The Pirate's Fiancée

The Pirate's Fiancée:Feminism, Reading, Postmodernism

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‘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.

Reviews

  • a combination of entertaining pedagogy and intellectual verve ... sheer delight.

    Times Educational Supplement
  • With enormous verve and style she brilliantly intertwines her analyses of the texts of the masters and the occasional mistress) of postmodernism/poststrucuralism with her own political concerns.

    New Statesman and Society