“It is safest to grasp the concept of the postmodern as an attempt to think the present historically in an age that has forgotten to think historically in the first place” (Fredric Jameson ix)
Overview
- Critical Analysis of Culture Essay (Due Friday, 9/20, 11:00pm)
- Most likely returning to Monday’s page
- Two important notes on Gender/Sexuality
- The forgotten ‘A’ in LGBTQIA+ and defining identity through sexuality
- Gender-affirming care from 19th News
“More broadly, gender-affirming care is any kind of medical care that people get to bring their bodies into more comfortable alignment with their sense of gender (think of IUDs, erectile dysfunction medication, laser hair removal and breast reduction surgeries).”- Gender-realignment surgery
- Hormone therapy
- Breast Augmentation
- Hair treatments (minoxidil, transplants, wigs, etc.)
- Elon Musk meme…
- Identity/Comfortability-affirming care (presentation)
- Make up, fashion, etc. to present one’s appearance in a particular way
- Working out, accentuating, diverting attention, etc. to present in a particular way
- It might not be synonymous with “gender-affirming care,” but there’s definitely overlap
- Postmodernism, Part 1
Postmodernism
I have lots of resources up on this topic, but I’ll address the elephant in the room. Because postmodernism rejects grand narratives and definitive statements (broadly), defining it goes against the tenets it advocates/observes. Therefore, it’s hard to come up with a certain definition, which is unfortunate. However, we can say that postmodernism tries to explain the condition of posmodernity…simple, right? Let’s back up to modernism as an introduction:
- Modernism focuses on the conditions of modernity, roughly 1900-1945 (these are academic boundaries)
- “Modernity” isn’t synonymous with “modern,” which is often referred to as history since the Rennaissance (circa 1500), including the Enlightenment, through today.
- Might 1492 be a good year to propose as a beginning?
- Futurism, the first European avant-garde
- Fodism/Taylorism
- Industrialization is in full swing
- Colonial power grabs and conflicts
- Militarization
- Mass propaganda
- Communism
- Fascism
- WW1
- WW2
Simon Malpas’s The Postmodern (pp. 1-32)
We’ll be covering this over multiple class periods, so I’ll just throw in some notes. Next Wednesday, 9/25, we’ll be discussing Marxism and cultural studies, and Malpas helps you understand some of the connection. It’s probably frustrating that Malpas (who has an unenviable task) provides theorists who disagree on the definition and time period(s) of postmodernism. I think this is something to embrace about studying postmodernism: it follows our embrace of ambiguity well.
- p. 1: “The world is now, quite literally, at our fingertips as we choose and purchase lifestyles from wherever we please, eclectically piecing together patchworks of images and signs to produce our identities.”
- p. 2: “Contemporary culture in all its variety rests on ‘money’, on ‘buying power’, and the apparently borderless postmodern world is so only for the Western elites who have the wealth and power to travel, consume and freely choose their lifestyles.”
- Much like modernism (and even modern), this is a Western historical construct
- Yet postcolonialism comes out of this…
- p. 3: “…deregulation, dispersal and disruption as the securities of tradition and community are continually crushed.”
- pp. 4-5 (emphasis added): “…some critics celebrate the postmodern as a period of playful freedom and consumer choice, some see it as a culture that has gone off the rails as communities around the globe have their traditions obliterated by the spread of capitalism, and for others its complex theories and outlandish cultural productions mark an abdication from any engagement with the real world at all.”
- p. 9: “Broadly speaking, postmodernism has tended to focus on questions of style and artistic representation, and postmodernity has been employed to designate a specific cultural context or historical epoch.”
- p. 20: “…postmodernism marks the exhaustion of those projects, the end of a sense that art has a single purpose or can change the world, and yet it also indicates a democratisation of art coupled with a continuing expansion of the forms and techniques that might be counted as artistic…”
- p. 24: “[Brian] McHale argues that the move from modern to postmodern fiction is marked by a change from a focus on epistemological issues to an exploration of ontological questions.”
- If I told you both were a part of postmodernism, you might curse this discussion.
- Consider the ontological approach as a way of understanding that doesn’t (have to) rely on quantitative methods and scientific discourse communities.
- p. 25: “Parody, according to Jameson, has a critical edge: it challenges and subverts that which it mimics. Pastiche, on the other hand, is concerned only with the superficial appropriation of different modes and genres for the generation of its own performative style.”
- pp. 26-27: “If for Jameson, then, postmodernism marks an abdication from political responsibility, engagement and critique, for Hutcheon it opens new political channels to challenge the dominant ideological discourses of the present.”
- p. 28: “the relationship between realism, modernism and postmodernism is seen as a gradual progress from the restrictions of the first to the freedom and experimentation of the last.”
- Realist ways of depicting the world (p. 32)
- “…cultures have particular realist ways of depicting the world that are open to challenge and transformation.”
- p. 32: Although specifically addressing architecture, this holds for much of postmodernism: “uniformity and universalism have fallen rapidly from grace.”
Coming up…
Don’t forget the your Critical Analysis of Culture Essay is due Friday, 9/20, 11:00pm, on Canvas. Keep up reading Malpas, and we’ll return to postmodernism next week. Make sure to respond to Weekly Discussion Post #5 before Saturday, 9/21, 11:00pm.
Work Cited
Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or, the cultural logic of late-capitalism. Duke UP, 1991.
Malpas, Simon. The Postmodern. Routledge, 2005.