“포스트페미니즘” 시대의 페미니즘 비평 - 보편성과 여성, 그리고 문학

Feminist Criticism in the Age of "Postfeminism": Universality, Women and Literature

  The term "postfeminism" addresses the backlash against feminism which has gathered pace over the past 20 years, and the re-formation of the main issues of feminism from the oppression of women and fights for universal rights to the gender studies and sexuality as well. It is related with the intervention of identity politics, poststructuralism and postcolonialism, which have challenged the idea of "common oppression" of the Woman arguing that the Woman actually stands for the white middle class heterosexual women. For all the proliferation of the differences in terms of race, class, and sexual orientation among feminist discourses, this new paradigm in feminism stops short of rethinking the complicated relationship women and feminism have had with the universality and institutionalization. For what should be revised is not only the notion of "common" oppressive situation and "common" goal, but the very assumption that feminist discourses or any radical perspectives may derive their own justification from "oppression". Virginia Woolf"s Three Guineas helps to reevaluate the feminist objectives and strategies so far and suggests the frame of thinking we still need to grapple with universality. It shows that universality is not simply the question of inclusion and exclusion because there is no escaping the frame of universality even when one is excluded from the universal norm. The deconstruction of universality, therefore, comes only with understanding the way we are inescapably involved with the universality and the law. Woolf emphasizes the personal as the occasion of subverting the universal and associates it with literature. While literature, the institutionless institution as Derrida puts it, should submit to the law to establish itself as such, it is an absolutely singular event which can exercise the legislative power to sidestep existing laws. Likewise sexual difference as subverting universality can be thought of as such a singular event that happens in the gap between the singularity and its repetition or generalization, that is, through iterability.