Feminist and Postmodernist Metamorphoses Reconsidered
The cyborg is a bad girl […] Maybe she is not so much bad as she is a shape-changer, whose dislocations are never free. She is a girl who’s trying not to become Woman, but remain responsible to women of many colors and positions.1
Some differences are playful; some are poles of world historical systems of dominations. “Epistemology” is about knowing the difference. 2
Introduction
The relationship between postmodernism and feminism is one of debate. Often, postmodernism is taken as the “assumed reference point in a debate that has largely taken place within feminism and has authorized feminism’s reflection on itself through either disavowal or disapproval”.3 Against this background, Ahmed wonders how we, as feminists, might be able to read postmodernism differently — “as feminist and for feminism”.4 Put differently, can we reconsider the relationship between feminism and postmodernism — generating some sort of metamorphosis? Is it possible that this relationship is not marked by authority, hierarchy, and exclusion, but, instead, might be understood as being one of mutual and reciprocal productivity?
Read more- Donna Haraway, Constance Penley, and Andrew Ross, “Cyborgs at Large: Interview with Donna Haraway,” in: Social Text, No. 25/26 (1990): 23. ↵
- Donna Haraway, “A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s,” in The Haraway Reader (New York and London: Routledge, 1985/2004), 20. ↵
- Sara Ahmed, Differences that Matter: Feminist Theory and Postmodernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 3. ↵
- Ahmed, Differences that Matter, 2. ↵