Text page
Plant - Baudrillard s Women (Forget Baudrillard 1993)
"Plant - Baudrillard s Women (Forget Baudrillard 1993)" develops the cyberfeminist line by tying gender, media systems, writing, and synthetic culture into one technical field.
Archive condition
The page uses the canonical extracted text as its reading layer while preserving the original file paths as the archival source of record.
Core idea
The page matters because cyberfeminism here is not an add-on to the archive's better-known themes. It is one of the places where circuitry, writing, labor, and gender are made to reorganize what counts as a subject or a system.
These texts work by making cultural criticism, theory, and technical description contaminate each other. The result is a model of subjectivity produced through networks, codes, and infrastructural mediation rather than grounded in stable identity.
That matters because the archive's human/machine problem changes once it is read through Plant, Parisi, and later xenofeminist debate. The future stops looking like a neutral technical horizon and becomes a struggle over who or what gets composed by it.
How to read this text
Read for where writing, labor, media, or embodiment are described as technical arrangements rather than background topics. That is where the page usually sharpens.
Keep an eye on how the page positions itself against humanist or moralizing accounts of technology. The section's strongest interventions are usually anti-essentialist and infrastructural at once.
Representative extracts
Definition · paragraph 5
This is the privilege which woman, with feminism, wants to toss aside in favour of a subjectivity, a sexuality, desires and meanings of her own. Woman wants to become real, and this, for Baudrillard, is her big mistake. What does the women’s movement oppose to the phallocratic structure?
Definition · paragraph 3
And this subject is masculine, as Baudrillard is quick to admit and happy to assume, while that which seduces is its ‘missing dimension’ (p. 67), the feminine. While Baudrillard does not intend this conflation of the seductive and the feminine to make seduction the sole prerogative of women, it is they who have ‘mastery over the symbolic universe’ (p.
Definition · paragraph 17
The circuits are endlessly self-referential, an idea which is itself the reproduction of man’s imaginary limit. ‘But isn’t that your game, ceaselessly to bring the outside inward?’ asks Irigaray: To have no outside that you have not put there yourself?’ (Baudrillard 1990a:12).
Definition · paragraph 5
Women eclipse power; they do not enter into it, but exist with merely ‘the flickering of a presence’ (p. 85). For Baudrillard, this is the never quite real world of seduction, an effect of nothing, but itself the secret government of the real world of men and things.
Definition · paragraph 16
This is what Baudrillard worries about: the thought of women signalling to each other in ways which make no sense to him; this is the goal of his use of the term seduction: to make the signals meaningful, to be able to understand them as games and rituals foreign to man but by no means dangerous and alien.
Appears in sections
Cyberfeminism, Xenofeminism, and Technical Subjects Primary section
Sadie Plant, Amy Ireland, and the technical, gendered, and synthetic subject positions running through the archive.