Unravelling postmodern paralysis: A response to Joan Hoff

Abstract

Joan Hoff, in her article 'Gender as a postmodern category of paralysis', women's History Review, 3, pp. 149-168, usefully shows that questions of how we know gender are displacing questions about what needs to be known about women's lives, and why relations between women and men are as they are. It is argued that if the material realities of women's lives become deconstructed into readings of texts, women's complex and contradictory experiences can be reduced to debates about the limits and possibilities of knowing. Gender relations may be discursively constituted, but this does not mean that they do not really exist. The key problem is that some theories are better at grasping gendered power than others. The disintegration of history into a multiplicity of voices does not make all narratives equal.