2006/10/01 by Toril Moi · 1 citation
Environmental Science · Mathematics · Psychology · Social Sciences · #Academic Research and Education Studies #Argument (complex analysis) #Critical theory #Education, Psychology, and Complexity Research #Epistemology #Feminism #Feminist philosophy #Feminist theory #Gender studies #Multicultural Socio-Legal Studies #Philosophy #Psychoanalysis #Psychoanalytic theory #Psychology #Queer #Queer theory #Sociology #Wonder
paper · doi:10.1632/pmla.2006.121.5.1735
openalex publication_date 2006/10/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/05/21
If PMIA invites us to reflect on the state of feminist theory today, it must be because there is a problem. Is feminist theory thought to be in trouble because feminism is languishing? Or because there is a problem with theory? Or—as it seems to me—both? Theory is a word usually used about work done in the poststructuralist tradition. (Luce Irigaray and Michel Foucault are “theory” Simone de Beauvoir and Ludwig Wittgenstein are not.) The poststructuralist paradigm is now exhausted. We are living through an era of “crisis,” as Thomas Kuhn would call it, an era in which the old is dying and the new has not yet been born (74–75). The fundamental assumptions of feminist theory in its various current guises (queer theory, postcolonial feminist theory, transnational feminist theory, psychoanalytic feminist theory, and so on) are still informed by some version of poststructuralism. No wonder, then, that so much feminist work today produces only tediously predictable lines of argument.