Published in 1992
178 pages
Somer Brodribb taught feminist theory and politics at Canadian Universities in the 1990s. Her experience of backlash is outlined in ‘The Equity Franchise’, CCLOW, Women’s Education, 1996, and is the focus of Dorothy Smith’s chapter ‘Texts and Repression’ in Writing the Social, 1999. One of her best political articles is about establishing a shelter: ‘Winonah’s’ in Resources for Feminist Research, September, 1988. She now lives in England, and her short fiction has appeared in The Sandhopper Lover, 2009, produced by the Welsh publisher, Cinnamon Press, in Momaya’s Annual Review, 2011, and in The French Literary Review, 2012.
What is this book about?
Nothing Mat(t)ers is a feminist critique of the theories of Foucault, Derrida, and Lacan, among others. Somer Brodribb analyzes the texts and the arguments that poststructuralism has nominated as central, in the process exposing the misogyny at their core.
Brodribb provides a history of definitions of structuralism, poststructuralism, deconstruction, and postmodernism. She considers feminist encounters with structuralism and existentialism. She evaluates the originality of Foucault’s contributions and discusses feminist responses to his work.
Turning to Derrida, she considers his fixation with dissemination and de/meaning versus conception and new embodiment. She contrasts the work of Lacan and Irigaray on ethics before turning to the work of de Beauvoir, O’Brien, and other feminists as an authentic alternative to postmodern critical theory.
“An eloquent work. Somer Brodribb not only gives us a feminist critique of postmodernism with its masculinist predeterminants in existentialism, its Freudian footholdings and its Sadean values, but in the very form and texture of the critique, she literally creates new discourse in feminist theory. Brodribb has transcended not only postmodernism but its requirement that we speak in its voice even when criticizing it. She creates a language that is at once poetic and powerfully analytical. Her insistent and compelling radical critique refuses essentialism-from both masculinist thinkers and their women followers. She demystifies postmodernism to reveal that it and its antecedents represent yet another mundane version of patriarchal politics. Ultimately Brodribb returns us to feminist theory with the message that we must refuse to be derivative and continue to originate theory and politics from the condition of women under male domination.” -Kathleen Barry, author of Female Sexual Slavery
“An iconoclastic work brilliantly undertaken . . . Nothing Mat(T)ers magnificently shows that postmodernism is the cultural capital of late patriarchy. It is the art of self- display, the conceit of masculine self and the science of reproductive and genetic engineering in an ecstatic Nietzschean cycle of statis.” -Andre Michel
“Nothing Mat(T)ers encapsulates in its title the valuelessness of the current academic fad of postmodernism. Somer Brodribb has written a brave and witty book demolishing the gods and goddesses of postmodernism by deconstructing their method and de-centering their subjects and, in the process, has deconstructed deconstructionism and decentered decentering! This is a long-awaited and much-needed book from a tough- minded, embodied, and unflinching scholar.” -Janice Raymond.
