no pomo

It appears that a certain authoritative consensus is being promoted and recirculated, a somewhat totalizing postmodern feminist metanarrative about the history and the potential of feminism. It is no longer a question of extending postmodernism by adding gender; it is feminism which must be purged by postmodernism of Enlightenment, essentialist, absolutist and foundationalist tendencies. Cartesian epistemology, not class or heterosexuality, is the main enemy here, and Foucault, Derrida and Gadamer are brought forward to critique feminism.

Foucault thinks our pleasure’s our pain; incest and its taboo is a game of please and power (‘perpetual spirals of power and pleasure’). The intimacy of violence is not its enjoyment. Of course, if we don’t like that, we are told there can be no escape. Even our resistance is already inscribed, constituted, contained, absorbed, impossible. Is that so? Does this mean that we can only perform with the pleasure and power of Judith, who slept with King Holofernes to cut off his head? Because that is what he desires, if there is no other history. 

Nothing Mat(t)ers: A Feminist Critique of Postmodernism, Somer Brodribb. 1992.