Feminism, ethics, and history, or what is the "post" in postfeminism?

Tulsa Studies in Womens Literature

Volumn 21, Issue 1, 2002, Pages 29-44

  Kavka, Misha ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF AUCKLAND   (New Zealand)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 28744447193     PISSN: 07327730     EISSN: 19361645     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/4149214     Document Type: Article

References (42)

1. Julia Kristeva, "Women's Time," trans. Alice Jardine and Harry Blake, Signs, 7, No. 1 (1981), 13-40;
2. rpt. in Feminisms, ed. Robyn R. Warhol and Diana Price Herndl (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1991), p. 446.
3. Toril Moi, Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory (New York: Methuen, 1985), p. 13.
4. Gloria T. Hull, Patricia Bell Scott, and Barbara Smith, eds., All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave (Old Westbury, New York: Feminist Press, 1982).
5. See Lynne Segal, Why Feminism? (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), p. 24.
6. Henry Abelove, Michèle Aina Barale, and David M. Halperin, eds., The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader (New York and London: Routledge, 1993).
7. Christina Hoff Sommers, Who Stole Feminism? How Women Have Betrayed Women (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995).
8. See Nancy K. Miller, Getting Personal: Feminist Occasions and Other Autobiographical Acts (New York: Routledge, 1991), pp. 74-75;
9. quoted in Susan Gubar, "What Ails Feminist Criticism?" Critical Inquiry, 24, No. 4 (1998), 881.
10. See also Micke Bal, "Enfolding Feminism," in Feminist Consequences: Theory for the New Century, ed. Elisabeth Bronfen and Misha Kavka (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), pp. 321-52.
11. Germaine Greer, The Observer Review, 19 October 1997, p. 4
12. Greer continues: "Thirty years ago I fought for women to say yes, yes, yes. Now we've forgotten how to say no" (Segal, p. 7).
13. Gubar, Critical Condition: Feminism at the Turn of the Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000).
14. Most well-known are Katie Roiphe, The Morning After: Sex, Fear, and Feminism (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1993)
15. and Last Night in Paradise: Sex and Morals at the Century's End (Boston: Little, Brown, 1997);
16. Naomi Wolf, Fire with Fire: The New Female Power (New York: Random House, 1993)
17. and Promiscuities: The Secret Struggle for Womanhood (New York: Random House, 1997);
18. Roiphe's conservatism is further played out in Rene Denfield, The New Victorians: A Young Woman's Challenge to the Old Feminist Order (New York: Warner Books, 1995).
19. The most recent versions of this kind of "postfeminism" can be found in Wendy Shalit, A Return to Modesty: Discovering the Lost Virtue (New York: Free Press, 1999)
20. and Danielle Crittenden, What Our Mothers Didn't Tell Us: Why Happiness Eludes the Modern Woman (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1999).
21. Leslie Heywood and Jennifer Drake, eds., "Introduction," in Third Wave Agenda: Being Feminist, Doing Feminism (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), p. 4.
22. For other excellent "third wave" collections, see Rebecca Walker, ed., To Be Real: Telling the Truth and Changing the Face of Feminism (New York: Anchor Books, 1995)
23. and Barbara Findlen, ed., Listen Up: Voices from the Next Feminist Generation (Seattle: Seal Press, 1995).
24. See, for example, Ann Brooks, Postfeminisms: Feminism, Cultural Theory and Cultural Forms (London and New York: Routledge, 1997).
25. For the articulation and questioning of this kind of postfeminism, see Natasha Walter, On the Move: Feminism for a New Generation (London: Virago Press, 1999).
26. Drucilla Cornell, "What is Ethical Feminism?" in Feminist Contentions: A Philosophical Exchange, by Seyla Benhabib, Judith Butler, Cornell, and Nancy Fraser (New York and London: Routledge, 1995), p. 79.
27. See Jacques Derrida, "The Deconstruction of Actuality," trans. Jonathan Ree, Radical Philosophy, 68 (Autumn 1994), 28-41;
28. see also Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York and London: Routledge, 1994).
29. In "A Leftist Plea for 'Eurocentrism,'" Critical Inquiry, 24 (Summer 1998), 988, Slavoj i ek refers to this understanding of universality as "the empty principle of universality, of the principled equality of all men qua speaking beings," which Étienne Balibar has called égaliberté. Crucially, for i ek, universality as the empty principle of equality grounds what he calls "politics proper" (p. 988).
30. See Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women's Development (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983), for the groundbreaking study of differences between women's and men's moral priorities.
31. See also Benhabib, Situating the Self: Gender, Community, and Postmodernism in Contemporary Ethics (New York: Routledge, 1992).
32. Elisabeth Porter, Feminist Perspectives on Ethics (London and New York: Longman, 1999), p. 5.
33. See Joan Tronto, Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethics of Care (New York: Routledge, 1993).
34. For an excellent overview, see Bat-Ami Bar On and Ann Ferguson, eds., "Introduction," Daring to Be Good: Essays in Feminist Ethico-Politics (New York: Routledge, 1998).
35. Ranjana Khanna, "Ethical Ambiguities and Specters of Colonialism," in Feminist Consequences: Theory for the New Century, p 102.
36. In "Ethics as First Philosophy," The Levinas Reader, ed. Sean Hand (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), Levinas articulates the radical separation between self and Other in the sense both of temporality and ontology. What Levinas refers to as "face" articulates the precedence of self-expression on the part of the Other: "But, in its expression, in its mortality, the face before me summons me, calls for me, begs for me, as if the invisible death that must be faced by the Other, pure otherness, separated, in some way, from any whole, were my business. . . . Responsibility for the Other, for the naked face of the first individual to come along. A responsibility that goes beyond what I may or may not have committed, as if I were devoted to the other man before being devoted to myself. Or more exactly, as if I had to answer for the other's death before being" (p. 83).
37. See Chandra Talpade Mohanty, "Cartographies of Struggle," in Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism, ed. Mohanty, Ann Russo, and Lourdes Torres (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), pp. 1-50.
38. Cornell, "What Is Ethical Feminism?" p. 78.
39. Luce Irigaray, An Ethics of Sexual Difference, trans. Carolyn Burke and Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993);
40. Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993).
41. Judith Butler, "The End of Sexual Difference?" in Feminist Consequences: Theory for the New Century, p. 418. Subsequent references will be cited parenthetically in the text.
42. Lynne Segal's Why Feminism? is an excellent and highly detailed example of feminist history that is sensitive to the pitfalls of simplification.