Holliday-Karre, E. A. (2015). The seduction of feminist theory. Feminist Theory, 16(1), 31-48.

he death of Jean Baudrillard in 2007 brought about a resurgence of feminist scholarship on his work. But in all recent feminist scholarship on Baudrillard, save for Victoria Grace’s Baudrillard’s Challenge: A Feminist Reading (2000), feminists focus on Baudrillard’s later theory of simulation, forestalling any reconsideration of his earlier text Seduction (1979). In this article I argue that a theory of seduction facilitates the unveiling of a hitherto unnoticed strain of feminist writing that proposes an ongoing challenge to masculine power and politics. This strategy of seduction is one that can be traced through a history of modern feminism, from Joan Rivière’s concept of ‘woman- liness’ in ‘Womanliness as Masquerade’ to Hélène Cixous’s écriture féminine in ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’ to Virginia Woolf’s ‘mulberry tree’ in Three Guineas.