Sexual Difference

Definition

Sexual difference, in Fatal Strategies (1983), is Baudrillard's target: he argues that the biological difference between the sexes is the weakest and poorest of all differences, not their origin. "Sexuality signals, in fact, with its biological and pretentious evidence, the weakest and poorest difference, the one that's left over after all other differences have been lost." "Any naturalistic principle of differentiation is necessarily weaker" than "the powerful artifice of signs." Baudrillard periodizes the relation of the sexes as three regimes: "Seduction is the era of an aesthetic and ceremonial difference between the sexes. Love (passion) is the era of a moral and affective sexual difference. Sexuality is the era of psychological, biological and political difference between the sexes." He grants the woman the higher position in the game of seduction — "she's in the much higher position of object of desire" — and claims that "seduction alone can put an end to the domination of one sex over the other," even while describing the woman as sovereign through "triumphal indifference." The concept is the wiki's point of contact between Baudrillard's object-metaphysics and its gender analysis; it requires careful handling, since the page must record both the anti-essentialist claim (sexual difference is not originary) and the re-naturalization risk (the woman as privileged object). See seduction, supremacy-of-the-object, gender-and-the-interior, obscenity.

Key Thinkers

• Jean Baudrillard — the concept's author: "the weakest and poorest difference"; the three regimes of seduction/love/sexuality; "seduction alone can put an end to the domination of one sex over the other" (1983).
• Jacques Lacan (not yet paged) — "there is no sexual rapport," which Baudrillard accepts while redirecting it.
• Sigmund Freud — the psychoanalytic frame whose desiring subject Baudrillard's object-philosophy displaces.
• Doreen Massey — the wiki's theorist of the gendering of place and the home-term's female coding, as a counterpoint.

Related Concepts

• Seduction — "the era of an aesthetic and ceremonial difference between the sexes."
• Supremacy of the Object — the woman as object of desire.
• Gender and the Interior — the wiki's frame for testing Baudrillard's gender politics.
• Obscenity — the sexual scene's disappearance.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Fatal Strategies (Baudrillard 1983) — "The Evil Genie of Passion" and "In Praise of the Sexual Object": the three regimes; "the weakest and poorest difference"; "the supreme orgasm is metamorphosis"; the woman as object.
• Jean Baudrillard: The Defence of the Real (Butler 1999) — the book-length secondary study that reads Baudrillard "in his own terms": the paradox of the sign (paradox-of-the-sign), simulation as the realization rather than the loss of the real (simulation-hyperreality), seduction as the limit to simulation, and the doubling power of theory (doubling, the-real, double-strategy).

Open Questions

• Is Baudrillard's anti-essentialism about sex/gender emancipatory or a re-naturalization of the woman-as-object? This page should be developed by the wiki's gender cluster.