FeminismfPostInodernism
Suzanne Paul
2014艾美奖giulianoA central point of a recently published book by a feminist philosopher is the refutation of all feminist attempts to articulate a n in which the history of philosophy reveals distinctively"male"perspectives on reality.All such attempts,the author argues,"do vio-lence"to the history of philosophy and"injustice"to the"extremely variegated nature"of male experience.l Indeed,any attempt to"cut"reality and perspective along gender lines is methodologically flawed.
In the1970s,the feminist imagination was fueled by the insight that the template of gender could dis-clo aspects of culture and history previously con-cealed.The male-normative view of the world,feminists argued,had obscured its own bias through its fic-tions of unity(history,reason,culture,tradition,and so forth).Today,many feminists are critical of what they now e as the oversimplifications and generaliza-tions of this period in feminism.
Susan Bordo,a feminist philosopher,writes in Femi-nism,Postmodemism and Gender-Skepticism about the emergence of gender analytics and the difficulties into
1Susan Bordo,"Feminism,Postmodernism and Gender-Scepti-cism,"in LindaJ.Nicholson,ed.,FeminismjPostmodemism(New York:Routledge,Chapman&Hall,Inc.,1990),133-34.
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which it fell.2In1979,Richard Rorty's Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature burst on the philosophical scene in the United States.3Its author,established and re-spected within the very traditions he had now t out to deconstruct,was uniquely situated to legitimate a simple yet subversive argument.That argument,ear-lier elaborated in different ways by Marx,Nietzsche, and Dewey,held that ideas are the creation of social beings rather than the reprentations or mirrorings of Nature.Rorty's prentation of this argument was philosophically powerful and influential.But it was not Rorty who was ultimately responsible for uncovering the pretensions and illusions of the ideals of episte-mological objectivity,foundations and neutral judg-ment.That uncovering first occurred not in the cour of philosophical conversation but in political practice. Its agents were the liberation movements of the six-ties and venties,emerging not only to make a claim to the legitimacy of marginalized cultures but also to unheard voices and suppresd narratives.Now tho accounts could no longer claim to descend from the heavens of pure rationality or to reflect the inevitable and
progressive logic of intellectual or scientific dis-covery.They had to be en,rather,as the products of historically situationed individuals with very particu-lar class,race and gender interests.The imperial cat-egories which had provided justification for tho accounts-reason,truth,human nature,history,tra-dition-now were displaced with the historical and social questions:Who truth?Who nature?Who version of reason?Who history?Who tradition?
Feminism,appropriately enough,initiated the cul-tural work of exposing and articulating the gendered nature of history,culture and society.It was a cul-2ibid.,133-53.
3Richard Rorty,Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature(Princeton: Princeton University Press,1979).
Femininism/Postmodemism/107 tural moment of revelation-for feminists and femi-nist Humanists.The category of the"human,"a stan-dard against which all difference translates,was brought down to earth,given a pair of pants and re-minded that it was not the only player in town.It was a moment of revelation for me,as a student at the Humanist Institute,to read Carol Gilligan and gain this critical and empowering insight and learn that the language of"rights"is not the ethical discour of God or Nature but the ideological superstructure of a particular construction of masculinity.4As a female Humanist,what does one do with this information? How does this informati
on impact on a female's status within Humanism?If Humanists,male or female,em-brace the Enlightenment position of rationality and humanism at its word and as its starting point-com-mon respect then is due to all people becau they are rational.However,women have been unfairly excluded from the respect which they are due as human beings on the basis of an insidious assumption that we are less rational than men."Difference"has been ud to legitimize the unequal treatment of women.Difference will have to be repudiated theoretically and practically in order for women to assume their rightful place in society and in Humanism.
As male and female Humanists,we need to exam-ine gender differences and when and if"difference" translates into"unequal."Since we live in a society in which men have more power than women,it makes n to assume that what is considered to be more worthy of prai may be tho qualities associated with men.This has certainly been the history of Western Humanism.It is very difficult,if not impossible,for female Humanists to find Humanist female role mod-els.History argues that the thinkers of the Enlighten-ment brought truth and therefore need not be gender-specific.That has always been the ntiment
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4Carol Gilligan,In a Different Voice(Cambridge,Massachutts: Harvard University Press,1982).
高考辅导班108/Humanism Today1993
of the modernists.It has taken the postmodernists to say that the experience of gender has and does affect traditional philosophic underpinnings.
Postmodernism has offered feminism,and thus fe-male Humanists,some uful ideas about method,par-ticularly a wariness toward generalizations that transcend boundaries of culture and region.Postmod-ernism recognizes that objectivity and reason have re-flected the values of masculinity at a particular point in history;this recognition by the postmodernists has opened the door to feminists who feel that postmod-ernism is an ally of feminism.The postmodern critique has come to focus on philosophy and the very idea of a possible theory of knowledge,justice,or beauty that excludes the female experience.As male and female Humanists,we also need to critique the Humanist philosophy that has historically and traditionally ex-cluded the female experience.Jean Grimshaw writes in Philosophy and Feminist Thought:
早春呈水部张十八员外古诗的意思翻译The experience of gender,of being a man or a
woman,inflects much if not all of people's
woman,one is never just a man or a woman.
One is young or old,sick or healthy,married
01'unmarried,a parent or not a parent,em-
ployed or unemployed,middle class or work-
ing class,rich or poor,black or white,and so
forth.Gender of cour inflects one's experi-
ence of the things,so the experience of any
介绍自己的英语作文one of them may well be radically different
according to whether one is a man or a
woman.But it may also be radically different
according to whether one is,say,black or有效期限
white or working class or middle class.The
people magazine
relationship between male and female expe-
rience is a very complex one.Experience does
not come neatly in gments so that it is im-
Femininism/Postmodemism/109 possible to abstract what in one's experience
is due to"being a woman"or"being a man."5
What postmodernism has done,to my way of think-ing,is to point out that we live and have always lived in a world where we males and females cannot simply be"human."This is no more possible than it is pos-sible that we can just be"people"in a racist culture. Our language,intellectual history and social forms are gendered:there is no escape from this fact and from its conquences on our lives.Some of tho con-quences may be unintended,may even be fiercely re-sisted;our deepest desire may be to transcend gender dualities,not to have our behavior categorized as male or female.But,like it or not,in our prent culture, our activities are coded as male or female and will func-tion as such within the prevailing system of gender power relations.One might think that postmodernism, which has criticized the liberal notion of the abstract human,would be an ally here.H
owever,the postmodern critique of liberal humanism is mitigated by its tendency to insist on the correct destabilization
of general categories of social identity-race,class, gender,and so forth.Practically the most powerful strategies against liberal humanism have been tho that demystify the human through general categories of social identity which give content and force to the notions of social interest,historical location,and cul-tural perspective.
bryanMy rearch into feminism/postmodernism has un-covered a myriad of information-almost all of it con-flicting.What I truly have come to believe is that,at this moment in history,feminists need both the En-lightenment and the postmodernist agendas-but we don't need the same ones for the same purpos or in the same forms as do white,bourgeois,androcentric Westerners.
5Jean Grimshaw,Philosophy and Feminist Thinking(Minne-apolis:University of Minnesota Press,1986).
