‘Postmodernism’ is used to name at least three things of interest to the critical study of men and masculinities: (1) a new global context of contention in the wake of the 1960s (often distinguished as ‘postmodernity’); (2) the writings of a set of predominantly French philosophers of the political Left who came to prominence in connection with the events of the 1960s and 1970s (often distinguished as ‘poststructuralism’); and (3) a problematic position within feminist debate that emerged during the 1980s and became dominant during the 1990s (under the name ‘postmodernist feminism’). Conflict over gender and sexuality, in feminism, gay liberation and antifeminism, is one of the defining features of postmodernity. Post-structuralist philosophies have proven valuable in rethinking the modern and premodern, including their use of gender. ‘Men’s studies’ itself is based, in part, in the rise and institutionalisation of postmodernist feminism.
While these three things can be distinguished, discussion of ‘postmodernism’ commonly elides their differences. One of the French philosophers (sense 2) played a key role in promoting the interpretation of the post-1960s period as ‘postmodern’ (sense 1), while the feminist position (sense 3) drew explicitly on arguments from that philosopher and the other ‘poststructuralists’ (sense 2). More generally, what holds the three together is the claim that a prevailing set of distinctions is no longer valid (or, at least, not in the way those distinctions are usually understood). What permits their distinction is differences in which distinctions are challenged, by whom and how.
Metanarratives and the two modernities
A’post-’ modernism or ‘post-’ modernity implies a relationship to something called ‘modernity’ or ‘modernism’. One can think of ‘modernity’ as the political economy and ‘modernism’ as the dominant cultural framework of the period 1848 to 1968. (These dates—marking two periods of revolutionary uprisings across the modern world-system—should be taken as symbols, rather than as hard and fast.) During this period, the main axis of contention was between liberalism and socialism, representing two solutions to the problem of’class’.
Today, after (‘post’) modernity, the differences between these two seem less important. There has been a proliferation of new struggles around crisscrossing axes of oppression. In this new context, both ‘modernist’ parties face a host of attacks together—sometimes both being decried as ‘secularist’ or ‘socialist’, sometimes as ‘neocolonialist’, ‘patriarchal’, ‘state capitalist’ or ‘anthropocentric’. Postmodern contention is often called ‘cultural politics’. In it the distinctions between ‘the political’, ‘the economic’, ‘the social’, ‘the cultural’ and even ‘the natural’, have increasingly broken down, taking with them familiar distinctions between ‘the public’ and ‘the private’, between ‘facts’ and ‘values’. The nation-state, the individual and the revolutionary subject have been displaced in favour of the global, the local and problems of ‘identity’ and ‘difference’.
Interpretation of these developments in terms of ‘postmodernism’ began in the early 1970s with the efforts of such critics as Ihab Hassan (literature), Robert Venturi (architecture) and Daniel Bell (sociology). But critical categories can be said to ‘arrive’ when controversy about them explodes. In the case of postmodernism, this explosion can be dated to Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition (1979, English 1984) and to Habermas’s 1980 response, originally titled ‘Modernity versus postmodernity’ and later re-published as ‘Modernity—an incomplete project’. Lyotard defined postmodernism as ‘incredulity towards metanarratives’ (Lyotard 1984: xxiv), and this has served as its most common definition ever since.
A’narrative’ is just a story, and stories are the traditional way of laying claim to legitimacy (truth, justice). By a ‘metanarrative’, however, Lyotard meant a legitimacy claim in a discourse (science) that specifically denied the validity of recourse to stories (hence, ‘meta’, meaning ‘beyond’). Modern metanarratives are most familiar as stories of progress—the progressive ‘modernisation’ and ‘development’ of our culture, knowledge, politics, economy and morals. ‘Progress’ was appealed to equally by the US/NATO and the USSR/Warsaw Pact, liberalism and Marxism. Whatever differences they had, both sides took themselves to be justified by both science and the promise of freedom and fulfilment, to be progressively achieved under the guidance of technocrats.
Narratives of progress take it for granted that technology, capital accumulation and technocratic administration go along naturally with liberation and fulfilment. It is this assumption that has lost credibility, hence postmodern ‘incredulity’ (disbelief). Even in modernist authors one now fmds a split between these two sets of objectives, these two modernities. Habermas distinguishes administrativeeconomic ‘societal modernisation’ from antiauthoritarian ‘cultural modernity’ just as Lyotard distinguishes the ‘speculative’ from the ‘humanist’ narratives of legitimation. These different formulations matter. Habermas defends modernism in the name of its anti-authoritarian currents, while Lyotard promotes the postmodern ‘search for instabilities’ on the grounds that both of modernity’s narratives are authoritarian. But such differences are arguably less important than recognition of the split. For the point is that, under modernism, these two objectives were presumed to go together, while today this unity can no longer be presumed.
Language, power and the threat of ‘relativism’
This leads to one of the most characteristic difficulties of postmodern discourse: language becomes a problem. Consider, as an example, the meanings of key words like ‘man’ and ‘woman’. If we reject what they have been used to mean, or take such meanings as arbitrary, how are we to dispose ourselves to them? Should we allow that ‘woman’ is dependent on ‘man’, and reject the category, perhaps promoting ‘womyn’ or ‘lesbian’ instead? Or, is the goal a ‘positive category of women’ (Frye)? What, if anything, would ‘femininity’ mean in either case? Is ‘man’ defmed by oppression, whether of ‘woman’ or otherwise? What could it mean to accuse gay men of’effeminacy’? Can one speak of a ‘gay masculinity’, and how would it relate to the ‘real masculinity’ of ‘real men’? One could go on.
The problems of language are the special purview of ‘poststructuralist’ philosophies (taken to include such authors as Foucault, Derrida, Kristeva, Deleuze, Irigaray and Lacan, among numerous others). Speaking generally, what a word means is not something merely given, neutral or uncontroversial. Despite modernist orthodoxy, ‘reality’ and ‘truth’ will not tell us what categories we ‘ought’ to use. Instead, words are ‘essentially contested’ (Gallie): they emerge from social practice and embody social choices That a choice is ‘social’ does not imply that it is universal or unanimous, much less that it is fixed once and for all. Precisely because it is a choice, different choices are always possible, with different implications. Social choice is an active and ongoing process, a matter of politics.
One consequence of this is that it matters what collectivity is at issue when a word is being defmed or debated. Within a given collectivity, a word may mean very different—even opposite—things to what it means in other collectivities, including the predominant ones. Perhaps the most glaring example of this is the inversion of the meaning of ‘bad’ successfully brought about by young black men in North America in the late 1980s. If someone said of something, ‘Oooh…that’s bad,’ an outside observer would be reduced to asking, ‘Is that “bad” as in bad, or “bad” as in good?’
This recognition of the contingency, contestability and non-universality of language gives rise to the characteristic charge that postmodernism is nothing but relativism (scepticism, nihilism, cynicism, irrationalism, etc.). Supposedly, for postmodernists ‘anything goes’. They have no way to distinguish between right and wrong, so all things, no matter how horrific, must be permissible and—poof—here come the Nazis and the death camps (as exemplars of ultimate evil). This shows the significance of the modern framework to modernists. Either their preferred distinctions are accepted or the world dissolves into Hobbes’ hypothetical ‘war of all against all’—despite the fact that Nazism and death camps, ‘total war’ and Weapons of Mass Destruction are products of modernism.
Sadly, many ‘introductions’, and other books about postmodernism, treat postmodernism exclusively in this manner. While such a move actually demonstrates the postmodern point (‘postmodernism’ is itself a contested term), readers new to the literature should be wary of such introductions. Keep in mind that the charge of ‘relativism’ means only ‘does not treat my preferred distinctions as the only possible ones, or in the manner in which I prefer them treated’ and is not terribly helpful to the student.
Feminism, gender and postmodernism
Feminism was postmodern before the term. Feminist theorists’ efforts to articulate ‘the problem that has no name’ (sexism, misogyny, patriarchy) and to work out the terms of their relation to Marxism played a key role in shaping postmodern discourse. Indeed, the idea of ‘postmodernity’ specifically cites feminism in its reading of a ‘crisis’ of modernity. Despite this, ‘postmodernism’ has been a controversial and polemical word in feminist debate. This is owing to the emergence of a self-described ‘postmodernist feminism’ in the 1980s.
Postmodernist feminism can be seen as a product of three earlier critiques:
1 a critique of institutionalised feminism in the US by feminists of colour, embodied particularly in the book This Bridge CdledMyBock (1981);
2 a critique of feminist theories growing out of the Anglo-American ‘analytic’ philosophical tradition by feminist theorists working within the ‘Continental’ (European) phenomenological philosophical tradition, embodied first in the volume New French Feminisms (1980) and later especially associated with Judith Butler; and,
3 an all-out attack on radical feminism by some socialist feminists, most notably Alice Echols and the other contributors to the volume Pkasure and Danger (1984).
The politics of these three critiques are very different. For feminists, the first is presumptively just. It can be rebutted, but the burden of proof lies on the criticised. The second is presumptively indifferent. While such differences of philosophical vocabulary make a difference, there is no reason why it must be zfeminist difference. The third, however, is a specifically feminist controversy. Given these different politics, there is no reason why the three critiques need be taken as one, nor are they always. However, the ‘postmodernist feminist’ position is precisely about eliding their differences, in effect using the presumptive justice of the first to sell the indifferent second and the controversial third.
The controversy over this third critique came to be known as the ‘sex wars’. Fought over the politics of lesbianism and the appropriate feminist approach to heterosexuality, gay men’s culture and movements, pornography, prostitution, sadomasochism, fetishism, body mutilation and transsexualism, these ‘wars’ coincided with the anti-feminist backlash. The anti-radical feminists in these debates (not exclusively socialist, but by no means everyone associated with the other two critiques) claimed to be ‘sex-positive’, and accused radical feminists of practising an ‘essentialist’ ‘identity politics’ and ‘cultural feminism’ that suppressed ‘difference’. This is where ‘postmodernism’ entered in.
Stated briefly, the critique of ‘essentialism’ is that there is no way to define a word without leaving something out. Taken from the poststructuralist critique of metaphysics, anti-radical feminists used it to argue that radical feminism offered a ‘white, middleclass’ analysis of ‘women’ that succumbed to biological determinism. While calling, uncontroversially, for more detailed studies of and by women in different social locations (i.e. women of different races, classes, sexualities, (dis)abilities, nationalities, etc.), they also argued that the radical feminist project of building a movement around women’s oppression as women had to be abandoned, since this supposedly got in the way of building movements against women’s oppression as workers, or as people of colour, or what have you. Their project was institutionalised, in part, by a move away from women’s studies to gay and lesbian and/or gender studies, and by the emergence of queer theory and so-called ‘third wave feminism’.
This has had direct consequences for the critical study of men, starting with the fact that the study of men as men has been a crucial part of this project (predictably, once again decentring women). It is now commonly considered proper to study ‘masculinities’, a differentiated field of people and practices marked as ‘male’ in differing ways, variously privileged and oppressed, rather than to study ‘masculinity’, an axis of domination. This has meant, in particular, an increased attention to ‘hybrid’ or ‘border’ categories, like intersexuality and so-called ‘male lesbians’ and ‘female masculinity’. While these developments have done wonders to promote ‘men’s studies’, why masculinity/masculinities should be an ‘either/or’ choice has not been well answered.
‘Postmodernism’ continues to incite controversy. In that respect, it is worth keeping in mind that ‘category’ comes from the ancient Greek word for prosecuting someone in a court of law. Nonetheless, for all who see the limits and presumptions of modernity as a problem, ‘postmodernism’ is at least suggestive of possibilities—a presentiment of a future still in formation.
References and further reading
Bell, D. and Klein, R. (eds) (1996) Radically Speaking, North Melbourne: Spinifex.
Benhabib, S., Fraser, N. and Cornell, D. (1995) Feminist Contentions, London: Routledge.
Braidotti, R. (1994) Nomadic Subjects, New York: Columbia University Press.
Butler, J. (1990) Gender Trouble, London: Routledge.
Butler, J. and Scott, J. (eds) (1992) Feminists Theorize the Political, London: Routledge.
Drolet, M. (ed.) (2003) The Postmodernism Reader, London: Routledge.
Habermas, J. [1985] (1990) The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, Cambridge, MA: MIT.
Lyotard, J.-F. [1979] (1984) The Postmodern Condition, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Marks, E. and de Courtivron, I. (eds) (1980) New French Feminisms, Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press.
Moraga, C. and Anzaldua, G. (eds) (1981) This Endge Called My Back, Watertown, MA: Persephone.
Nicholson, L. (ed.) (1990) Feminism/Postmodernism, London: Routledge.
Ross, A. (ed.) (1988) Universal Abandon? Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Sim, S. (ed.) (1998) Post-Marxism, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Vance, C. (ed.) (1984) Pleasure and Danger, London: Routledge.
Waugh, P. (ed.) (1992) Postmodernism, London: Edward Arnold.
