L’aspetto che mi è parso invece utile, ciò che fa guadagnare la seconda stella a un testo altrimenti davvero sovrapponibile e criptico, è il concetto “The private and the public” (156-64), che appoggiandosi su alcune teorie femministe (in particolare Catherine Stimpson) ricorda: “Experience generated more than art; it was a source of political engagement as well” (1988: 226). Scrive la Hutcheon: “The feminist rethinking has coincided with a general renegotiation of the separation of high art from the culture of everyday life – popular and mass culture – and the combined result has been a reconsideration of both the context of historical narrative and the politics of representation and self-representation. [...] One would be those historiographic metafictions in which the fictively personal becomes the historically – and thus politically – public in a kind of synecdochic fashion [...] and the result is the politicization of public and private experience, of nationality and subjectivity”. (154).
L’epilogo pure riveste un qualche interesse, se non altro come summa dei saggi principali scritti sul postmodernismo fra fine ’80 e il 2002. In particolre, sono interessanti gli allacci che la Hutcheon fa tra il postmodernismo e la queer theory, sostenendo che tutti e due condividono:
a) l’ironia
b) la parodia
c) l’interesse nell’eccentrico e nell’ibrido.
“Like postmodernism, then, queer theory and practice attempt to demistify, subvert, undo – and often through irony” (179).