Some questions for materialist feminism

Abstract

This thesis explores the current popular position of the body in postmodern feminist theoty; Elizabeth Grosz's and Judith Butler's work is investigated as representative of the wide-spread celebration of female bodily experience in language. "Postmodernism signifies a historical continuation of "modernism" and both Butler and Grosz return to modem 'materialists" to develop their theorizations of a sexed materiality of the text." Alternatively, I have constructed a dialogue between Frankfurt School materialism, or, an oppositional modernism, allowing the question of historical representation to return to the feminist focus on bodies. I propose Walter Benjamin's interpretation of history in baroque allegory and then, Theodor Adamo's continued insistence on a bodily materialism" (the micro-political level) in conjunction with a 'materialist theory of society' (the macro-political level), as useful intetventions into the predominant focus on the pleasure of the text, or, in feminism, the pleasure of the body.