genderberg.com

has anyone read this? i found a review online, it looks interesting. its quite expensive though!

Yes, it's terrific. It has lots and lots of rebuttals to postmodernism and the pro-prostitution and pro-porn brigades. It's also good to read something reasonably up to date.

ohh answers to pomo idiots, awesome.

My favourite was a chapter on the so-called French feminists (Kristeva, Cixious, et al) by a French feminist who says they aren't even regarded as feminists in France. Hee, hee.

As a linguistics and English double major in college, I think I accepted that I was a postmodernist before I accepted I was a feminist, which is rare for radical feminists I've noticed.

I was a mega-nerd who overloaded credits each semester and took a lot of experimental classes and independent studies. When I signed up for the brand-spanking new class Postmodernist Theory & Philosophy I didn't have a clue what it would be about but I took like a fish to water to questioning meta-narratives, unravelling semiotics, and deconstructing simulacra back to its earliest signifier. The language theory of Kristeva was challenging for most in the class to read but I breathed it in and was never so proud to be a linguist in an English class. The class was also my introduction to academic queer theory, which I went on to pursue in the experimental Queer Studies minor at my college.

The gender questions (and language stuff) were where my heart was at concerning postmodernism, and I am grateful to what pomo had to teach me in regards to rejecting hierarchy and raising up minority voices and opinions, but that's the limit of its usefulness for an activist who won't live with her head in a book. The emblem of Harvard is of three books with two faced up and one, veritas, faced down to symbolize that truth is not always found in books. While the possibility of endless personas and experiences is theoretically true, it's also true that people alig themselves to archetypes and social forces are much more than the sum of each individual's experience.

I've spoken with sociology professor and antiporn writer Gail Dines about this some and she believes the gender issues, queer theory, and theoretical language stuff I focused on in the mid 90s is different than what's being taught as pomo a decade later. Can anyone speak to that?

I read around some post-modernism when I was at university in the early nineties. Nothing to do with my course, but it was pretty much the same kind of thing that they seem to be coming coming out with now. Certainly the stuff that the women's studies undergraduates on Livejournal say seems painfully familiar.

Feminism and other liberation movements were already undermining the grand narrative and questioning accepted truths. Post-modernism as far as I can see stole that approach and emptied it of its political meaning. I don't think it's a coincidence that at the very moment feminism started having some success, a form of politics sprang up that didn't even accept the idea that there could be such a thing as a woman (thank you Judith Butler). I also never understood why something that began in English departments was suddenly accepted as a political movement.

An English professor I knew back in the late eighties told me it wasn't surprise that someone like Paul de Man who wrote Nazi tracts during the war would be part of the deconstructionist movement that tried to undermine ideas like objective truth. I reckon he was about right.

I can't speak to pomo, just that everyone who describes themselves as a post modernist gives me bullshit like this when we're arguing feminism:

If the truth of what you say is so clear, it shouldn't be difficult to convince me, who is, in many ways, already on your side.

(To me it was not obvious at all that he was on my side seeing as he told me I can't critique Titus or Lysistrata)

This is the kind of student Rutgers University Gender Studies Department is producing for example. Doesn't have a clue about radical feminism, hasn't read any radical feminists but is fully conversant with Lacan, Derrida and Barthes. Still thinks he can pronounce on radical feminism however.

http://community.livejournal.com/feminist/2169435.html

And another thing whilst I'm on a roll complaining about postmodernism what other political movement requires people to go to university to be able to understand it? Academia is a prerequisite for being a postmodernist.