This gathers together the most important statements of postmodern theory, providing the classic essays of authors such as Lyotard, Haraway, Foucault and Rorty. Contributors include well known theorists in the fields of sociology, anthropology, women's and gay studies, philosophy, and history.

1. The postmodern condition Jean-Francois Lyotard; 2. Genealogy and social criticism Michel Foucault; 3. Method, social science, and social hope Richard Rorty; 4. The new cultural politics of difference Cornel West; 5. A manifesto for Cyborgs: science, technology, and socialist feminism in the 1980s Donna Haraway; 6. The end of sociological theory Steven Seidman; 7. The theoretical subject(s) of This Bridge Called My Back and Anglo-American feminism Norma Alarcon; 8. Contingent foundations: feminism and the question of postmodernism Judith Butler; 9. Subjectivity and social analysis Renato Rosaldo; 10. Is there a postmodern sociology? Zygmunt Bauman; 11. On ethnographic allegory James Clifford; 12. Rhetoric, textuality, and the postmodern turn in sociological theory Richard Brown; 13. Social criticism without philosophy: an encounter between feminism and postmodernism Nancy Fraser and Linda Nicholson; 14. Post-structuralism and sociology Charles Lemert; 15. Deconstructing equality-versus-difference: or, the uses of poststructuralist theory for feminism Joan Scott; 16. The plague of discourse: politics, literary theory, and AIDS Lee Edelman.