Feminist critics’’have often pondered whether a postmodern language may be articulated that obviates the essentialist arrogance of much modernist and some feminist discourse and does not reduce feminism to silences or a purely negative and reactionary stance. This ideal may be actualized in a discourse that recognizes itself as historically situated, ’’ as motivated by values and, thus, political interests, and as a human practice without transcendent justification. The author Dorothy Allison meets these criteria by focusing on women who have been marginalized by totalizing forces and ideas, while simultaneously reminding the reader, through the wide range of women that she portrays and their culpability in her protagonists’’ predicaments, that unlike pure and transcendent heroes, women are real characters and morally complex. Allison insists that humans are burdened with the responsibility of fashioning their own stories, quotidian as they may be, and .while these will never offer the solace of transcendent justification, the constant negotiation between the word and the world avoids reticence on the one hand and the purely negative on the other.