Emily Hoflinger points to the wave metaphor describing feminism’s history, which, with its divisive connotations, seems key to encouraging the current conflict within the field. In response, she calls for a reconceptualization of the metaphor in order to emphasize the continuity of the movement. I too have been troubled, over the course of the last decade, by the turn that feminism has taken—seemingly mired down in intergenerational conflict, while also being somewhat creatively paralyzed. However, I see the main culprit not as the influence of the wave metaphor, but rather the dominance of postmodern feminist perspectives. As several scholars have pointed out, feminism today is largely transmitted and preserved in the academy as an interdisciplinary field, which is under the sway of postmodernism (Minnich; Ramazanoglu; Gubar). The advantages of postmodern feminism have often been pointed out, chief among them, that it frees feminist thinking from restrictive binaries and provides ample room to account for axes of identity that intersect with gender, such as race, class, and sexuality (Flynn; Minnich; Ramazanoglu); it offers women the “free play of a plurality of differences” (Alcoff 105). But its chief disadvantages have been noted, too: postmodern feminism has become so hegemonic that it now amounts to what Minnich calls “secular dogmatism,” using postmodern language on “autopilot,” “imposing one way of speaking” as if there were no alternative (16-7). It’s as if only certain kinds of feminisms were worthy of respect, with all other forms of feminism, in Benhabib’s words “trash[ed]” (qtd. in Ramazanoglu 166).

The repudiation and distortion of the various feminisms that came before postmodern feminism makes these ideologies, in effect, straw women. Radical feminism, for example, is often constructed by postmodernists as a homogenous way of thinking in which words like ‘woman’ were uncritically used, as a time in feminist history in which white heterosexual, upper middle-class women unthinkingly tried to speak for everyone. Cultural feminism fares no better; it is frequently constructed as wrong-headedly valorizing the category ‘woman,’ and overgeneralizing and overbinarizing gender. Both are damned for, as Elizabeth Flynn says, “tend[ing] to essentialism” (27). Yet, as several scholars caution, we cannot gain an accurate picture of these feminisms--and others--out of context (Echols; Fargaris; Heilbrun and Miller; Whittier). In their historical accounts, these scholars show how radical feminism emerged from other leftist sociopolitical movements, in which gender was discounted in favor of class or race. The foregrounding of gender at the time was actually a means of creating a space for it in public discourse and activism. Far from being a homogenous movement, there was ongoing conflict within feminist circles about the interconnections of gender with race, class, sexuality, and other identity markers. As for cultural feminism, if viewed in historical context, it can be seen as a useful corrective to the unconsciously assumed generic human (Echols). By valorizing all things ‘woman,’ it instantiated Derrida’s observation that the way to break out of a dichotomous hierarchy is “to assert total difference, to revalue the devalued” (qtd. in Alcoff 104).

It is commonplace in academic disciplines for a contemporary movement to vilify what is past, to rewrite the past in order to reject it, in order to place the new idea in bold relief. But postmodern feminism’s attack on other feminisms and their past has been of such ferocity that it has virtually cut the ground from beneath the entire discipline of feminist studies. To interject the present day preferred epistemology onto the past is to support what I call ‘anachronistic criticism,’ in which we expect the past to hew to today’s standards and subsequently condemn it for not doing so. Gloria Steinem observed that this internal attack feels as if some feminists were re-enacting the high expectations, disappointments, and predictable attacks on the archetypal “mother”—“a gigantic mother who is held responsible for almost everything” (xix). I think Gubar’s chapter on the discord, “With Friends Like These, Who Needs Enemies,” says it all. To my mind, feminism’s attack on itself is a sad manifestation of continuing misogyny; oppressed people filled with self-contempt are more likely to attack one another than to face their real problems and threats to their progress. But, again, it is the narrowness of postmodern feminism that provides the pretext for the attack.

The result of postmodern feminism’s dominance has been to limit the variety of what counts as feminist research, to foreground, as Alcoff says, the “negative tactics of reaction and deconstruction” (103), and to emphasize critique over creation. As fertile as much postmodern feminist thought is, I get an overall sense of drift, of silencing, and of stagnation in recent years. Perhaps as Hoeflinger says, this state is part of the natural ebb and flow of feminism, an historical pattern (Rossi, qtd. in Heywood and Drake 3-4) as indeed it is any discipline. Or, perhaps we are in a phase of consolidating gains, or, seeing what seems like a lull, but is in fact how feminism is being redefined by another generation (Whittier). Whatever the reason, it seems to me that a kind of vitality is gone from the discipline, and that the damper is the way postmodernism is being misused to castigate other feminisms.

The postmodern domination of academic feminism also seems to further sever feminism’s connection with praxis. bell hooks and others decry what she calls the “depoliticization” of academic feminism with its “theory that [is] metalinguistic, creating excessive jargon” (22) written solely for an academic audience—a problem with consequences not only for our students, but also for the nonacademic population that could benefit from feminist action. The loss of now unacceptable terms like ‘woman,’ ‘oppression,’ ‘sexism,’ ‘patriarchy,’ and others with nothing comparable in postmodern feminism to replace or reframe them, has added to this schism.

As has been reiterated over the last fifteen years, the loss of these terms has serious consequences. Linda Alcoff warned back in 1988 that “the dilemma facing feminist theorists today is that our very self definition is grounded in a concept that we must deconstruct and de-essentialize in all its aspects” (406). ‘Sexism’ or ‘misogyny’ goes on, of course, in the United States, often in less blatant form than the situation that radical feminists confronted forty years ago--now more often as “subtle” sexism (Thompson 8), or “the enemy within” (hooks 14). But where is the postmodern vocabulary to reframe these concepts? It’s as if we’ve gone backwards to Betty Friedan’s linguistic-conceptual ‘problem that has no name’ from forty-five years ago.

So what’s to be done? Like Hoeflinger, I would like to see a multi-modal approach in which the plurality of feminisms (radical, cultural, Marxist, postmodern, and others) are all welcomed on their own terms. I envision, for example, a piece written from a cultural feminist viewpoint, which identifies itself as such, explains why this particular mode was employed, and offers whatever qualifications are needed. Or, perhaps if written from a postmodern perspective, it could be identified as such rather than, as is often the case now, as if it were a reflection of objective truth. Critiques of this research would be based more on the terms of that particular kind of feminism rather than on a sort of knee-jerk postmodern reaction to it. This sort of multi-modal methodology and critique would be less binaristic, less ‘either-or’--either postmodernism or nothing--, and instead more inclusive or ‘both-and.’ Most especially, I’d like to see a change in the current agonistic posture, perhaps along the lines of Gubar’s call for a more civil kind of critique, one more respectful of differences.

When critiquing work from the past, there might be a greater effort to see it in its historical context, to emphasize why different feminisms evolved as they did. A tolerant pluralistic approach could allow us to recover the past respectfully and to enrich the present. After all, we have a plurality of feminisms, already cross-disciplinary, which could well be multi-modal too. A truly pluralistic approach would allow us to stand back a bit from postmodern theory, as compelling as it is, and to acknowledge that it is only a theory—and one that will one day likely be superseded by something else. A truly postmodern approach, when you come right down to it, would include and validate a plurality of feminisms.