In the 21st century has become customary to approach the complex of issues around sex and gender via notions of identity. In a contribution written over a quarter of a century ago Annette Scambler both anticipated and expressed concern about this tendency. She saw its intellectual origins in the emergence of postmodernist thinking. In this short blog I revisit her analysis.
The opening sentences read:
‘it is probably within medical sociology that one of the strongest critiques of postmodern feminist projects can be mounted … I will be arguing that, while the tools of postmodernist discourse have often deepened and enriched debates around issues of gender and the subordination of women under patriarchy, the postmodern feminist project itself is fundamentally flawed. It is logically flawed in negating the concept of ‘grand’ narratives whilst postulating its own, namely, that only ‘petit’ narratives re now possible’ (p.100).
Postmodern discourse, she argues, is most antagonistic to the concept of a feminist movement when it focuses on: (i) the deconstruction of the notion of ‘woman’, and (ii) privileges individuals over collectivities. It is a thesis that has come to have increasing resonance in light of the sometimes toxic debates between proponents of ‘gender ideology’ versus ‘gender critical’ standpoints.
Her own stance is clear. In much postmodern thinking:
‘the concept of ‘woman’ is denied validity because it is said to be constructed within a patriarchal discourse characterised by dichotomies and opposites. Woman has been created as opposite to man in this discourse, but has also been created inferior. While there is no doubt that patriarchal discourse has led to a particular construction of womanhood (and manhood), what is problematic is that, once the social genesis of patriarchal discourse has been exposed, there remain ‘underlying realities’ to contend with. Male and female biology retains its difference, for example, and many complex and gendered social structures survive their deconstruction’ (pp.100-101).
In short, what have been called ‘strong social constructionist’ approaches end up denying the existence of material reality. This is to commit what Bhaskar calls the ‘epistemic fallacy’, namely, reducing what exists to what we (think) we know of what exists.
In the second wave of feminism in the 1960s and 1970s feminists were generally united in their aims to free women from their subordination. Deriving their impetus from the liberal tradition they wanted individual women to have the same rights as men.
Progress was slow and alternative philosophies began to take root. In Britain Marxist feminists focused their attention on the problems confronting women who wanted equality in a capitalist system that persisted in using them: (i) as cheap paid labour, (ii) as unpaid reproducers of the next labour force, and (iii) as carers of existing male workers. They demanded changes to the economic infrastructure.
By the late 1960s however, radical feminists started turning their attention away from both the liberal preoccupation with equal opportunities and the Marxist focus on the forces of capitalism and feminism became increasingly fractured. Black feminists, for example, argued that feminism was basically white and middle class. Moreover, working-class women across society were reticent about joining the feminist movement. They were more often motivated by class issues, as when miners’ wives organised to fight the government over pit closures. These women possessed a strong internal solidarity, but their most telling alliance was with working-class men and predominantly male unions and against the middle classes. Summarising:
‘Women in the different strands of feminism began to focus on different aspects of women’s situation. While liberal feminism tended to support the family but wanted women to have more rights within it and more access to jobs and childcare, white radical and Marxist/socialist feminists began to see the family as a key source of oppression. Black women, on the other hand, were integrating two different forces of oppression in their analyses and had to contend with the fact that the family, while it may act as a source of subordination within patriarchy, was also a source of support for black women against white oppression. And white oppression obviously included oppression by white women. So black women began to see their needs as very different from white women and began to argue that one feminism was not possible’ (p.103).
Meanwhile the gay women’s movement was focusing its attention on sexuality and ‘authentic femaleness’, occasioning some discord with heterosexual women. Towards the end of the second wave, in other words, the feminist movement was characterised by disunity and fragmentation. The time was ripe for a new theoretical engagement, and this came via postmodernism.
Postmodern thinking emerged in the context of the enhanced institutionalised individualism associated with the Thatcherite neoliberalism of the 1980s (there is no such thing as society, just families and individuals). Annette Scambler pointed to:
‘a strong association between the ideology of individualism and the growth of feminisms of difference, notwithstanding the fact that much individualist philosophy is in conflict with those difference philosophies which centre heavily on class, race, sexuality, religion and so on, which have a social basis. On the whole, the postmodern theorists from within feminism fitted neatly into the individualist ethos. Perhaps, given the factionalising of feminism, it was the appropriateness of the timing of the rise of postmodernism that led some feminists to commit the cardinal ‘female’ sin of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. The new ideas were exciting and seemed (even) more liberating than the old’ (p.104).
The resultant focus often centred on individual empowerment. While the concept of empowerment is attractive, individual empowerment often depoliticises in a fundamentally anti-feminist way. Women use other women as child-carers and cleaners, and women from the Global South are often exploited even while the call for their empowerment persists.
Postmodern thought held out a promise to deconstruct the established – patriarchal – notion of identity ‘and its binary grid of oppositional concepts’, to offer a future ‘in which we might be freed from the tyranny of constructed identities.’ Yet, as Kate Soper maintained, while it is doing this it subverts itself by using the meaning structures of the old order to construct the new. She wrote:
‘a logic of difference which is theoretically incompatible with the logic of democracy, while continuing implicitly to rely on the latter for its critical force … For why should we ‘respect’ or ‘preserve’ the plurality of social actors … unless we think it is right that they should be represented, and that in treating different persons or groups as different we are treating them more equally’? (Soper, 1991: 100).
A little later Soper adds:
‘there is a risk, in short, that under the cover of the very respectable request that we acknowledge difference, we justify as forms of self-expression what we ought to denounce as modes of greed, narcissism and egoism which are all too little conscience of the basic needs of others; or that in challenging the political collective as a false form of humanism we grant legitimacy to what are actually very disquieting forms of tribalism … In other words, to grant all the rope to ‘discourse’ and none of it to ‘reality’ is to put the noose round those cardinal values of equality and democracy in whose name all serious struggle against oppression must be conducted’ (1991: 107-108).
It is not possible here to do justice to Annette’s analysis of women’s health. She wrote, remember in 1998:
‘in the present postmodern climate, any attempt to return to the primacy of the body is likely to result in charges of determinism and essentialism … Modern feminists who still celebrate the capacity of women’s bodies to nurture and reproduce, often seem to be vilified as unsophisticated theorists.’
She added: as a psychological level this may be understandable ‘since forms of biological determinism have invariably worked to women’s detriment.’ But, and she went on to cite Alison Assiter (1996):
‘Assiter argues that there is a distinction to be made between (socially constructed) gender and (biological) sex. The sex side, she says, is characterised by a ‘minimal notion of the body; by the set of minimally necessary factors that enable us to identify a particular body as male or female’. These are not unchanging, but may be altered by psychological or social manipulation, and may vary in quantity in different males and females. ‘There is, however, a minimally necessary set of bodily or biological features present in every female, features the presence of which enables us to identify the person as female, including ‘some combination of chromosomes, hormones, genitalia and secondary sex characteristics’. This forms the ‘real essence’ or the nature of the kind ‘female’ in something closely akin to a ‘Lockean sense’’ (1998: 114).
Theorists like Assiter allow for patriarchal power within the social, but ‘in movement with biological change in a symbiotic relationship to create distinctive patterns of maleness and femaleness.’
Annette concluded with the following:
‘ it might be suggested that a major part of the problem with the postmodern project is that it somehow manages to disembody the concept of woman when it reduces it to the structure of the male symbolic, even when it is focusing on it corporeally. The mental has been privileged over the notion of embodiment at the expense of the very real problems of dealing with the gritty subjects of conception, childbirth and childrearing, not just as individual experiences of women but as requirments for the social to persist. The focus on identity and individual empowerment tends to gloss over these issues’ (1998: 122).
It is interesting that this account, written for a book published in 1998, has such a strong resonance in 2026, most conspicuously in the context of a culture increasingly oriented to identity politics and to the frequently toxic ‘trans debate’ largely conducted within that culture.
References
Assiter,A (1996) Enlightened Women: Modern Feminism in a Postmodern Age. London; Routledge.
Scambler,A (1998) Gender, health and the feminist debate on postmodernism. In Eds Scambler,G & Higgs,P: Modernity, Medicine and Health: Medical Sociology Towards 2000. London; Routledge.
Soper,K (1991) Postmodernism and its discontents. Feminist Review 39 97-108.