Hello Everyone!

Can anyone please help me in these two topics (men's feminism and postmodern feminism)? I am encountering difficulty in apprehending these two.

Regards,

Postmodernism is a broad set of ideas and arguments relating to advanced
industrialised societies of the late twentieth century onwards. It is
concerned with the description and analysis of the distinctive features of
these societies and with theorising the ramifications of these features for
relations between social groupings, for individual selves and identities,
and for the status and forms of knowledge, science and culture.
Postmodernism as a concept is sometimes used interchangeably with that
of post-structuralism. In this volume, however, the two concepts have
separate entries in order to clarify the differences between them. We
follow the view of writers like Marshall (1994) in regarding poststructuralism
as primarily a theory of knowledge and language, and
postmodernism as primarily a theory of society, culture and history.
It is hard to identify a single, concise illustration of postmodernism,
partly due to variations in the meaning of the concept according to
disciplinary perspective and partly due to the tenets of the concept itself:
a key idea of postmodernism is that things are not certain, orderly and
fixed, but are instead uncertain, disorderly and fluid. That being said, there
is reasonably widespread agreement that the key authors of postmodernism
include Lyotard, Baudrillard and Jameson; Foucault is also often labelled as
a postmodernist writer. There is reasonably widespread agreement, too, that
a shared feature of postmodernist perspectives is the critique of
‘modernism’ as a set of ideas, arguments and analyses. Briefly, modernist
thinking is argued to encapsulate the Enlightenment belief in the practices
and values of science as a way of understanding both the natural and the
social world. Rational thinking and a belief in progress are seen to have
underpinned the development of the key social, economic, political and
cultural features of modern societies, from, say, the fifteenth and sixteenth
centuries up until the mid to late twentieth century. Modernist thinking
was reflected in, for example, the organisation of large-scale methods of
production, in the development of mass party politics, trades unions, and
the welfare state, and in large-scale, universalist social and political theories
which explained or otherwise ‘justified’ modern societies, including
Parsons’ structural functionalism and Marxist historical materialism. In
contrast to modernism, postmodernism encapsulates a turning away from
the Enlightenment project, through a rejection of the authority of science
and a questioning of the inevitability of, and benefits of, progress. In the analyses of postmodernist authors like Lash and Urry (1987), Jameson
(1991) and Baudrillard (1990), for example, advanced industrialised
societies exhibit features such as disorganisation and fragmentation,
insecurity, uncertainty and unpredictability (for example, in the rise of
‘flexible working’, the decline of class-based politics, and through the
‘hyperreal’). For authors like Lyotard (1984), there has been a loss of faith
in the powers of science and other universalist ‘metanarratives’ (or largescale
theories) as the route to improve the human condition. Instead, there
is increasing plurality in cultural representations and knowledge forms, with
greater recognition of the local and the specific and of minority social
groupings, differences and diversity.
The impact of postmodernism has been significant across a wide range
of academic disciplines. It is a concept which has proved impossible to
ignore, although it remains a highly controversial one that has elicited a
variety of responses, including within gender studies. For some writers,
there is a strong affinity between feminism and postmodernism. Hekman
(1990), for example, argues for a ‘postmodern approach to feminism’, in
part based on the similarities between the two. Both feminism and
postmodernism critique dominant knowledge forms, especially
conceptions of science which privilege rationality, causal explanation and
either/or dichotomies. Furthermore, Hekman sees feminism and
postmodernism as ‘complementary and mutually corrective’. A
postmodern position can help resolve some of the key issues debated in
feminism (for example, the existence of an essential female nature), while,
in turn, feminism can contribute to postmodernism through bringing in
gender, a focus which it otherwise often lacks (1990: 3–8). More broadly
within gender studies, an important consequence of the postmodernist
challenge to the legacy of Enlightenment thinking has been the
destabilising of dichotomous gender categories and the increased
recognition of differences within those grouped as ‘women’ and ‘men’
(age, class, ethnicity, sexuality, dis/ability, etc.). Relatedly, there has been
a shift away from large-scale theories which seek to causally explain
gender relations in a universalist sense (for example, patriarchy), to
approaches which centre on the analysis of language and discourse in the
construction of gender (for example, Butler 1990). For Brooks (1997),
such intersections of feminism with postmodernism have produced ‘postfeminism’.
In other words, through an engagement with postmodernism,
feminism has matured into ‘a confident body of theory and politics,
representing pluralism and difference and reflecting on its position in
relation to other philosophical and political movements similarly
demanding change’ (1997: 1).
Responses to the development of ‘postmodernist feminism’ by some
other writers have, however, been less positive. If, as postmodernist
arguments propose, ‘women’ and ‘men’ are untenable unitary categories,
then where does this leave feminism as a political project? Walby argues
against postmodernist feminism, insisting that the ‘signifiers of “woman”
and “man” have sufficient historical and cross-cultural continuity, despite
some variations, to warrant using such terms’ (1994b: 229). Other critics,
Walby included, emphasise the continued importance of empirical
investigations into gender relations, and especially of focusing on material
aspects, rather than merely examining representations and discourses (for
example, Maynard 2001; Jackson 1998). As Oakley contends, ‘if we took
the admonitions of the postmodernist . . . theorists seriously, we would
abandon altogether the interest a practical feminism must have in
establishing how peoples’ material resources, life chances, and experiences
are affected by their gender’ (1998: 143). A further set of responses to the
influence of postmodernism within gender studies amounts neither to its
wholesale acceptance or rejection. In a general sense, most writers within
gender studies recognise that postmodernism has quite rightly focused
attention on diversity and difference, and that its critiques of ‘grand
narratives’ have at least some value (for example, Maynard 1995;Walby
1994b). Moreover, some contributors to the debate on postmodernism and
gender studies have begun to question the very distinctions that have been
drawn between the modern and the postmodern. Zalewski (2000) analyses
modern and postmodern feminist perspectives on the issue of new
reproductive technologies. She argues that, although different, their
perspectives on new reproductive technologies are not necessarily
contradictory and can even be seen as complementary. Similarly, in Felski’s
(2000) analysis, modernism and postmodernism are not antithetical
concepts, partly because neither are unified, coherent or self-evident
entities. Felski’s argument is that feminist theory can help deconstruct the
distinction drawn between modernism and postmodernism and reveal the
‘leaky boundaries’ between the two concepts. For Felski, feminism can
benefit from an engagement with postmodernism as a concept, but also
needs to retain some ‘modernist’ concerns. In other words, feminism should
pay attention ‘to diverse and often contradictory strands of cultural
expression and affiliation without losing sight of broader determinants of
inequality’ (Felski 2000: 206). Feminist analyses also need to realise that
‘power and inequality do not simply reside in language, even though we can
only make sense of them through language’ (2000: 206). In outlining these
terms of feminism’s engagement with postmodernism, Felski is in keeping
with the broader reception given to the concept within gender studies.

Source: 50 key concepts of gender studies

will share another topic soon

Men's Feminism
Men's feminism is a burgeoning field of study that applies
feminist theories to the study of men and masculinity. Men's
feminism took on the task called for by feminists studying
women in relationship to men -- to treat men as well as women
as a gender and to scrutinize masculinity as carefully as
femininity. A prime goal has been to develop a theory, not of
masculinity, but of masculinities, because of the diversity among
men. There are no universal masculine characteristics that are
the same in every society. Nor, for that matter, in any one
society, or in any one organizational setting, as earlier studies of
working-class men and racial stratification made very clear.
The main theory developed in men's feminism, which has been
used to dissect the differences between and within groups of
middle-class and working class men of different ethnic groups
and sexual orientations, is a concept of hegemonic masculinity.
Hegemonic or dominant men are those who are economically
successful, ethnically superior, and visibly heterosexual. Yet the
characteristics of masculinity, hegemonic or otherwise, are not
the source of men's gender status. Genders -- men's and women's
-- are relational and embedded in the structure of the social
order. The object of analysis is thus not masculinity or
femininity but their oppositional relationship. Neither men nor
woman can be studied separately; the whole question of gender
inequality involves a relationship of haves and have-nots, of
dominance and subordination, of advantage and disadvantage.
Men's feminism argues that gender inequality includes men's
denigration of other men as well as their exploitation of women.
Low-level men workers around the world are oppressed by the
inequalities of the global economy, and young working class
urban men's impoverished environment and "taste for risk" has
made them an endangered species. Men's feminism blames
sports, the military, fraternities, and other arenas of male
bonding for encouraging physical and sexual violence and
28 JUDITH LORBER
misogyny. It deplores the pressure on men to identify with but
not be emotionally close to their fathers and to be "cool" and
unfeeling towards the women in their lives and distant from their
own children. But many men feminists have been critical of the
men's movements that foster a search for the primitive or "wild
man" and of religiously oriented men's organizations that link
responsibility to family with patriarchal concepts of manhood.
They argue that these movements seek to change individual
attitudes and do not address the structural conditions of gender
inequality or the power differences among men

Source: Judith Lobrer

The material which you have shared regarding first topic is almost all focused on 'postmodernism' instead of 'postmodern feminism'.

Kindly correct me, if i am wrong.

Regards,

The material which you have shared regarding first topic is almost all focused on 'postmodernism' instead of 'postmodern feminism'.

Kindly correct me, if i am wrong.

Regards,

Yes you are right but it is all about relating theories to feminism, for more details you may consult chapter 8 of "Feminist Thought" by Rosemarie Tong easily available on net .

Hey esoteric, did u find a good explanation of these two topics from somewhere??? Do respond if u did

Hi,
Yes i just grasped the basic idea of these two very briefly.

Can you please tell me which book is this from? Because I would like to read it in greater detail.

Thanks