Loyola University Chicago Loyola eCommons Dissertations Theses and Dissertations 2011 The Seduction of Feminist Theory Erin Amann Holliday-Karre Loyola University Chicago Follow this and additional works at: https://ecommons.luc.edu/luc_diss Part of the Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons Recommended Citation Holliday-Karre, Erin Amann, "The Seduction of Feminist Theory" (2011). Dissertations. 168. https://ecommons.luc.edu/luc_diss/168 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Theses and Dissertations at Loyola eCommons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Loyola eCommons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License. Copyright © 2011 Erin Amann Holliday-Karre LOYOLA UNIVERSITY CHICAGO THE SEDUCTION OF FEMINIST THEORY A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL IN CANDIDACY FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY PROGRAM IN ENGLISH LITERATURE BY ERIN HOLLIDAY-KARRE CHICAGO, ILLINOIS MAY 2011 Copyright by Erin Holliday-Karre, 2011 All rights reserved. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am eternally indebted to Pamela L. Caughie not only for her tireless work on and enthusiastic support of this project but also for her friendship, which ultimately pushed me to persist with an “ambitious” dissertation. To Anne Callahan for spending so many hours in her writing studio helping me search for just the right word to capture what I was trying to say. To Holly Laird for graciously acknowledging in my work a previous aspiration of her own and for her masterful editorial skills. And to Paul Jay for making me mindful of oppositional viewpoints. To the best friends, colleagues, sounding boards, support group, and writing group that any graduate student could ever hope to have: Natalie Kalich, Julia Daniel, Allison Fagan, Lacey Conley, Faith Bennett, and Scott Cheney. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS iii CHAPTER ONE: SEDUCING FEMINISM: AN INTRODUCTION 1 Feminism on Baudrillard 1 Baudrillard on Seduction 10 Anti-productive Feminism: Challenging the Discourse of Meaning and Value 23 CHAPTER TWO: THE SEDUCTION OF FEMINIST THEORY 31 The Feminist who Refuses: “There is No Seduction Here” 31 The Feminine: Joan Rivière and Psychoanalysis 40 Equality: A Guinea for Your Thoughts 50 Subverting Identity: Or Feminism’s Fictional Identity Crisis 64 Difference and Feminism 77 Knowledge/Knowing/Known 90 CHAPTER THREE: FROM PRODUCTION TO SEDUCTION: WOMEN AND POWER IN THE PROGRESSIVE ERA 102 CHAPTER FOUR: SELF-SPECTACULARIZATION AND SEDUCTION: DE- EMPHASIZING SEX AND SEXUALITY IN MODERNIST ERA FEMINISM AND FICTION 132 Producing Sex 132 Sexual Reform in the Modernist Era 141 New Woman Feminism 156 The Limits of Seduction 180 CHAPTER FIVE: POSTWAR FEMINISM: AN INTERLUDE 188 CHAPTER SIX: SIMULATING FEMINISM: POSTMODERN POLITICS AND THE LANGUAGE OF SILENCE 199 Modeling Feminism 206 Feminism Beyond the Model 215 Reading For Silence: Postmodern Literature and Feminism 226 CHAPTER SEVEN: CONCLUSION: A SIMULATION OF TRUTH: RECONCILING GENDER IN THE MEDIA AND THE TRUTH AND RECONCILATION COMMISSION IN SOUTH AFRICA 253 BIBLIOGRAPHY 270 VITA 280 i v CHAPTER ONE SEDUCING FEMINISM: AN INTRODUCTION Feminism on Baudrillard The recent death of French sociologist and theorist Jean Baudrillard in 2006 brought about a resurgence of scholarship on his work. While writing this dissertation a wealth of specifically feminist scholarship appeared including, most recently, 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,’ Meaghan Morris’s ‘Room 101 or A Few Worst Things in The World’ 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” <http://www.acla.org/acla2011/?p=425>. It is true that Baudrillard has long been dismissed by feminism not only as “antifeminist,” but also, by implication, as sexist, racist, and misogynist. 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.” Feminism, according to Hoofd, has become decreasingly irrelevant, while Baudrillard has come to define many theories of global politics: the media, simulation, cybernetics, and the hyperreal, to name a few. Thus, in order to regain 1 2 political relevance, Hooft argues that it is time for feminists to reconsider their earlier critiques. But in all of the recent feminist scholarship on Baudrillard, save for sociologist Victoria Grace’s Baudrillard’s Challenge: A Feminist Reading (2000), which I discuss later in the chapter, feminists have focused on Baudrillard’s latter theories of simulation and the posthuman in order to maintain global relevance, forestalling any reconsideration of his earlier text Seduction (1979). In the most recent feminist text on Baudrillard, Cyborgs and Barbie Dolls: Feminism, Popular Culture, and the Posthuman Body (2007), Kim Tofoletti 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” (49). Tofoletti’s refusal to engage Seduction is not surprising given the fact that Seduction is commonly viewed as his most sexist work. But Tofoletti’s assumption here is also 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, they will continue to miss an unacknowledged historical strand of feminism that speaks to our continued rather than decreasing grip on global politics. Revisiting Baudrillard’s theories will not make feminism relevant unless reading them 3 allows us to re-imagine the history of modern feminism as already relevant. In this dissertation, I reread the history of modern feminism through Baudrillard’s theory of seduction, arguing for a revaluation of feminist history and literature to highlight feminism’s ongoing challenge to power and politics. Contrary to popular feminist belief, Baudrillard’s work on seduction is not rooted in a fundamental disregard for or antagonistic stance toward women. But the fact that this remains a prevailing point of view proves that feminists ban together more than most people give them credit for. Jane Gallop blacklisted Seduction in the 1980s and, since then, feminist scholars have skipped over this seminal work, usually with a nod to Gallop,1 before moving on to engage later works, such as Simulations or Transparency of Evil.2 Perhaps those feminists who use Baudrillard’s later work do not recognize that his theory about the media and image culture came about as a supplement to Seduction, a lament over what Baudrillard fears is the contemporary loss of seduction through the overproduction of meaning. In failing to account for his earlier work, feminists miss the important implication of seduction as a strategy and a practice aimed at challenging the overproduction of meaning. Jane Gallop’s argument against Baudrillard’s Seduction in “French Theory and the Seduction of Feminism” (1987) is many layered, but her main criticism is that 1 See Kim Tofoletti’s Cyborgs and Barbie Dolls: Feminism, Popular Culture, and the Posthuman Body (2007), or Rebecca Schneider’s The Explicit Body in Performance (1997). 2 See Rita Felski’s Doing Time: Feminist Theory and Postmodern Culture (2000), and Donna Haraway’s Simians Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (1991). 4 Baudrillard is contradictory.3 Because contradiction is a key term in Gallop’s work, in order to fully grasp the reason for Gallop’s seeming dismissal of Baudrillard, it is helpful to keep in mind that her critique is informed by her earlier work. In The Daughter’s Seduction: Feminist Theory and Psychoanalysis (1984), one of Gallop’s main points is that in invoking any identity, indeed in utilizing any definition, we risk turning relations into comforting representations. While Baudrillard, for example, argues that “seduction” and “production” are opposing terms, in that one cannot exist where the other is found, Gallop would argue that they are relational terms and that they should be treated as such.4 In The Daughter’s Seduction, Jane Gallop uses seemingly contradictory positions, feminism and psychoanalysis (insofar as feminism works against patriarchy and psychoanalysis seems to work in its favor), to model the way feminists should analyze methods and concepts relationally.5 For Gallop, even though we may oppose a particular 3 Gallop is not the only feminist to critique Seduction. In Differences that Matter (1998), Sarah Ahmed argues that while Baudrillard refuses the concept of destiny, he also argues that seduction is destiny. In this way, Baudrillard seems to establish seduction as the norm. Ahmed writes, “The subject is [now] determined by indeterminacy (rather than anatomy, class, or gender). As such, Baudrillard’s post-modernism can be read as a normative and positive reading of the subject” (106). Ahmed’s misreading of Baudrillard is all too common in feminist theory. Baudrillard does not claim seduction as positive. Seduction is without value because it does not conform to the value of political economy. Seduction is also not a subjectivity. Baudrillard’s entire work has been an effort to think beyond subjectivity (which he sees as an ideology of exclusion and hierarchy).