Content area
Full Text
The death of Jean Baudrfflard in 2006 brought about a resurgence of scholarship on his work. While writing this essay a wealth of specifically feminist scholarship appeared including a 2011 panel at the American Comparative Literature Association conference entitled "Rethinking Baudrillard and Feminist Theory." In her call for papers Ingrid M. Hoofd writes: "From Jane Gallop's 'French Theory and the Seduction of Feminism/...to Douglas Kellner's 'Baudrillard's Affront to Feminism,' the French sociologist Jean Baudrillard has been widely condemned in the 80s and 90s as an anti-feminist philosopher." Hoofd suggests that it is not just Baudrillard's death but his increasing relevance that makes him important to feminism: "It has become urgent to revisit Baudrillard's relevance for feminist theory in light of the latter's decreasing grip on global politics." According to Hoofd, Baudrillard has become progressively relevant by defining many theories of global politics. Thus, Hoofd argues that feminists need to reconsider their earlier critiques of Baudrillard in order to increase and maintain their own political relevance.
But in most of the recent feminist scholarship on Baudrillard, save for sociologist Victoria Grace's Baudrillard's Challenge: A Feminist Reading (2000), feminists have focused on Baudrillard's later theories of simulation, the transsexual, and cybernetics in order to maintain global relevance, forestalling any reconsideration of his earlier text Seduction (1979).1 In the most recent full length feminist work on Baudrillard, Cyborgs and Barbie Dolls: Feminism, Popular Culture, and the Posthuman Body (2007), Kim Toffoletti only tangentially addresses Seduction: "My purpose here isn't to defend Baudrillard on the topic of seduction.. .rather I look elsewhere in his body of work using his theory of simulation to make sense of posthuman images in a climate characterized by the abundance of signs and the implosion of meaning" (2007, 49). Toffoletti's assumption here is that a theory of seduction is not as important as simulation for understanding today's "climate." A critical engagement with Seduction is, I argue, key to understanding just how we, as feminists, are now in the position of not only trying to "make sense" of the "implosion of meaning" but also defending our "grip on global politics." I agree that a feminist revaluation of Baudrillard's work is "urgent," but I also argue that as long as feminists refuse to engage with Seduction,...