This collection of essays explores the significant agreements and tensions between contemporary feminist and postmodern theories and practices. Having brought enormous changes to conceptions of the body, identity, and the media, postmodernity compels the rethinking of many feminist categories, including female experience, the self, and the notion that "the personal is political." Feminist analysis has been equally important, though not always equally acknowledged, as a force within postmodernism. Feminist writings on subjectivity, master narratives, and the socioeconomic underpinnings of the master narrative of theory itself have been particularly influential. This volume traces the crossings and mutual interrogations of these two traditions into the arenas of cultural production, legal discourse, and philosophical thought.
Multidisciplinary and international in their collective focus, the essays range from a study of Madonna as an Italian American woman who is revising the cultural meanings of an ethnic feminism to a unique interview with Mairead Keane, the national head of the Women’s Department of the Irish political party Sinn Fein. Turning the prism of postmodern feminism onto such diverse cultural objects as literary and literary critical texts, contemporary film, and music, these essays intervene in debates regarding technology, sexuality, and politics. Challenging modern feminisms to articulate their inescapable relation to postmodern society, this expanded edition of a special issue of boundary 2 also explores ways in which feminism can work as the cutting edge of a global postmodernism.

Contributors. Salwa Bakr, Claire Detels, Margaret Ferguson, Carla Freccero, Marjorie Garber, Barbara Harlow, Laura E. Lyons, Anne McClintock, Toril Moi, Linda Nicholson, Mary Poovey, Andrew Ross, David Simpson, Kathyrn Bond Stockton, Jennifer Wicke

Feminism and the Final Foucault is the first systematic offering of contemporary, international feminist perspectives on the later work of philosopher Michel Foucault.
 
Rather than simply debating the merits or limitations of Foucault's later work, the essays in this collection examine women's historical self-practices, conceive of feminism as a shared ethos, and consider the political significance of this conceptualization in order to elucidate, experiment with, and put into practice the conceptual "tools" that Foucault offers for feminist ethics and politics. The volume illustrates the ways in which Foucault's later thinking on ethics as "care of the self" can reintroduce a number of issues and themes that feminists jettisoned in the wake of postmodernism, including consciousness raising, feminist therapy, the subject woman, identity politics, and feminist agency.
 
Taken as a whole, the diversity of feminist viewpoints presented provide important new insights into "the final Foucault," and thus serve as a productive intervention in current Foucault scholarship.
 

In an insightful assessment of the study and teaching of writing against the larger theoretical, political, and technological upheavals of the past thirty years, Fragments of Rationality questions why composition studies has been less affected by postmodern theory than other humanities and social science disciplines.

If the postmodern is a collage—as some critics have suggested—or if collage is itself a kernel of the postmodern, what does this mean for our way of understanding the world? The Frame and the Mirror uses this question to probe the distinctive character of the postmodern situation and the philosophical problem of representation. Brockelman’s work is itself a collage of sorts, using juxtapositions of critics and art historical figures to conduct a debate between such figures as Karsten Harries, Gianni Vattimo, Rosalind Krauss, Immanuel Kant, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Slavo Žižek, and Le Corbusier about issues such as truth in art, perspectivism, theatricality, the sublime, psychoanalytic theory, politics, and urbanism.

More than an introduction to the postmodern, The Frame and the Mirror advances our understanding of the contemporary world by relating its features to the peculiar characteristics of collage. Ultimately, Brockelman shows how collage demands that we reinterpret modernity, conceiving of it as suspended between a loss of certainty and a new kind of knowledge about the human condition. In doing so, his work challenges many of the claims made in the name of postmodernism—and offers in their place a new and ironic view of the cultural space in which contemporary and historical events occur.