Adventures of Feminism: Simone de Beauvoir's Autobiographies, Women's Liberation, and Self-Fashioning

Hypatia Reviews Online

Assessing Simone de Beauvoir’s contribution to second wave feminism, and the ramifications of her theory of femininity in contemporary fields of psychoanalysis and gender politics.

Simone de Beauvoir's Philosophy of Individuation: The Problem of The Second Sex, 2017

This book presents a new, Deleuzian reading of Simone de Beauvoir's phenomenology, the place of recognition in The Second Sex, the philosophical issues in her novels and the important role of her student diaries. Hengehold clarifies the elements of Deleuze's thought – alone and in collaboration with Guattari – that may be most useful to contemporary feminists who are simultaneously rethinking the becoming of gender and the becoming of philosophy. Most studies of Simone de Beauvoir situate her with respect to Hegel and the tradition of 20th-century phenomenology begun by Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty. Reading Beauvoir through a Deleuzian lens encourages us to place more emphasis on Beauvoir's early interest in Bergson and Leibniz, and on the individuation of consciousness, a puzzle of continuing interest to both phenomenologists and Deleuzians.

The Third Asian Conference on Literature and librarianship Osaka, Japan, 2013

The purpose of this paper is to shed light on the role the French author and philosopher Simone de Beauvoir has played in the development of women’s movement in general and feminist intellectual achievements in particular. To this end, this paper explores Beauvoir’s intellectual struggle to urge women to get rid of the manacles of the patriarchal system, which has long imprisoned them within its norms and values, denying them the freedom and autonomy they deserve as equal human beings. To show Beauvoir’s significance in this respect, the paper traces her influence on feminist academics and authors, with special emphasis on the notable feminist critic Kate Millet for the simple reason that many critics consider the latter’s masterpiece Sexual Politics as the foundation of what is called radical or second wave of feminism, minimizing or even ignoring Beauvoir’s effect.

2012

What are we doing, really, when we either venerate or condemn Simone de Beauvoir? What do we hope to accomplish when we decide for or against her? What sorts of concerns motivate the impulse to categorize her work as feminist or non-feminist? What, in other words, do we have at stake in the symbolic Beauvoir: in the good and the bad “Beauvoirs” produced through generations of feminist interpretations? In posing these questions I treat Beauvoir scholarship as a site for thinking critically about our desire to settle what I argue to be Beauvoir’s important teaching about the fundamentally unsettled character of feminine subjectivity and feminist politics. Whether savior or scapegoat, the symbolic Beauvoir tells us something about a persistent yearning in American feminism for definitive theories of women’s oppression and for prescriptivism in feminist theory. Our rhetorical productions of the good (feminist) Beauvoir versus the bad (not so feminist or not the right kind of feminist) Beauvoir are symptomatic of our reluctance to accept a feminist theory without solace, by which I mean a feminist theory that refuses to yield the identities of victim and victor, oppressed and oppressor, and, consequently, a feminist theory that resists our understandable but also potentially dangerous desire for directives in the face of social injustice. There are numerous other ways in which Beauvoir’s feminism denies us solace, and some of these will be elaborated as I proceed. But the central idea that I want to advance here is this notion of a feminist theory that does not tell us what is wrong and how to fix it, a theory that pushes us rather to accept incertitude and even confusion as the achievement rather than the failure of feminist theory and ambiguity as the vital condition of feminist politics. Beauvoir’s texts, and especially The Second Sex, are neither feminist nor anti-feminist: rather they open up and onto the space of feminine contradictions; they give voice to a feminine subjectivity that is at best at odds with itself.

Continental Philosophy Review, 2010

This article explicates the meaning of the paradox from the perspective of sexual difference, as articulated by Simone de Beauvoir. I claim that the self, the other, and their becoming are sexed in Beauvoir’s early literary writing before the question of sexual difference is posed in The Second Sex (1949). In particular, Beauvoir’s description of Françoise’s subjective becoming in the novel She Came to Stay (1943) anticipates her later systematic description of ‘the woman in love’. In addition, I argue that the different existential types appearing at the end of The Second Sex (the narcissist, the woman in love, the mystic, and the independent woman) are variations of a specific feminine, historically changing paradox of subjectivity. According to this paradox, women, in a different mode than men, must become what they ontologically “are”: beings of change and self-transcendence that have to realise the human condition in their concrete, singular lives. My interpretation draws on Kierkegaardian philosophy of existence, phenomenology, and early psychoanalysis.

Simone de Beauvoir’s 1949 masterpiece, The Second Sex, is rarely considered a canonical text worthy of being studied within the history of political thought. Even within feminist scholarship, although it is often cited or acknowledged, only short excerpts, usually the introduction, are read carefully. This essay argues that the reception of The Second Sex has been marred by overly emotional and ambivalent responses, in part a result of its literary style. The Second Sex is written as a situated dramaturgical staging of conversation. Beauvoir puts men into conversation about women in Volume I and invites women into conversation with each other about their experiences in Volume II. These literary techniques invite readers of The Second Sex to also participate in the conversation, a conversation Beauvoir hopes will change the way we see and talk about sexual difference, conditions of oppression, and how to enlarge the space for freedom.

2010

Theory & Event, 2012

ProQuest document link ABSTRACT (ENGLISH) [...]she did not hesitate a long time before writing a book on woman: from her autobiography it is clear that she got right down to work on researching myths of femininity upon discovering that to write about herself she would need to explore the question of how being a woman affected her more generally (1968:103). [...]the quarrel over feminism is about to be re-energized upon publication of The Second Sex, as Beauvoir, already a well-known public figure, likely suspects. [...]she acknowledges the "complex truths" that come to the fore in each woman's experience: an unwed woman might be "overwhelmed in material terms by the burden suddenly imposed on her" but then "find in the child the satisfaction of secretly harbored dreams" (2010: 533). [...]Beauvoir's thinking politics in situation is a direct challenge to political theory's usual methods and assumptions. FULL TEXT Simone de Beauvoir is seldom recognized by critics as a political thinker.1 In interviews and public statements, Beauvoir always identified herself as a writer, rather than as an activist, philosopher, or political person. 2 Yet even if we think about politics in its most conventional sense-as the art of governance, the study of how power works, or as the interaction between people and states-we notice that Beauvoir was always thinking about political questions and responding to the historical-political events that unfolded in her lifetime (1908-1986). 3 In essays, novels, and longer theoretical reflections, she discussed Stalinism, the disappointments of communism, and the purge trials; German occupation of France and the politics of collaboration and resistance; post World War II trials for collaborators and the articulation of crimes against humanity; racism in America; France's war in Algeria and the politics of colonization; and the politics of embodiment, specifically addressing the aging body and women's experience. 4 Moreover, when responding to and writing about all these situations, Beauvoir provoked and engaged the public in ethical and political debates that probed subjects typically considered outside the realm of the political. For example, she investigated the multiple (many personal) reasons for the actions of collaborators; she brought the Algerian militant, Djamila Boupacha's, rape by French soldiers to light in the French public in 1960; and she argued that Robert Brasillach's crime (a Nazi-identified journalist executed for treason in 1945) was a violation against specific embodied Jewish victims rather than a crime against the French state.5 If we think of politics a bit more expansively, we could say that as a political thinker, Beauvoir made publicly visible what ought to be, but often was not, a matter of public concern. Of all her writings, however, Beauvoir is by far best known for The Second Sex. 6 Her seven hundred plus page magnum opus on male theorization of "Woman" and the challenges women's lived experience poses to any attempt to fix a feminine essence launched her reputation as a specifically feminist, rather than a more broadly political, thinker. The intense focus on this one book ironically served to obscure the importance of her other work, and its organic links to her political ideas.7 In the sixty-plus years following publication of The Second Sex, Beauvoir's reputation has been even more firmly associated specifically with feminist theory, and her work has been mostly ignored by other political theorists. 8 Yet, by thinking politically with Beauvoir, we will see that The PDF GENERATED BY PROQUEST.COM

It is impossible to know where Simone de Beauvoir's thinking would have gone had she been spared the depravation and fright of living in Nazi occupied Paris. What we do know is that coming face to face with forces of injustice beyond her control, the questions of evil and the Oth er took on new urgency. Beauvoir speaks of the war as creating an existential rupture in time. Sh

British journal for the history of philosophy, 2008

Sapere Aude Revista De Filosofia, 2013

Work in contemporary feminist philosophy seems often to divide along a line between those who understand sexual difference to be originary and irreducible, and those who see "sexual difference" as an effect of patterns of social, political and material relations that have sedimented over time. I argue, along with other readers of Beauvoir, that this was a demarcation she refused, in favor of an affirmation of the ambiguity of sexual difference. My claim is that "femininity" and "masculinity" were, for Beauvoir, operations of justification that do their work in the very tension and ambiguity between nature and culture. Beauvoir's account of what we might, today, choose to call "gender" is an account of the distortion or reversal of the process of "conversion" by which adults take up and affirm an intersubjective condition of freedom and responsibility. In this paper I explore the notion of "justification" in Beauvoir's work as it is developed in relation to femininity, masculinity, sovereignty and plurality.

In her book, The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir raised some fundamental issues surrounding the oppression of women. She argues the case that women are still at the immanence sphere where they are subjected and oppressed. At this level, women exist as a being for the “Other” and not for themselves. She alarms that this stage is detrimental to women and also to their freedom as well as the society at large. Furthermore, and most important to our discussion, is her belief that there is a great need to liberate women from this immanent, oppressive, and degrading sphere, to the liberating transcendence sphere-where she could exist as “self”. This paper, therefore, is a philosophical examination of Simone de Beauvoir’s philosophy of mystification of women and its possible significance to our contemporary society. It shows that de Beauvoir’s cry for women’s liberation is still not wipe out in our contemporary world. It also identifies de Beauvoir’s philosophy with deep philosophical importance for the possibility of arriving at the liberation of women in our contemporary world.

In her book, The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir raised some fundamental issues surrounding the oppression of women. She argues the case that women are still at the immanence sphere where they are subjected and oppressed. At this level, women exist as a being for the “Other” and not for themselves. She alarms that this stage is detrimental to women and also to their freedom as well as the society at large. Furthermore, and most important to our discussion, is her belief that there is a great need to liberate women from this immanent, oppressive, and degrading sphere, to the liberating transcendence sphere-where she could exist as “self”. This paper, therefore, is a philosophical examination of Simone de Beauvoir’s philosophy of mystification of women and its possible significance to our contemporary society. It shows that de Beauvoir’s cry for women’s liberation is still not wipe out in our contemporary world. It also identifies de Beauvoir’s philosophy with deep philosophical importance for the possibility of arriving at the liberation of women in our contemporary world.

translation of a chapter from : Amore e matrimonio nel pensiero filosofico e teologico moderno, Melchiorre, Virgilio (ed) , 1976

1. The most original discovery in Beauvoir’s book is one more Columbus’s egg, namely that it is far from evident that a woman is a woman. That is, she discovers that a woman is the result of a process that made so that she is like she is. The paper discusses two aspects of the so-to-say ‘ideology’ inspiring the work. The first is its ideology in the proper, Marxian sense. My claim is that the work still pays a heavy price to the dominating ideology. It leaves still too much unquestionedof what was assumed at the time to be obvious, necessary, and unchanging. This ballast depends firstly on the inherited prevailing climate of opinion, corresponding to a situation of alienation, producing two distorted views of the male and female gender. On the other hand, it depends on an unquestioned legacy from the modern episteme (in Foucault’s sense of the word) carrying presupposed Cartesian dualism. The other side of the work’s ideology, that is, the positive program presented or better the utopia it formulates is less innovative than it could be, In a few passages, where she seems to make use of suggestions from Merleau-Ponty, she points at a view where the bodily and emotional dimension is rescued from its negation in the male-dominated Capitalist society. Still, these suggestions are forgotten in the bulk of the work. 2. The making of a philosophical work does not depend just on the kind of philosophical influences behind it. A book is also the product of an author with a story living in one society at a given time of social history. In this case, the book was written in the afterwar time when women were pushed back home again from the wartime labor market and when several of the goals reached by the first phase of feminist movements had gone lost in several European countries under Fascist or semi-fascist regimes and were being eroded in America by the reactionary climate of McCarthyism. It was a book written by an intellectual young woman in almost total isolation. These circumstances account for some more naïve suggestions from work: for ex., the idea that the alternative to the strategy once adopted by nineteenth-century emancipationist movements should be an individual inner process of transformation confined within the boundaries of one woman’s consciousness, or also, the idea that the goal of women’s liberation should be to bring all women to a condition similar of Simone de Beauvoir herself who, as an educated woman, earning her life by her work, and living in an allegedly equal state with an enlightened man (Jean-Paul Sartre!) in a relationship free from constraints (an unmarried couple!), was already exemplifying what a liberated woman’s life would be. 3. The reconstruction of the idea of femininity is still the most fruitful part of the work. It rejects the notion of femininity as an essence depending on biology or other factors and explores the making of this image as a result of a condition made of the social and economic state of affairs but as revived and actively mirrored through and by the consciousness of the very subjects suffering an oppressive situation. And the main novelty is the ‘discovery’ of asymmetry between the self-image of the male and the (self)-image of the woman, an asymmetry depending on the fact that the woman sees herself through the other’s eyes. 4. Later feminist writers such as Shulamit Firestone remarked that 'The Second Sex' heavily depended on several key-ideas from Sartre existential ontology. One crucial aspect is accepting the mind-body dualistic framework without any suspicion that such dualism could have been itself a projection of the basic experience of the male-female duality. I suggest that the philosophical legacy inherited from Sartre is on occasion an asset for Beauvoir’s innovative existential analysis of the feminine ‘condition,’ but on several occasions, it creates unnecessary obstacles for her project of a new comprehension of the feminine ‘situation,’ aimed at rescuing women from an 'inauthentic' self-definition. 5. The first among these poisoned gifts is Sartre’s idea of the individual as pure freedom and project. Merleau-Ponty’s criticism is well-known: Sartre draws a picture of the world as containing no more than ‘human beings and things,’ thus denying any substance to social relations, institutions, and culture. 6. The second is Sartre’s reconstruction of dialectics, understood as dialectics without synthesis. This is an enlightening tool when used to describe conflicts, in so far as it accounts for the emergence of the ‘other’ as what is excluded. But it becomes a boomerang when used to interpret any kind of relationship, leading to equate inter-subjectivity with conflict. 7. Suggestions coming from Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological approach of positive value of the bodily dimension as such, and hence of the feminine body, are evoked here and there but never fully spelled out. The most shocking consequence of acceptance of the Cartesian or Sartrean dualist view is an almost total de-evaluation of sexuality, understood as an activity involving just one tiny part of the human body, going with the idea that overcoming the oppression of women implies de-empathizing biological differences that are after all tiny and devoid of value. Besides, Beauvoir falls back into the trap of grounding claims of equality between men and women on the assumption that biological differences are of limited relevance. The eventual reason for such a step back is the distorting Cartesian mirror into which Beauvoir still looks in the vain hope of discovering a disembodied self as the (Cartesian) subject of an impossible kind of liberation.The first among these poisoned gifts is Sartre’s idea of the individual as pure freedom and project. Merleau-Ponty’s criticism is well-known: Sartre draws a picture of the world as containing no more than ‘human beings and things’, thus denying any substance to social relations, institutions and culture. The second is Sartre’s reconstruction of dialectics, understood as a dialectic without a synthesis. This view of dialectics is an enlightening tool when used to describe conflicts. It may account for the emergence of the ‘other’ as what is excluded. However, it becomes a boomerang when used to interpret any relationship, leading to equate inter-subjectivity with conflict. Suggestions coming from Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological approach would tend to admit that the bodily dimension as such has a positive value, and hence the feminine bodily dimension is not just indifferent, but instead gives women a point of view on the world different from the male point of view. These suggestions, yet, are evoked here and there but never fully spelt out. The most shocking consequence of acceptance of the Cartesian or Sartrean dualist view is an almost total de-evaluation of sexuality, understood as an activity involving just one tiny part of the human body, going with the idea that overcoming the oppression of women implies under-stressing biological differences that are after all tiny and devoid of value. Furthermore, Beauvoir falls back into the trap of grounding claims of equality between men and women on the assumption that physical differences are of limited relevance. The eventual reason for such step back is the distorting Cartesian mirror into which Beauvoir still looks in the vain hope of discovering a disembodied self as the (Cartesian) subject of an impossible kind of liberation.