Jean Baudrillard and Feminism: Sara Ahmed and the Necessity to “Forget Baudrillard”

Abstract

Jean Baudrillard’s work has had a turbulent relationship with feminist thought. Victoria Grace attributes this turbulence to a general refusal on the part of feminist critics to engage, borrowing from Rex Butler, with Baudrillard “in his own terms” (1). In this essay, I challenge Grace’s faith in Baudrillard’s work to wrest feminist thought from the clutches of hyperreality. Conversely, I argue that Grace’s lionization of Baudrillard’s theories as a panacea to the problems facing contemporary society is itself a replication of the very model of hyperreality that she, and Baudrillard, decries. To argue this, I perform two operations. Firstly, I present Baudrillard’s theory of the simulacrum arguing that its emergence does not mark the dissipation of the real in favor of the virtual but that it signals the emergence of a single world-view, or “integrated circuit,” that is taken as objectively real. Secondly, I turn my attention to Sara Ahmed’s feminist critique of Baudrillard’s work in “his own terms” and how this critique informs a need to push Baudrillard’s theories further than he himself pushed them. I conclude by suggesting that Baudrillard’s theories can be—and have been—used by