Postmodern feminism

[2] Postmodern feminists argue that language constructs reality and that power is embedded in social norms, shaping identities and limiting agency.

[3] French feminism, as it is known today, is an Anglo-American invention coined by Alice Jardine to be a section in a larger movement of postmodernism in France during the 1980s.

They draw on and critique the work of Simone de Beauvoir, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Lacan, as well as on Irigaray's argument that what we conventionally regard as "feminine" is only a reflection of what is constructed as masculine.

[8][9] Butler criticises the distinction drawn by previous feminisms between (biological) sex and (socially constructed) gender.

"She reads Moraga's statement that 'the danger lies in ranking the oppressions' to mean that we have no way of adjudicating among different kinds of oppressions—that any attempt to casually relate or hierarchize the varieties of oppressions people suffer constitutes an imperializing, colonizing, or totalizing gesture that renders the effort invalid…thus, although Butler at first appears to have understood the critiques of women who have been historically precluded from occupying the position of the 'subject' of feminism, it becomes clear that their voices have been merely instrumental to her" (Moya, 790).

She also stated that because language is always open to re-interpretation, it can also be used to resist this shaping and restriction, and so is a potentially fruitful site of political struggle.

They believe that through abandoning the values of Enlightenment thought postmodern feminism "precludes the possibility of liberating political action.

"[14] This concern can be seen in critics such as Meaghan Morris, who have argued that postmodern feminism runs the risk of undercutting the basis of a politics of action based upon gender difference, through its very anti-essentialism.