Postmodernism and Feminism

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on March 27, 2018 • ( 1 )

[Feminism] should persist in seeing itself as a component or offshoot of Enlightenment modernism, rather than as one more ‘exciting’ feature (or cluster of features) in a postmodern social landscape. (Sabina Lovibond, in T. Docherty, ed., Postmodemism: A Reader (1993).)

[D]espite an understandable attraction to the (apparently) logical, orderly world of the Enlightenment, feminist theory more properly belongs in the terrain of postmodern philosophy. (Jane Flax, in L. J. Nicholson, ed.,Feminism/Postmodernism (1990).)

Any definition of feminism must see it above all as a social and political force, aimed at changing existing power relations between women and men. In Maggie Humm‘s words, ‘The emergence of feminist ideas and feminist politics depends on the understanding that, in all societies which divide the sexes into different cultural, economic or political spheres, women are less valued than men’ (Feminisms: A Reader (1992». As a movement for social change, therefore, feminism’s theoretical developments have been bound up with demands for political change. The beginnings of ‘second wave’ feminism, the term now usually used to describe the post-1968 women’s movement, were thus marked both by new political groupings and campaigns, such as those organized around abortion legislation, demands for legal and financial equality, and equal opportunity at work, and by the publication of ambitious theoretical works such as Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics and Shulamith Firestone‘s The Dialectic of Sex (both 1970). Both works offered themselves as texts of revolution, Firestone insisting that what she called the ‘pioneer Western feminist movement’ of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries must be seen as only the first onslaught of ‘the most important revolution in history’, and Millett heralding the emergence of ‘a second wave of the sexual revolution’. Both sought to re-claim a feminist history; both identified feminism as theoretical standpoint with the women’s movement as political practice.

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For feminism, then, politics and theory are interdependent. But feminist politics have operated in the spheres of knowledge and culture as well as through campaigns for social and economic change. Feminist theorists from Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-97) onwards have identified as a primary source of women’s oppression the cultural construction of femininity which renders women ‘insignificant objects of desire’ and opposes the category ‘woman’ to the category ‘human’. As Annette Kuhn insists in The Power of Image (1985), ‘From its beginnings, feminism has regarded ideas, language and image as crucial in shaping women’s (and men’s) lives.’ Feminism has taken as an object of both analysis and intervention the construction of knowledge, meaning and representations. It has also been concerned with the struggle to find a voice through which such knowledges might be expressed. For the development of an autonomous female subject, capable of speaking in her own voice within a culture which has persistently reduced her to the status of object, is also part of feminism’s project. As Rosalind Delmar describes it, feminism has sought to transform women’s position from that of object of knowledge to knowing subject, from the state of subjection to subjecthood (in J. Mitchell and A. Oakley, eds., What is Feminism (1986)).

All of this would seem to place feminism as an offshoot of the ’emancipatory metanarratives’ of Enlightenment modernism, and this is indeed where many feminist theorists would position themselves. If, as Lyotard suggests, two major forms of ‘legitimation narrative’ have been used to justify the Enlightenment quest for knowledge and the importance of scientific research, both find their echo in feminist theory. The first, the ‘narrative of emancipation’, in which knowledge is sought as a means to liberation, finds a clear echo in the concept of ‘women’s liberation’. As Sabina Lovibond writes, ‘it is difficult to see how one could count oneself a feminist and remain indifferent to the modernist promise of social reconstruction’ (Postmodemism: A Reader). But Lyotard‘s second legitimation narrative, that of the speculative mind, in which knowledge is sought for its own sake, also finds its feminist echo – in the practice of ‘consciousness raising’. Through consciousness raising, greater insight into the operations of male power (a feminist ‘enlightenment’) is achieved through women’s communal self-analysis and consequent rejection of internalized patriarchal assumptions and ways of understanding (what might be termed a patriarchal ‘false consciousness’). Like Marxism, therefore, feminism’s initial project ties theoretical analysis of oppression to a narrative of emancipation through social transformation.

Early feminism, then, had as its aim women’s equality, through their admission to those spheres from which they had been excluded, and this included the spheres of rational thought and intellectual discourse. If women had been excluded from political theory, Marxism, philosophy, psychoanalysis and other dominant theoretical discourses, then women’s inclusion would expand and perhaps transform those discourses, while at the same time their insights could be used to illuminate women’s experience. Much feminist theory of the 1960s and early 1970s, therefore, set out to expand and transform existing theoretical models. But there are a number of problems with this approach. In the first place, it became clear that it was not possible simply to expand such theories to include women, for women’s exclusion was not an accidental omission but a fundamental structuring principle of all patriarchal discourses. As Simone de Beauvoir pointed out in The Second Sex (1949), woman in Western thought has represented the Other that can confirm man’s identity as Self, as rational thinking being. ‘The category of the Other’, writes de Beauvoir, ‘is as primordial as consciousness itself, since the Self can only be defined in opposition to something which is not-self, Man, she writes, has assigned to himself the category of Self, and constructed woman as Other: ‘she is the incidental, the inessential as opposed to the essential. He is the Subject, he is the Absolute – she is the Other.’

Moreover, even if women could be included within these discourses, it could be in terms only of sameness not difference, that is, within frameworks which could discuss women only in terms of a common, male-referenced humanity (what Luce lrigaray calls the ‘hom(m)osexual economy’ of men) not specifically as women As subjects of these knowledges, therefore – that is, as thinkers and writers – women could occupy only a range of pre-given positions: they could write only as surrogate men. Indeed, it became increasingly clear that the ‘universal subject’ of Enlightenment modernism, far from being ungendered and ‘transcendent’, was not only gendered but very specific: a Western, bourgeois, white, heterosexual man.

Once this theoretical step is taken, a further step is inevitable: if feminists seek to construct a universal, ‘essential’ woman as subject and/ or object of their own thought, then that figure will be as partial, as historically contingent and as exclusionary as her male counterpart. Given her origins, she will simply be a Western, bourgeois, white, heterosexual woman. Feminist theory cannot claim both that knowledge and the self are constituted within history and culture and that feminist theory speaks on behalf of a universalized ‘woman’. Rather, it must embrace differences between women and accept a position of partial knowledge(s). And once it occupies this position, feminist thought would seem to move away from its Enlightenment beginnings, and to have much in common with postmodernist theory. Barbara Creed, summarizing the arguments of Craig Owens in The Discourse of Others (H Foster, ed., Postmodem Culture (1983», suggests a number of points of apparent convergence between the two. Both feminism and postmodernism argue that the ‘grand’ or ‘master’ narratives of the Enlightenment have lost their legitimating power. Not only, they would both suggest, have claims put forward as universally applicable in fact proved to be valid only for men of a particular culture, class and race, the ideals that have underpinned these claims – of ‘objectivity’, ‘reason’, and the autonomous self – have been equally partial and contingent. Both also argue that Western representations – whether in art or in theory – are the product of access not to truth but to power. Women, as Owens points out, have been represented in countless images (and metaphors) throughout Western culture, often as a symbol of something else – Nature, truth, the sublime, sex – but have rarely seen their own representations accorded legitimacy. The representational systems of the West have, he argues, admitted only ‘one vision – that of the constitutive mali subject’. Both present a critique of binarism, that is, thinking by means of oppositions, in which one term of the opposition must always be devalued: we have seen in the discussion of de Beauvoir‘s work how fundamental this critique has been to feminist thought. Both, instead, insist on ‘difference and incommensurability’. Finally, both seek to heal the breach between theory and practice, between the subject of theory/knowledge and its object. Women, of course, are both the subjects and the objects of feminist theory, and women’s sense of self, it has been argued, is far more ‘relational’ than that of men.

Instead of an essential, universal man or woman, then, both feminism and postmodernism offer, in Jane Flax’s words, ‘a profound skepticism regarding universal (or universalizing) claims about the existence, nature and powers of reason, progress, science, language and the subject/self’ (‘Gender as a Social Problem’, American Studies (1986». But the alliance thus formed is an uneasy one, for feminism, as I have indicated, is itself a ‘narrative of emancipation’, and its political claims are made on behalf of a social group, women, who are seen to have an underlying community of interest, and of an embodied female subject whose identity and experiences (or ‘truth-in-experience’) are necessarily different from those of men. If, then, as Sarah Harding has suggested, we replace the concept of ‘woman’ by that of ‘myriads of women living in elaborate historical complexes of class, race and culture’ (H. Crowley and S. Himmelweit, eds., Knowing Women (1992», as some theorists propose – if, in other words, we remove gender (or sexual difference) as a central organizing principle – how can a feminist political practice any longer be possible? If sexual difference becomes only one term of difference, and one that is not fundamentally constitutive of our identity, then how can it be privileged? Surely to privilege it becomes, in Christine Di Stefano‘s words, ‘just another … totalizing fiction which should be deconstructed and opposed in the name of a difference that serves no theoretically unifying master’ (Feminism/Postmodemism ).

In throwing in its lot with postmodernism, then, might not feminism be colluding in its own eradication, accepting the demise of ‘metanarratives of emancipation’ at a point when women’s own emancipation is far from complete? Feminists are understandably divided as to the answer to this question. Some, like Sabina Lovibond, insist that feminism must not be seduced by the attractions of postmodernism, for if feminism disowns’the impulse to “enlighten'” it loses the possibility of all political and social action. Others take a very different line, arguing that the critiques of Enlightenment beliefs which feminist theory has mounted must place it as ‘a type of postmodern philosophy’. Thus Jane Flax, for example, argues that feminist theories, ‘like other forms of postmodernism, should encourage us to tolerate and interpret ambivalence, ambiguity, and multiplicity as well as to expose the roots of our needs for imposing order and structure no matter how arbitrary and oppressive these needs may be’ (Feminism/Postmodemism). In this argument, postmodernism becomes a sort of therapeutic corrective to feminism’s universalizing tendency. In similar vein, Nancy Fraser and Linda Nicholson, while rejecting the philosophical pessimism of Lyotard, wish to adopt his critique of metanarratives for a feminist social criticism. Such a feminist theory, they argue, would eschew the analysis of grand causes of women’s oppression, focusing instead on its historically and culturally specific manifestations. It would also replace unitary conceptions of woman and female identity with ‘plural and complexly structured conceptions of social identity, treating gender as one relevant strand among others, attending also to class, race, ethnicity, age, and sexual orientation’. In a thoroughly feminizing metaphor, they conclude that such a theory ‘would look more like a tapestry composed of threads of many different hues than one woven in a single color’ (Feminism/Postmodemism ).

Another example of such an anti-essentialist critique can be found in the work of Judith Butler who, from a lesbian perspective, goes much further than Flax or Fraser and Nicholson, in arguing that the very category of gender is a ‘regulatory fiction’ which functions to enforce compulsory heterosexuality (everyone is either male or female; opposites complement/attract). For Butler, gender is ‘a kind of impersonation and approximation … but … a kind of imitation for which there is no original’. The appearance of ‘naturalness’ that accompanies heterosexual gender identity is simply the effect of a repeated imitative performance. What is being imitated, however, is ‘a phantasmatic ideal of heterosexual identity’. There is no essence of heterosexual masculinity or femininity which precedes our performance of these roles; we construct the ideal of that essence through our performances (D. Fuss, ed.,Inside/Out (1991». And we construct it in the service of a regulatory heterosexual binarism. Gender, like other categories of knowledge, then, is the product not of truth but of power expressed in discourse. Moreover, as a copy of a fantasized ideal, heterosexuality always fails to approximate its ideal. It is thus doomed to a kind of compulsive repetition, always threatened by failure and always liable to disruption from that which is excluded in the performance. Gender, in this view, is a performance which constructs that which it claims to explain. Rather than persisting in clinging to it as an explanatory category, therefore, feminists should celebrate its dissolution into ‘convergences of gender identity and all manner of gender dissonance’ (Butler, Feminism/ Postmodemism). Its abandonment promises the possibility of new and complex subject-positions and of ‘coalitional politics which do not assume in advance what the content of “women” will be’ (Butler, Gender Trouble (1990».

Other feminists, however, while not wishing to return to a unitary concept of ‘woman’, are far more sceptical than Butler about the transformative possibilities of a feminism which embraces postmodernism. These theorists point to a number of major problems in this projected alliance. First, there is the tendency of male postmodernist theorists, when discussing feminism or attempting, as for example Craig Owens does, to ‘introduce’ feminism into the postmodern debate, to do so by presenting feminism as, in Owens’s words, ‘an instance of postmodern thought’ (my emphasis). Postmodernism, that is, constitutes itself where it considers feminism at all- as the inclusive category, of which feminism is merely one example. Second, to treat gender as only ‘one relevant strand among others’, as Fraser and Nicholson would wish, or as merely a ‘regulative fiction’, as Butler suggests, would render a politics based on a specific constituency or subject – women impossible. The strategy proposed by Judith Butler, for example, is that of ‘gender parody’, in which gender is self-consciously and parodically performed, in a masquerade that subverts because it draws attention to the non-identity of gender and sexuality, to the multiple sexualities that can be written on our bodies. It is, as Tania Modleski points out in Feminism Without Women (1991), an ‘extremely individualistic solution to the problem of women’s oppression’, and one which risks merely reinforcing the binary structure which it seeks to subvert. Parody, after all, depends on the stability of that which it imitates for its critical force. It is difficult, therefore, to envisage the ‘coalitional politics’ advocated by Butler as any more than a coalition in resistance, rather than a strategy for change.

A third problem inherent in the too-easy acceptance by feminism of postmodernism’s embrace is, as Meaghan Morris points out, that while we may accept that there is a crisis in modernism’s ‘legitimation narratives’, there is no reason to assume – simply because they have been termed ‘master narratives’ – that this will benefit women – or blacks, gays, or other difference-based movements. It might just as well mean the disintegration of all motivating arguments for any kind of intervention or, as Donna Haraway puts it in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women (1991), ‘one more reason to drop the old feminist self-help practices of repairing our own cars. They’re just texts anyway,so let the boys have them back.’ It might even, as Morris suggests, mean ‘a state of permanent bellicosity in which Might … is Right’ (The Pirate’s Fiancee (1988». With no arguments for change, power is ceded to the powerful. This last point takes us on to a further argument: that postmodernism may itself be a new ‘master discourse’, one which deals with the challenges posed by feminism by an attempted incorporation – as when feminism is offered inclusion in the postmodern debate as ‘an instance’ of postmodern thought.

That postmodernism has sought to deal with the feminist critique by offering itself as a ‘framing discourse’ for feminism is a point made by a number of feminist theorists. They have pointed to the fact that postmodernism’s debate with – or deconstruction of – modernism has been conducted pretty well exclusively within and by the same constituency as before (white, privileged men of the industrialized West), a constituency which, having already had its Enlightenment, is now happy to subject that legacy to critical scrutiny. It is a debate in which the contribution of feminism, while acknowledged as a (perhaps even central) factor in the destabilizing of modernism’s concept of a universal ‘subject’, must necessarily be (re-)marginalized: the central protagonists are (as always) situated elsewhere. Feminist suspicions of this move are voiced by Nancy Hartsock. ‘Why is it,’ she asks, ‘that just at the moment when so many of us who have been silenced begin to demand the right to name ourselves, to act as subjects rather than objects of history, that just then the concept of subjecthood becomes problematic?’ (Feminism/Postmodernism). It is no accident, she argues, that just at the moment when those previously excluded begin both to theorize and to demand political change, there emerges uncertainty about whether the world can be theorized and about whether progress is possible or even, as a ‘totalizing’ ideal, desirable. For Hartsock, then, the intellectual moves of postmodernism constitute merely the latest accent of the voice of the ‘master discourse’, as it attempts to deal with the social changes and theoretical challenges of the late twentieth century.

Two further feminist suspicions are worth enumerating here. They concern the way in which postmodern ‘gender-scepticism’ permits an easy slide into what Susan Bordo calls the ‘fantasy of becoming multiplicity – the dream of endless multiple embodiments, allowing one to dance from place to place and self to self (Feminism/Postmodernism). This has two aspects. The first is that being everywhere is pretty much the same as being nowhere; in other words, postmodernism offers to its male theorists simply another version of the disembodied detachment which characterized the Enlightenment speaking position. The second is that ‘becoming multiplicity’ can also mean ‘becoming woman’ or occupying the feminine position. Thus, as Alice Jardine, Barbara Creed, and Tania Modleski all point out, male postmodern theorists have tended both to identify – in common with earlier thinkers – the position of ‘otherness’ with femininity, and to seek to occupy it. In this way, as Tania Modleski puts it, ‘male power … works to efface female subjectivity by occupying the site of femininity’ (Feminism Without Women), and the material struggles of embodied women are erased. Modleski goes on to argue further that for women to seek to occupy the postmodernist position, as postmodernist feminists do, is a cause for considerable feminist concern. The kind of disembodied, ‘antiessentialist’ feminism which is produced is, she argues, a luxury open only to the most privileged of women. Only those who have a sense of identity can play with not having it.

How, then, can feminist theory both hold on to a belief in ‘woman’ and respect cultural diversity and difference? Or, as Rosi Braidotti puts it in Nomadic Subjects (1994), ‘By what sort of interconnections, sidesteps, and lines of escape can one produce feminist knowledge without fixing it into a new normativity?’ Attempts to answer this question – to, in Alice Jardine’s words, ‘dive into the wreck’ of Western culture rather than simply pushing it aside – have produced some of the most exciting feminist thinking over the past decade. One possible answer is provided by what have been termed the feminist ‘standpoint’ theorists. These thinkers use for feminist ends the Marxist vision in which those who occupy subjugated or marginal positions in society not only produce different knowledges from those in positions of privilege; they also produce less distorted, less rationalizing, less falsely universalizing accounts. Nancy Hartsock presents the argument for this approach, arguing that ‘we need to dissolve the false “we” I have been using into its real multiplicity and variety and out of this concrete multiplicity build an account of the world as seen from the margins, an account which can expose the falseness of the view from the top and can transform the margins as well as the center’ (Feminism/Postmodernism). The task, she suggests, is to develop an account of the world which treats these alternative perspectives not – as they are seen from the centre – as subjugated or disruptive knowledges, but instead as primary and as capable of constituting a different world. This is an approach also embraced by black feminists like Patricia Hill Collins, who argues for what she terms a black women’s or Afrocentric feminist epistemology. Like other subordinate groups, argues Collins, African-American women have not only developed distinctive interpretations of their own oppression, but have done so by constructing alternative forms of knowledge. The specific forms of black women’s economic and political oppression and the nature of their collective resistance to this oppression mean, she argues, that African-American women, as a group, experience a different world from those who are not black and female. This distinctive experience in turn produces a distinctive black feminist consciousness about that experience, and a distinctive black feminist intellectual tradition. These ‘engaged visions’, in Hartsock’s terms, can then produce the grounds for the recognition of commonalities, and ‘the tools to begin to construct an account of the world sensitive to the realities of race and gender as well as class’ (Feminism/Postmodernism).

There are problems, however, with this rather literal interpretation of what a ‘politics of location’ (Adrienne Rich, Blood, Bread and Poetry (1986» might mean. It can become over-simplified and reductive (this set of experiences inevitably produces that mode of consciousness). It is difficult to know which set of experiences is constitutive of a particular group and mode of knowledge-production. It places an emphasis on experience which should perhaps more properly be placed on particular ways of interpreting that experience. Finally, the appeal to a commonality of experience can elide both differences between and differences within women. Collins’s work, for example, persistently assumes that all black women are American, insisting, in ‘The Social Construction of Black Feminist Thought’, for example, that ‘[l]iving life as an African American woman is a necessary prerequisite for producing black feminist thought’ (B. Guy-Sheftall, ed., Words ofFire (1995», and that all African-American women share a common position. On the other hand, once we allow for the multiplicity of positionings within every ‘standpoint’, the concept of a commonality of experience – and hence a distinctive standpoint – within oppressed groups can become lost.

The concept of ‘situated knowledges’ developed by theorists like Rosi Braidotti and Donna Haraway is a more complex answer to the question of how, in Braidotti’s words in Nomadic Subjects, to ‘figure out how to respect cultural diversity without falling into relativism or political despair’. The ‘situatedness’ envisaged here, however, isno simple affair. It is in the first place a position which insists on the embodied and therefore sexually differentiated nature of the female subject. But embodiment does not, in this context, mean ‘essentialism’, where essentialism is defined as implying a fixed and monolithic essence to female identity “which is beyond historical and cultural change. The embodied female subject envisaged here is, on the contrary, a ‘nomadic’ subject, to use Braidotti’s terminology. That is, she is ‘the site of multiple, complex, and potentially contradictory sets of experiences, defined by overlapping variables such as class, race, age, lifestyle, sexual preference, and others’. Haraway goes further: in the contemporary high-tech world, feminist embodiment is about ‘nodes in fields, inflections in orientations, and responsibility for difference in materialsemiotic fields of meaning’ (Simians, Cyborgs, and Women). What both thinkers are trying to do in these rather complex formulations is to insist both that the female subject is embodied – that women’s knowledge and thought cannot be separated from their lived experience – and that this insistence does not mean that feminism cannot recognize the differences both between women and within each woman. Within all of us, argues Braidotti, there is an interplay of differing levels of experience, so that our identities, while situated, are not fixed but ‘nomadic’. It is such situated knowledges – ‘partial, locatable, critical knowledges’, as Haraway describes them – which permit both a new definition of objectivity (objectivity as partial, situated knowledge) and the possibility of new political coalitions.

But this still leaves the difficulty of how, in Braidotti‘s words, to ‘connect the “differences within” each woman to a political practice that requires mediation of the “differences among” women’. For it is difficult – to say the least – to see how women could unite around the formulations quoted earlier. In answer, Braidotti and Haraway offer ‘political fictions’ (Braidotti) or ‘foundational myths’ (Haraway) as a way of framing understanding. These ‘politically informed images’ (Braidotti), or ‘figure[s] of hope and desire’ (Patricia Clough, Feminist Thought (1994», are offered as a means of empowering both a shared sense of identity and the struggle against oppression. Political fictions, argues Braidotti, may be more effective at this moment than theoretical systems. Braidotti’s image is the figure of the nomad, who is neither exile (homeless and rootless) nor migrant (displaced and suspended between the old and the new); instead, ‘situated’ but mobile, the nomad employs a critical consciousness to cultivate ‘the art of disloyalty to civilization’, thus resisting incorporation by the host culture. Haraway’s ‘political fiction’ is more challenging: the figure of the cyborg, a hybrid of body and machine, a ‘kind of disassembled and reassembled, postmodem collective and personal self’ (Feminism/Postmodernism). As hybrid figure, the cyborg blurs the categories of human and machine, and with it those other Western dualisms: self/other, mindlbody, nature/culture, male/female, civilized/primitive, reality/appearance, whole/part, agent/resource, maker/made, active/passive, right/wrong, truth/illusion, total/partial, God/man. It is embodied but not unified, and being a figure of blurred boundaries and regeneration rather than (re )birth, it cannot be explained by reference to conventional narratives of identity. It is locally specific but globally connected: Haraway reminds us that ‘networking’ is a feminist practice as well as a multinational corporate strategy, a way of surviving ‘in diaspora’ (Feminism/Postmodernism).

It can be objected, however, that theorists like Rosi Braidottiand Haraway are trying to have it both ways: to be both situated and multiple, within and outside postmodernism. They can also be accused of substituting for a narrative of liberation directed at change in the real world, a utopian fantasy whose notions of ’embodiment’ and ‘situatedness’ are slippery in the extreme. Susan Bordo, for example, criticizing Haraway‘s image of the cyborg, protests: ‘What sort of body is it that is free to change its shape and location at will, that can become anyone and travel anywhere? If the body is a metaphor for our locatedness in space and time and thus for the finitude of human perception and knowledge, then the postmodern body is no body at all’ (Feminism/Postmodernism). For Bordo, this kind of response to what Sandra Harding in Knowing Women calls the contemporary ‘instabilities’ of feminism’s analytical categories will leave feminist thought ‘cut … off from the source of feminism’s transformative possibilities’ (Feminism/Postmodernism). A similar charge is made by Tania Modleski (Feminism Without Women), who argues that it will leave us with a ‘feminism without women’. Nevertheless, the dilemma that all these theorists articulate is the same: in Modleski’s words, how to ‘hold on to the category of woman while recognizing ourselves to be in the process (an unending one) of defining and constructing the category’. Since it is, as Donna Haraway comments, ‘hard to climb when you are holding on to both sides of a pole, simultaneously or alternately’ (Simians, Cyborgs, and Women), the various ‘political fictions’ offered by feminist theorists can be seen as a way of finding new terms in which to theorize a way forward. For the danger they recognize is also the same: that male postmodern theory will simply repeat the gesture of its modernist predecessors in appropriating ‘femininity as one of its multiple possible positions, at the same time as it erases and silences the work and lives of women. The task that is being addressed, then, is, in the words of Meaghan Morris in The Pirate’s Fiancee, ‘to use feminist work to frame discussions of postmodernism, and not the other way around’.