SOURCE: “Postmodernity, Narratives, Sexual Politics: Reflections on Jean-François Lyotard,” in The Centennial Review, Vol. XXXII, No. 4, Fall, 1988, pp. 336-50.

In the following essay, Leo explores Lyotard's postmodern critique of modernist doctrine.

I

Beginning in the 1960s a group of skeptical (and mainly gay) theorists emerged in Europe (mainly France) whose common stance has been the decolonization of just about everything administered by a white, straight, occidental patriarchy.¹ Figures such as Roland Barthes, Jean Baudrillard, Hélène Cixous, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Guy Hocquenghem, Julia Kristeva, Jean-François Lyotard, and Monique Wittig are just some of the thinkers who have changed irrevocably how we describe, understand, and participate in social formations. Their commentaries on sexuality, psychoanalysis, signs and codes, the pervasive power of the state and of institutions (“discourses”), economic exchange, and mass communications are today the core of European university curricula and the interpretive frameworks (and...