The seduction of feminist theory

My dissertation, "The Seduction of Feminist Theory," comes out of my research on South African fiction and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and focuses broadly on feminist theory and the question of female power. The work of French theorist and sociologist Jean Baudrillard provides me with the conceptual model and critical vocabulary to reframe feminist theory.;In the first chapter, I argue that Baudrillard has not offered feminism an entirely unfamiliar theory of resistance. It is more that feminists have yet to read feminism seductively. Baudrillard's theory allows me to accentuate seduction in earlier feminist writing that is either dismissed by more productive-minded feminists or championed for making apparently productive arguments. Virginia Woolf, I suggest, by avocating laughter as a response to patriarchy, was among the first feminists in whom we can identify seduction as a feminist practice. Once I saw laughter as a seductive writing practice, I began to perceive a resonance of seduction echoing throughout the work of feminists from French theorists such as Joan Riviere, Helene Cixous, and Luce Irigaray, to contemporary American scholars such as Judith Butler, Donna Haraway, and Trinh T. Minh-Ha.;My second chapter addresses feminism of the Progressive Era and argues that focusing on productive discourse systematically disempowers women. In documenting the labor of lower-class women, reformers such as Cornelia Stratton Parker and Charlotte Perkins Gilman established feminism as a materialist practice grounded in production. Defining women's power in relation to production, however, does not further women's status in society. An effective feminist movement would, alternatively, attempt to break down the idea of production as power. There is no language with which to define women as powerful in the Progressive discourse insofar as it establishes production as the only form of social value. I re-read Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth (1905) as resistant to the feminism promoted by reformers such as Gilman and Parker. Wharton, I argue, negotiates a seductive alternative in her characterization of Lily Bart.;My third chapter addresses the feminist insistence on sexual equality in the modernist era. I begin by presenting work of feminist sexual reformers such as Margaret Sanger, Mary Ware Dennet, and Helena Rosa Wright who argue that women must be allowed control over their reproductive function and enjoy sex on a par with men. However, such arguments unwittingly disempower women who do not confirm the social value of sex. I explore the public social success of Irene Castle in relation to modern fictional characters such as Lorelei Lee, Myrtle Wilson, and Florinda to demonstrate that social mobility, as imagined by authors in the `20s, was contingent upon a woman's ability to seduce while denying engagement in sex--that is, not through sex, but through performing femininity. I explore the significance of this shift in relation to the work of Liz Conor who, in The Spectacular Modern Woman (2004), argues that the "modern appearing woman," far from being objectified, provides a way of rethinking agency outside of the terms provided by masculine discourse.;To bridge the gap between the modernist and postmodernist eras, I include a short piece, "Post-war Feminism: An Interlude," addressing the dearth of feminist scholarship on the post-war period. I argue that embracing the ideology of production has led feminists to assume that Betty Friedan was the only serious feminist writing in the post-war era. Recognizing seduction as a feminist reading practice allows commonly dismissed feminists, such as Cosmopolitan editor Helen Gurly Brown and humor writer Shirley Jackson, into the feminist canon.;My fourth chapter examines what happens to the concepts of the modern woman and modern feminism in postmodern literature within a global framework. Drawing on Baudrillard's insight, I explore the significance of silence as an untapped resource for the disruption of power in an era dependant on the proliferation of speech. Using Isabelle Allende's House of Spirits (1986), Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children (1981), and J.M. Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians (1980), postmodern novels which explore the proliferation of speech and information within the current postmodern condition, I show the way silent female characters function to thwart power in a global society contingent on the assumption that speech is an expression of the real.;My fifth and final chapter takes my analysis of literature and feminist theory into the social and political arena. My readings of women's silence in the post-apartheid hearings before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) explore the political significance of the shift from modern laughter to postmodern silence. By paying close attention to the gaps and silences within the TRC testimonies, I seek to establish a new discourse recognizing silence as, in Baudrillard's words, "the immense, latent defection" from productivist discourse. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)...