It is difficult to begin writing a book with a sense of anticipation that one's reader may already be feeling a sense of dread. I imagine you scowling, ‘not another book on feminism and postmodernism’. And I imagine you yawning, ‘hasn't enough been said?’ Of course, the fantasies one has of ‘the reader’ or ‘one's reader’ are always impossible, always inadequate to their object. But, as someone interested in how feminism and postmodernism can and do speak to each other, I have a sense in which there is a critical reluctance to pursue a debate on or through these terms at all. So, one reader of my work comments, ‘my heart did rather sink at the prospect of yet another book on feminism and postmodernism’. This prospect of readers with sinking hearts is, to say the least, alarming. To deal with this doubling of affect (the reader's sinking heart, the writer's alarm) I want to ask: is the difficulty simply the proliferation of books on feminism and postmodernism, or is the difficulty about how the proliferation has taken place and to what effect?

Indeed, at the first academic conference at which I presented my work in 1993 the conference organiser commented on how none of the papers on postmodernism had said anything new or different. She suggested to me that all the papers – which had offered very different positions and were shaped by diverse disciplinary frameworks – were simply re-staging an old debate.