The Postmodern Quandrary

Postmodernism, Feminism, and the Academy

Susan Bordo’s critique and, to a lesser extent, her mitigating defense of postmodernism and its implication on feminist theory brings to mind some reflections on the nature of academic writing and where it is headed.

To begin with, Bordo critiques what she calls “cultural plastic” – how the intoxication with freedom from bodily determination meant an ideology where the materiality and history of the body could be overcome by choice. Self determination and limitless choice meant that the body, amidst everything else, was freed from “history, social location, or even individual biography” (251). This euphoria of freedom over fixity was one which celebrated putting on a different self everyday and reveled in the notion of “play” and “choice” when it comes to all beauty rituals – even those as problematic as black women who straighten their hair or East Asian women who go for double eyelid surgery. Extending this to academia, Bordo laments an atmosphere where particularity reigns and a fear of generality means marshalling a critique against cultural hegemony (e.g. the notion of a white feminine beauty as the inescapable Althusserian “ideology” which insidiously dictates all beauty standards) is seen as totalitarian and essentializing.

I am both sympathetic to and yet wary of Bordo’s take on the postmodern. Firstly, let me explain why I agree with Bordo to some extent. As an amateur scholar trying to figure out my mode of writing, I have found it challenging and at times suffocating to avoid a polemical mode of writing that was so evocative of pieces from the 70’s. In tip-toeing around ruptures, fissures, gaps, heterogeneous agency, polysemous identities, the fear of “speaking for” or “speaking to” has created a stutter which resulted in oftentimes not being to speak much of anything at all. I remember the most empowering literature I read as an undergrad which drew me to pursue graduate school, were those written by Edward Said, Toni Morrison, and yes, Laura Mulvey. Their politics had not yet undergone the infinitesimal hair-splitting and self-conscious qualifying/justification/reservedness which has beleaguered postmodern writing. Their polemics though clearly essentialist, resonated with the certainty of “speaking for” a marginal group, whether the Oriental/colonized or the female. The experience of reading these kinds of writing for me then was akin to surfacing from under a murky pond, and it was very enabling. I understood why Miss World winners always looked a certain way, and that different and problematic social standards were applied to girls, and that cultural institutions were open to question and deconstruction. I think academia loses a lot of its potential for critique and empowerment when such “against the grain”-type readings, which necessarily “risk essentialism” (to quote Diana Fuss) in order to rally its politics, become out of vogue. Until there are no more stakes in representation, until all power hierarchies are made even, would we then be in a position to move completely past modernist resistances towards the postmodern.

On the other hand, I still think there is still much to be recuperated from the postmodern in the academe and that Bordo’s take on the postmodern might not be the fairest, nor the most enabling one. To be fair to Bordo, she does acknowledge poststructuralism’s contributions to how we see the body not as a unitary, physiological reality, but as a cultural, historical and plural construct – 1. through Foucauldian notions of power as enacted upon and through the body, 2. through Derridean notions of the body and gender as that whose meaning is mediated by language. She also complements how Butler is able to denaturalize gender categories through her study of gender performativity and subversive bodily acts. These points I thoroughly agree with. However, Bordo on page 292 goes on to argue that Butler’s theories are useful only in abstraction and that, like most postmodern texts, Butler’s texts “become signifiers without context,” exhibiting “a characteristically postmodern inclination to emphasize and celebrate resistance, the creative agency of individuals, and the instabilities of current power-relations” (294). I suppose what Bordo is saying is: so gender is performative and fluid etc. etc., but “so what”? How is this discourse constructive in a world where women still experience the pressures of conformity to a patriarchal, anglicized culture?

I am sympathetic with Bordo, but I sense that this so-called postmodern “plastic discourse” is more enabling than Bordo gives it credit for. I think there is a difference between simply putting on blue contact lenses, and being self-reflexive about the ideologies one is buying into as one puts on blue contact lenses. Bordo might find this a postmodern cop-out but yet one cannot discredit the oft mentioned notion of personal female pleasures involved in having one’s eyes look a certain way, or arranging one’s hair in a particular fashion. If the personal is political, then not only the arrangement of the body but also the alignment of one’s pleasures must be legitimated. Furthermore, I find Butler’s argument enabling because it provides the possibility for one to play with and reconsider one’s “gender performance”. Gender is no longer physiologically prescriptive but something more open to reinterpretation, at least in our minds, if not in society at large. This is in itself, no matter how abstract and divorced from material/historical reality, is enabling.


One Last Note

There is no answer to this quandrary and I find myself wavering between these positions – the postmodern stutter has certainly come into play. Which is why I appreciated the writing of bell hooks in Black Looks. To write the way she did in 1999 requires conviction (as well as a well publicized academic career). Even though she never calls on an essentialized “Black female identity”, she nevertheless does not disregard a material, historical experience of black femininity which is still ongoing and still experienced everyday in ways which need to be addressed and spoken about.

It is disappointing therefore to have stumbled across this review of the book on Amazon. A reviewer for Black Looks, a David S. Burt, writes:

“I must say, Bell Hooks's ideas and opinions are right on the money. She mentions issues such as black male masculinity, feminism, and racism and breaks them down very well. She's not the average traditional black feminist. She's not afraid to talk bad about white folks (like Madonna) and she's brave enough to use the word "white supremacy"; not in a militant way, but more reserved. It's easy to tell she's a liberal, but she's not restricted to traditional left-wing philosophy because of her strong Afro-centric view-points. This is a must read for all Black people, especially Black women who hardly have any intellectual role-model to look up to.”

What an infuriating review! Nevermind how Burt conceives of the “average traditional black feminist”, and lets not even get started at his prescriptive notion that Black women should read hooks lest they descend into waywardness due to a lack of “any intellectual role-model(s) to look up to.” The notion that hooks is an acceptable read because of the perception that her criticisms are in any way “diluted” or less trenchant, was what I found the most troubling because this was not at all how I read her work. I thought it was incendiary because it was so nuanced and yet bold. I appreciate how she calls on the collective in order to challenge representations of black men and women (though her writing sometimes lacks historical evidence), but also does not essentialize this "collective". Perhaps then, we need more writers in this postmodern academic environment able to write both polemically and also with a consideration for postmodern particularities.