ABSTRACT
To claim, to argue, that Baudrillard’s work is of central importance to feminist theory, it is necessary to begin with his theoretical analysis of the relationship between the coded structure of value in political economy and the parallel structure of the linguistic sign. In recent years many feminist theorists have created a distinct and powerful trend within feminist thought by avidly appropriating concepts of ‘post’- Saussurian linguistics, advocating ‘post’structuralist approaches to theorising and critique. Feminists have claimed that the poststructuralist critique of language not as a medium that reflects or represents reality, but as an active discourse that constructs social realities and subjectivities, has empowering possibilities for women, for those cast as ‘other’ in a phallocentric, humanist semiology. Such a critique, it is argued, has the potential to demystify meta-narratives of objectivity and truth, to open the field of discourse to a plurality of competing meanings, and to make explicit the politics of knowledge. Challenges to oppressive discursive practices can reconfigure the meanings that characterise and give shape to events, to processes of gendering, to what gets done and why.
