This collection of essays takes up the most famous feminist sentence ever written, Simone de Beauvoir's "On ne naît pas femme: on le devient," finding in it a flashpoint of feminist thinking. Two controversies emerge from this sentence which the volume addresses from multiple scholarly perspectives: one over the practice of translation and one over the nature and status of sexual difference.
While earlier research considered Simone de Beauvoir in the perspectives of Existentialism or Feminism, this work is the first to emphasize her reflective and descriptive approach and the full range of issues she addresses. There are valuable chapters and sections that are historical and/or comparative, but most of the contents of this work critically examine Beauvoir's views on old age (whereon she is the first phenomenologist to work), biology, gender, ethics, ethnicity (where she is among the first), and politics (again among the first). Besides their systematic as well as historical significance, these chapters show her philosophy as on a par with those of Merleau-Ponty and Jean-Paul Sartre in quality, richness and distinctiveness of problematics, and the penetration of her insight into collective as well as individual human life within the socio-historical world.
Acknowledged by many feminists as the single most important theoretical work of the twentieth century, Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex (1949) nevertheless occupies an anomalous place in the feminist 'canon'. Yet it has had an undeniable impact, not only on the development of critiques of sexual politics but on twentieth-century western thinking about the concept of 'woman' in general.This collection of six new essays by scholars from the disciplines of French, English literature, history, cultural criticism, feminist theory and philosophy makes a valuable contribution to the task of re-reading and reassessing this enormously influential text for a new generation of feminist readers, and also for cultural theorists, for whom the question of 'the feminine' is at the centre of key debates in philosophy and postmodernity.The contributors provide a significantly new rethinking of the place of The Second Sex in cultural history and of women and representation, the role of 'fictions' and the problem of ethical agency in the work of the leading intellectual woman of this age.
Medieval literature contains many figures caught at the interface between life and death - the dead return to place demands on the living, while the living foresee, organize or desire their own deaths. Jane Gilbert's original study examines the ways in which certain medieval literary texts, both English and French, use these 'living dead' to think about existential, ethical and political issues. In doing so, she shows powerful connections between works otherwise seen as quite disparate, including Chaucer's Book of the Duchess and Legend of Good Women, the Chanson de Roland and the poems of Francois Villon. Written for researchers and advanced students of medieval French and English literature, this book provides original, provocative interpretations of canonical medieval texts in the light of influential modern theories, especially Lacanian psychoanalysis, presented in an accessible and lively way.
On April 14, 1986, Simone de Beauvoir died in Paris. She was the “prettiest Existentialist”, who during her long and intense life had observed, described, analytically deconstructed and effectively changed the world that surrounded her, “one word at a time”. An engaged intellectual like her life partner and comrade Jean-Paul Sartre, she took actively part in most of the main social and political struggles of the 20th century, including, first and foremost, women’s emancipation and self-determination, as well as the decolonisation of French Algeria, and the denouncement of American imperialism in Vietnam and the marginalisation of elderly people in contemporary societies. This collection of essays, arising from the 18th International Conference of the Simone de Beauvoir Society held in Cagliari, Italy, in June 2010, provides a major contribution to the field of Beauvoirian studies with up-to-date research provided by scholars from a variety of disciplines that range from French literature to gender studies, from philosophy to social sciences, offering a multifaceted overview on the “state of the art” of research on the life and the works of Simone de Beauvoir, 30 years after her demise.
Kathryn Sophia Belle centers feminist frameworks, discourses, and vocabularies of Black women and other Women of Color that existed prior to and have continued to exist after The Second Sex. She centers and amplifies the voices of Black women and other Women of Color, such as Loraine Hansberry, Angela Davis, Chikwenye Ogunyemi, Deborah King, Oyèrónké Oywùmí, Mariana Ortega, Kathy Glass, bell hooks, Kyoo Lee, Stephanie Rivera Berruz, Patricia Hill Collins, and Alia Al-Saji. Special attention is also given to Claudia Jones and Audre Lorde, both of whom implicitly and indirectly engage with The Second Sex. Beauvoir and Belle demonstrates the myriad ways in which these frameworks both expose and surpass the limits of The Second Sex. Belle argues against the frameworks of oppression used by Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex, a foundational text of white feminist philosophy. She frames Beauvoir's analogies as limitations, and shows how Beauvoir either does not engage with Black women and other Women of Color-or engages with them in problematic ways. Belle explores how Black and other Women of Color have critically written and talked about The Second Sex, and in so doing exposes the ways in which the existing Beauvoir scholarship has mostly ignored these engagements, thereby replicating Beauvoir's exclusions.
Modern France is an up-to-date and accessible introduction to the nature of French society at the end of the twentieth century. The book examines the transition of France and French life as the nation moves from an industrial to a post-industrial economy, and the cultural and social dislocations that such an evoltuion implies. Sociological concepts and categories of class, race, gender, age and region are discussed as well as how they combine together to produce inequalities and identities. These concepts are then applied to a range of issues such as work, politics, education, health, religion and leisure. Modern France reveals the nature of French society at a critical moment in her evolution and how a member of the European Union reflects distinctiveness and commonality in the development of Europe as a whole.
Feminism, Gender and Universities demonstrates the positive and robust impacts that feminism has had on higher education, through the eyes and in the words of the participants in changing political and social processes. Drawing on the ’collective biography’ of leading feminist scholars from around the world and current evidence relating to gender equality in education, this book employs methods including biographies, life histories, and narratives to show how the feminist project to transform women’s lives in the direction of gender and social equality became an educational and pedagogical one. Through careful attention to the ways in which feminism has transformed feminist academic women’s lives, the author explores the importance of education in changing socio-political contexts, raising questions about further changes that are necessary. Delving into the deeper and more ’hidden’ echelons of education, the book examines the contested nature of current managerial or business approaches to university and education, revealing these to be incompatible with feminist thought. A plea for more careful attention to education and the ways in which the processes of knowledge-making influence (and are influenced by) gender and sexual relations, Feminism, Gender and Universities will appeal to scholars across the social sciences with interests in gender, pedagogy and modern academic life.
Submission : a philosophical taboo -- Is submission feminine? Is femininity a submission? -- Womanhood as a situation -- Elusive submission -- The experience of submission -- Submission is an alienation -- The objectified body of the submissive woman -- Delights or oppression : the ambiguity of submission -- Freedom and submission -- Conclusion: What now?
