| Abstract: | Although the feminist debate regarding to the supposed problem of relativism has moved on, there is still a nagging anxiety that the embrace of relativism undermines the feminist project. From an initial fear that questioning the notion of a singular truth would paralyse political action, more recent concerns centre on the ethical and, in particular, on responsibility. But for all that contemporary feminism celebrates fluid differences against the singular and fixed, there remains an acceptability gap between, on the one hand, the interpretative approach and, on the other, what can be broadly referred to as deconstruction. For the former, the concession that both material socio-cultural and historical differences, and ideological constructs, affect the way in which individuals understand and reason about the world is not taken to undermine the primacy and truth-value of a supposedly underlying model of reality. The claim is that preceding such differential constructions, there is a stable and ideally recoverable reality that is the guarantor of true knowledge. In contrast to such a hermeneutic reading of appearance as inherently contingent, Shildrick suggests that the metaconcepts of reality, truth and knowledge are in themselves contingent. It is neither relativism nor pluralism that offers escape from the damaging singularities and exclusions of modernity, but rather the move to a postmodernist concept of undecidability. |
