Eliminating gender difference was the second wave’s modern arm, affirming womanhood its postmodern arm.
Evidence
Clearly, my work here is indebted to these arguments. But rather than emphasizing either the foundational status or the continuing simultaneity of these contradictory positions, I am arguing that in the early second wave, this simultaneity constructed the elimination of gender difference as the utopian goal of overcoming all dualistic hierarchical oppressions, founded on the primary gender oppression, as an agenda of modernity, while the particularist, subjectivist goal of affirming women as an identity category was constructed as an agenda of postmodernity. — Marianne DeKoven, Utopia Limited, 855
Categorization
- DEEPTHINKING: A genuinely original re-reading that splits feminism’s founding contradiction along the modern/postmodern axis rather than treating it as permanent simultaneity. Dense and reusable.
- XREF: Directly extends the ch33 point that second-wave feminism fused modern universalism with postmodern binary critique but now differentiates the two arms. — connects to: Second-wave feminism fused modern universalism with postmodern binary critique inseparably. — Marianne DeKoven, Utopia Limited: The Sixties and the…, 831; Feminist politics is irreducibly torn between claims as women and claims as humans. — Marianne DeKoven, Utopia Limited: The Sixties and the…, 854; Queer theory aims to deconstruct gender binaries, not eliminate them. — Marianne DeKoven, Utopia Limited: The Sixties and the…, 856 (+1 more)
Broader Connections
- Radical feminism’s internal contradiction prefigured the modern-postmodern feminist split.
#qualifies(0.85) — Marianne DeKoven, Utopia Limited, 852