Feminine Seduction and the Demise of the Female

This week’s readings provocatively put Modleski’s dismissal of Baudrillard’s concept of feminine seduction up against McRobbie’s retraction of her celebration of supposedly liberated girl culture. To give a brief gloss on Baudrillard’s concept of feminine seduction, since it wasn’t assigned, he characterizes seduction as a determinedly female control over the symbolic order, through which women have traditionally achieved social power through means like fashion, makeup, and flirtation. As I understand it, his notion of feminine seduction, ultimately tied up in processes of consumption (as Modleski points out) finds an apotheosis in the postmodern era, an era of mass seduction in which all of us become self-seducers (i.e. feminized) who take surface pleasures in media objects that relay political messages that we don’t necessarily believe in. This state of affairs, which Baudrillard wrote about in the early 1980s, strikes me of having a great deal of overlap with conceptions of contemporary post-feminism and might hold the key to discovering the potential for politics within such a system.

As such, I am not sure that I would be as quick as Modleski to dismiss Baudrillard’s politics (no matter how uneasy they might make me feel, especially insofar as they seem to erase women as a distinct identity category). The argument here has less to do with gender, I would suggest, than with a virtualization of culture that takes most experience into the realm of simulation; the realm once reserved for objects like women’s novels and the like. Post-feminism takes feminism into account, but that doesn’t mean that it necessarily contains any feminist politics. As Baudrillard would likely argue, texts like Orange is the New Black are feminine because they contain pleasures that enable “the eternal irony of femininity that supposedly characterizes the masses – ‘the irony of a false fidelity to the law, an ultimately impenetrable simulation of passivity and obedience … which in return annuls the law governing them” (Modleski 52).

One of the problems for me in celebrating a work like Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs, with its mildly affirmative messages about gender and uniqueness, would be that I tend to broadly think of all cultural production as an attempt to transform audiences, pedagogically, into idealized citizens. We must question what types of citizens a film like this, or like Orange is the New Black, is trying to create. Certainly on some level through texts like these democratic participation is made equivalent to the right to buy (creating the feeling that anyone can become an activist through purchasing). To be a fan of the show is to subscribe to a politics, some cultural theorists might argue. While Meatballs’ narrative obviously performs what might be described as a “girl power” narrative, the film at the same time is really about consumption. A Baudrillardian line of thinking would insist instead that films and shows like these present a pose of being political, when they actually exist to give pleasure. Their affirmative messages allow viewers (regardless of gender) to self-seduce themselves into political passivity. This is how Baudrillard comes to associate femininity with massness and an end of politics. The question must be asked whether this pose of political engagement is a bad thing or not, especially if it contains within it a “simulation of passivity and obedience… which in return annuls the law.”

That being said, where we might look for radical potential in a film like Meatballs lies in Baudrillard’s concept of engulfment (dismissed by Modleski), which suggests that “a system is abolished only by pushing it into hyperlogic… You want us to consume – O.K. let’s consume always more, and anything whatsoever; for any useless and absurd purpose” (Modleski 53). Meatballs can be understood as modeling a process of engulfment, as it depicts a system of consumers who consume without any recourse to reality. It contains within it a hyperlogic of consumption that results in systemic collapse (of course this collapse is immediately recuperated with a happy ending, but still… food for thought).

Finally, as something of an aside, I want to bring up Dyer’s article on stereotypes. I can’t help but imagine that our discussion in class will bring up the question of neoliberalism and its emphasis on the individual, who exists autonomously, apart from identity groups (“be yourself” is the mantra). If the contemporary moment prizes individuality what political work do stereotypes still perform, especially for those people who might identify as a member of the identity group being stereotyped?