as significant movements of this era. In the war against the great ideas of civilization and modernity, both have shown their similarities. Postmodernism and feminism are frequently mentioned as though their unification has been a certainty. However, the postmodernism characteristics often make people question “is it postmodernism or feminism?”
Feminism Post Modernism: The Skepticism of Feminist toward Postmodernity
Postmodernism and feminism are not simply abstract categories. They constitute, analyze, inform, and help to identify the practices to be defined. As of today’s categories, feminism post modernism projects ways of understanding the future and reassessing the past.
Let us start by taking into consideration one of the more detailed narratives of what to describe as a moment of postmodernism provided by Jane Flax, a feminist theorist. In Thinking Fragments: Psychoanalysis, Feminism and Postmodernism in the Contemporary West, Flax identifies the position of postmodernism as a subscription of the theories of the Death of Man, Death of History, and Death of Metaphysics.
The perspective from the feminist and postmodernist regarding the postmodernist theories are as followed:
- Feminism post modernism are generally two different movements
In the “Death of Man”, postmodernists would like to destroy all the essentialist understandings of a human being. Flax describes that Man is not a transcendental being but a mere artifact of culture, history, or linguistics.
Meanwhile, the feminists argue that gender, and other practices that lead to its existence, is one of the significant backgrounds that is to locate an ostensibly impartial and universal topic of reason. Western explanation stands as the reasoning of one subject, which blinds us to the presence of the foreignness and the difference that falls into its definitions.
However, some argue that feminism post modernism is a branch of feminism in which assume that the modernist view of feminism emphasizes gender disparities among women and wen while rejecting the disparities within individual gender.
- Death of History Theory
In the theory of the “Death of History”, postmodernist defines history as something more than just a justification or preconditions for Man’s fiction. This notion also highly supports the idea of progress—a significant part of the history of the Man. Again, feminism post modernism is two different movements, although there has been a term of post-modern feminist; thus, the feminist counterpoint to the notion of the “Death of History” as the “Engendering of Narrative.” If the main subject of Western tradition was always the male head of the family, white, affluent, and Christian, subsequently, History, which previously narrated has always been “His Story.”
Moreover, all the philosophies about history that have populated even since the Western Enlightenment have also forced the narratives of history into homogeneity, linearity, and unity, with the results that different groups are already removed from heterogeneity and fragmentation.
Although feminism post modernism is a new strand, many feminists still oppose the idea of this notion. They argue until today, women did not have their own history, just like Hegel’s perspective that Africa had no history, and thus, the Africans were those without history.
- Death of Metaphysics Theory
In the notion of the “Death of Metaphysics”, postmodernists argue that at least after Plato, Western metaphysics was under the influence of the existence of metaphysics. For many postmodernists, this is a search for the Actual or Real concept that’s desired by the majority of Western philosophers. While feminism post modernism is now considered to be one single movement, the postmodernists in the past are on a quest for a Real thing, which is to conquer the universe but also embracing it in an elusive system. However, they believe in the absolute scheme, which represents a single unified being further than history.
Meanwhile, those who reject the idea of feminism post modernism oppose the notion of the “Death of Metaphysics” as “The Skepticism of the Feminist Towards the Claims of Otherworldly Reason.” If the theoretical or practical designs, as well as actions of such a subject, carry the marks of a scenario from which they arise, the subject of ideology is unavoidably intertwined with the interest of knowledge.
For the majority of feminists, the most significant interest of knowledge-driving in the ideas of Habermas, a matrix of truth, disciplinary, and power in the ideas of Foucault, is the relations of gender with the social, political, economic, and metaphoric constitution of gender disparities between men and women.
While feminism post modernism is constituted of two individual movements and has an affinity, the three notions above can be viewed to make the theoretical approaches, if not antithetical, at least vastly different.
Despite all of those skepticisms, those who claim themselves as post-modern feminists believe that gender is mostly formed out of a discourse that is adopted by individuals over time. Therefore, gender is not natural or even innate. Rather, gender is something that is created by how people talk, create pictures, and expose themselves to others.
Another key point of this branch of feminism is the argument that patriarchy works in a different way because of the social features of women. Consequently, the nature of patriarchy is different for a low-class black woman to a white woman from a middle-class family. This perspective is part of the idea of intersectionality, which aims at exploring the relationships between social, cultural, and biological categories on several and sometimes concurrent levels.
That is a structure that helps society to classify how inequality presents on many different levels. Given the sheer variety inside women’s activist idea, it likely could be suitable to utilize the term feminisms. At any rate, we ought to be mindful so as to maintain a strategic distance from speculations while thinking about the philosophy of women’s liberation. It is additionally easily proven wrong how much women’s activists represent women from many different backgrounds.
The American scholarly—Camille Paglia—is an especially powerful rival of woman’s rights. Paglia accepts that women’s liberation has created a feeling of victimhood that doesn’t matter to any women. From a comparative point, Christina Sommers adds that the idea of feminism post modernism regularly holds an unreasonable aggression toward the opposite gender. She accordingly guarantees that contemporary women’s liberation is plainly revolutionary and thusly detached from the existences of ordinary women.