between male and female disappear. Differences are there to be ironed out. Conventional gender boundaries are there to be erased. The war between the sexes can be ended by the realization that there are no sexes (‘we are all the same’). This belief rests on the perception that gender differences are a social construct (on the same grounds, this perception might appear no more than a social construct of the academy). The dispersal of our identities offers the hope of social and sexual reconciliation and thus an end to confrontation.
‘Do the postmodern academics really believe all that?’ asks Anne.
‘Worse,’ says Bill.
Postmodernists assert that all knowledge is constructed. Therefore there is no scientific truth or facts; only several versions of ‘facts’, constructed out of every individual’s cultural conditions. No one person’s version of the ‘facts’ can take precedence over any other’s. However, they often go on to say that, in the interests of ‘diversity’, the version of the ‘facts’ held by minority groups is to be given precedence. Somehow, postmodern women consider themselves a minority group.
‘No scientific truths –?’ asks Anne.
‘Maybe they give equal weight to the theory that the earth is flat,’ suggests Bill.
In an article entitled ‘How Feminism is Now Alienating Women from Science’, Noretta Koertge says: ‘Feminists add a new twist to this old litany of repudiations of analytical reasoning by claiming that the standard norms and methods of scientific inquiring are sexist because they are incompatible with women’s ways of knowing.’6 These ‘subjectivist’ women see the methods of logic, analysis and abstraction as ‘alien territory belonging to men’ and they ‘value intuition as a safer and more fruitful approach to truth’.
Paul Gross and Norman Levitt note in an abstract of their book Higher Superstition that: ‘if they [the recruits to the cause of feminist science] attempt to hold fast to the most emphatic tenets of feminist dogma – for instance, the stylish assertion that “women” can’t be “scientists” under the present order, because society constructs these as mutually exclusive categories, and therefore that scientific practice must be reconstituted along radical-feminist lines before women can participate – they will quickly find themselves effectively excluded from serious scientific work.’7
Listen to Rosi Braidotti, Professor of Women’s Studies at the University of Utrecht, describe her postmodern version of science:
It is because of this dynamic, life-giving element that I have chosen the term nomadic to describe this feminist style. Nomadic subjects are capable of freeing the activity of thinking from the hold of phallocentric dogmatism, returning thought to its freedom, its liveliness, its beauty. There is a strong aesthetic dimension in the quest for alternative nomadic figurations and feminist theory such as I practice that is informed by this joyful nomadic force … I think it is extremely important for feminists to break away from the patterns of masculine identification that high theory demands, to step out of the paralyzing structures of an exclusive [read, ‘scientific’] academic style.8
The shift is from the modern to the postmodern world: to a world without graven rules or certitudes (except for the law against laws). The overriding cliché is that there is as much variance within a sex as exists between the sexes. The postmodern, deconstructed intellectual cannot say simply, ‘Women are like this’ or ‘Men are like that’, because such statements acknowledge a biological difference; there can be no such difference if sexual identities are constructed and, consequently, capable of being deconstructed. This view, which became popular in the 1980s, was labelled ‘deconstructive feminism’. ‘This form of academic feminist thinking,’ wrote Lynne Segal, a feminist theoretician, ‘was increasingly sceptical of any generalisations about “women” or women’s “distinctive perspective”. Some feminist theoreticians were now questioning all types of fixed categories, identities and relationships, stressing what they saw as the complex, shifting and plural nature of the social meanings.’9
Plainly the traditional male, the deeply unreconstructed brute himself, is a sad anachronism in this shifting, boundary-free world, and so the attempt is being made to change him. This can only be done, of course, if we accept that masculinity is a social, cultural, political or historical construct in the first place. At Hobart College in New York State there is a men’s study programme, Course 245: Men and Masculinity, and the course summary offers the underlying assumption that ‘masculinity is problematic – for men and for women – but also socially conditioned and historically variable, and therefore subject to change.’10 ‘Male and female created he them’, but the academy is at hand to undo the damage. The academy holds to a common subtheme that the world was first constructed by men and the female’s role in the world was also made by him; that being the case, women can now return the compliment by reconstructing the world and his role. Call it revenge, if you like, but there is a conscious attempt to undermine masculine identity.
‘In the social sciences,’ says Bill, ‘there is too often a presumption against things that are not socially conctructed.’
‘But,’ says Anne, ‘there are other, harder sciences that show real sex differences.’
‘Hmm …’ says Bill. ‘Then in exploring the new science of gender differences we also explore the limits of social theory and its capacity to transform the sexes.’
If (and it is a big IF) gender is socially conditioned, then it must be true that it can be socially unconditioned and that sexual roles can be unlearned. In part this is true, inasmuch as the male who stamps his views on women can learn to recognize the existence of another mind (and vice versa). What then of the view that the sexes are alike, but the male can never be wholly deconstructed because he lacks the female experience? He cannot experience the menses, birthing or lactation. Trivialities, says the feminist. Failure to experience such physical processes does not affect the male’s ability to embrace and adopt feminine virtues: peace, co-operation, holistic dreams. The time when the lion will lie down with the lamb or, even better, the lioness. How much the world would be improved if only they, men, were more like women.
When the communicators of our society (the academy and the media) fail to get a grip on a subject – fail, that is, to understand what they are supposed to be explaining – the failure is often depicted as a deeper form of understanding. It is presented as a kind of wry humility, summed up by the adage ‘the more we know the less we know’. Lack of understanding is taken as a virtue instead of a failing. It seems that one cannot be sure about anything except the advantages of not knowing. It is the postmodern understanding; and, perhaps, the foxhole for the spooked and lost in every generation.
Postmodernists have no answers (answers are unambiguous, and unambiguity is bad), and that is the problem. They confront certainty with the question, ‘How can you be so sure?’ It is a useful logic for unsettling coherence (and is used not only by postmodern academics but also by neo-Nazis in their rejection of the existence of the Holocaust). It also advances all the frontiers of ignorance.
This postmodern ‘understanding’ rides in tandem with a common female approach to the world in general, an approach that is non-confrontational, non-judgemental, unaligned and multi-cultural. The past is seen as having been defined by male certainties, summed up in the dismissive acronym DWEM, which defines and rejects the philosophy, art, literature and cultural assumptions bequeathed to us by Dead White European Males. The old canon – that body of knowledge which was thought essential to an understanding of our culture – has been dismissed by many parts of the academy. To claim that Shakespeare is a greater writer than, say, some previously unknown woman is to be elitist. Thus we witness the feminization of the academy.
What is fixed is decreed authoritarian.
