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Origins and theory

Frug

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Mary Joe Frug suggested that one "principle" of postmodernism is that human experience is located "inescapably within language". Power is exercised not only through direct coercion, but also through the way in which language shapes and restricts our reality. She also stated that because language is always open to re-interpretation, it can also be used to resist this shaping and restriction, and so is a potentially fruitful site of political struggle.

Frug's second postmodern principle is that sex is not something natural, nor is it something completely determinate and definable. Rather, sex is part of a system of meaning, produced by language. Frug argues that "cultural mechanisms ... encode the female body with meanings", and that these cultural mechanisms then go on explain these meanings "by an appeal to the 'natural' differences between the sexes, differences that the rules themselves help to produce".

French feminism

French feminism as it is known today, is an Anglo-American invention coined by Alice Jardine to be a section in a larger movement of postmodernism in France during the 1980s. This included the theorizing of the failure of the modernist project, along with its departure. More specifically for feminism, it meant returning to the debate of sameness and difference. The term was further defined by Toril Moi, an academic with a focus on feminist theory, in her book Sexual/Textual Politics. In this book she further defined French feminism to only include a few authors such as Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray, and Julia Kristeva, while also creating a distinction between French feminism and Anglo-American Feminism. She states that the difference between the two is that Anglo-American feminists want to find a "woman-centered perspective" and a woman identity since they were not given the chance to have one in the past. French Feminists believe there is no identity for a woman but that "the feminine can be identified where difference and otherness are found." Elaine Marks, an academic in the field of Women's Studies, noted another difference between French and American feminists. French feminists, specifically radical feminists, criticized and attacked the systems that benefit men, along with widespread misogyny as a whole, more intensely than their American counterparts. Through American academics contriving their own concept of French feminism, it separated and ignored the already marginalized self-identifying feminists, while focusing on the women theorists associated with Psych et po (Psychanalyse et politique) and other academics who did not always identify as feminists themselves. This division ultimately ended up placing more importance on the theories of the French feminists than the political agenda and goals that groups such as radical feminists and the Mouvement de liberation des femmes (women's liberation movement) had at the time.

Bornstein

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Critiques

Feminist Activist Gloria Steinem

There have been many critiques of postmodern feminism since it originated in the 1990s. Most of the criticism has been from modernists and feminists supporting modernist thought. They have put a focus on the themes of relativism and nihilism as defined by postmodernism. Though modernist critics believe more importantly, that through abandoning the values of Enlightenment thought, postmodern feminism "precludes the possibility of liberating political action." This concern can be seen in critics like Meaghan Morris, who have argued that postmodern feminism runs the risk of undercutting the basis of a politics of action based upon gender difference, through its very anti-essentialism. Alison Assiter published the book Enlightened Women to critique postmodernists and postmodern feminists alike, saying that there should be a return to Enlightenment values and modernist feminism. Gloria Steinem has also criticized feminist theory, and especially postmodernist feminist theory, as being overly academic, where discourse that is full of jargon and unaccessible is helpful to no one.