The Pirate's Fiancée:Feminism, Reading, Postmodernism

‘Appropriation’, ‘bricolage’, ‘recording’, ‘scavenging’—a scenario of image piracy has provided the buzzwords of pop cultural theory for most of the 1980s. While programmes for political action in culture have increasingly taken the form of a romance of buccaneering, the more sedate theoretical disputes about postmodernism have begun to generate a myth that feminists, or even women, have so far said little or nothing about one of the most action-packed debates of the decade.

Taking her title from a 1969 film by Nelly Kaplan, Meaghan Morris considers the implications for feminism of a politics which transforms the materials of culture. She also considers the implications for post-modernism and pop theory of recognising the extent to which they already represent a borrowing of feminist thought.

In a collection of essays on subjects ranging from blockbuster cinema to art photography, from Foucault to Mary Daly, from Susan Sontag and Jean Baudrillard to Paul Hogan, she argues that a feminist practice of rewriting discourses should emerge from a political critique of the positioning of women, rather than a vague thematics of changing things.