175. Publications are increasingly becoming available in electronic format (CD-ROM and/or online editions).BRILL is proud to work with a broad range of scholars and authors and to serve its many customers throughout the world. Some very good thoughts to ponder. Spivak, Can the Subaltern Speak?, 310. Pelagia Goulimari, special issue, Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 25, no. 204. African American feminists have been critical of Beauvoir and of the womens movements of the 1960s. From her own perspective of existentialist ethics, as informed by Heidegger, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty, de Beauvoir rejects all attempts to stabilize the condition of women under the pretext that happiness consists in stagnation and stasis. To achieve this, she extols recording, examining, and naming ones experience, perceptions, and feelings, as a path to clarity, precision, and illumination, leading to concepts and theories but also to empowerment. In her renowned introduction to The Second Sex, de Beauvoir points out the fundamental asymmetry of the terms masculine and feminine. Masculinity is considered to be the absolute human type, the norm or standard of humanity. . Young, Throwing Like a Girl, 37. See The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism in Lorde, Your Silence. Simone de Beauvoir - Feminism & French Women in History: A Resource Guide - Research Guides at Library of Congress Skip to Main Content Library of CongressResearch Guides Library of Congress Introduction Famous Women in French History Hlose Eleanor of Aquitaine Jeanne de Clisson Joan of Arc Madame de Svign Louise Dupin Jeanne Baret reifying and othering.69 The alternative to both thoughtless action and paralyzing inaction is: acting hesitantly and responsively.70. Her attempts at existential affirmation are crushed by the judgment of the world. The first major volume in the book investigates Facts and Myths about women from many different perspectives, claiming that women share unique experiences apart from men like menstruation and pregnancy. Hartmans work emerges out of African American feminist traditions but also out of postcolonial feminists, whose work pays particular attention to impossibility, failure, aporia, and the limits of representing the subaltern, as well as the heterogeneity and specificity of womens agency. 6. She claims that women lack the concrete means to organize themselves in opposition to patriarchy, in that they lack a shared collective space, such as the factory and the racially segregated community for working-class and black struggles, instead living dispersed private lives.12 While white middle-class women are in solidarity with men of their class and race, rather than with working-class and black women, Beauvoir calls for solidarity among women across class and race boundaries.13 She addresses white middle-class women like herself, who benefit materially from their connection to white middle-class men, asking them to abandon these benefits for the precarious pursuit of womens solidarity and freedom. Simone de Beauvoir; Judith Butler; existentialism; gender oppression; gender performativity Beauvoir's existentialist ethics relates to and informs eminently contemporary accounts of feminist ethics in the Western continental feminist canon. Anger, unlike hatred, is potentially both full of information and generative.86 Affect, more broadly, can be a path to understanding, as affect and rationality are not mutually exclusive: I dont see feel/think as a dichotomy.87 Particularly innovative is Lordes theorization of the erotic. In contrast to the pornographic, the erotic is a power intrinsically connected to (and cutting across) love, friendship, self-connection, joy, the spiritual, creativity, work, collaboration, and the politicalespecially among black women.88 But relations of interdependence and mutuality among women are only possible in a context of non-hierarchical differences among equals and peers, Lorde stresses repeatedly.89, Alice Walker attends to many of these themes in Color Purple (1982).90 In her collection of essays, In Search of Our Mothers Gardens: Womanist Prose (1983), she pays tribute to black womens traditions of resistance, due to which womanish connotes outrageous, audacious, courageous or willful behavior.91 Her term womanism honors these collectivist traditions and their commitment to the survival and wholeness of entire people, male and female.92 But she also calls for the reconstruction of a written tradition of forgotten black women writers, resurrecting Zora Neale Hurston from oblivion in Looking for Zora, initially published in Ms. magazine in 1975.93, In 1979 Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubars The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination established the enforced privatization and entrapped idleness of 19th-century white middle-class women.94 In 1987 Hortense J. Spillers powerfully added that this was made possible by the enforced hard labor of black women, as house or field slaves and later as domestic servants who often headed single-parent households.95 Furthermore, the gender polarization within the white middle-class family was accompanied by the ungendering of African American slaves, who were not allowed to marry and raise their children, and the structural rape of black women. Irigaray, Equal or Different?, 3233. The subaltern exceeds any representation treating it as a full identity with a fixed meaning. about women from many different perspectives, claiming that women share unique experiences apart from men like menstruation and pregnancy. See also Hartman on singularity, as discussed in the section African American Feminisms (Morrison, Lorde, Walker, Spillers, Hartman): Race, Intersectionality, Differences among Women and among Black Women in this article. Founded in 1983, the journal emphasizes diverse social, cultural, and disciplinary approaches to its topics and promotes international and cross-cultural exchange. and . Al-Saji, Phenomenology of Hesitation, 142. Sister Outsider, Lordes essays and speeches from 1976 to 1984, theorizes intersections of race, sexuality, class, and age that are particularly binding and threatening for black lesbian women.81 White feminists are ignorant of racism and wrongly assume their concerns to be universally shared by all women, thus replicating the patriarchal elevation of men to the universal analyzed by Beauvoir; they need to drop the pretense to a homogeneity of experience, educate themselves about black women, read their work, and listen.82 In The Masters Tools Will Never Dismantle the Masters House, delivered during a Beauvoir conference, Lorde argues that Beauvoirs call to know the genuine conditions of our lives must include racism and homophobia.83 Black men misdirect their anger for the racism they encounter toward black women, who, paid less and more socially devalued, are easy targets. Beauvoirs activism and authorship influenced women then and continues to influence feminism today. De Beauvoir's feminist classic The Second Sex reflects her earlier philosophical interests, and is considerably strengthened by this influence. . If one is asked to point out one feminist critic that stands apart among all the feminists as the most influential of them all, it has to be Simone De Beauvoir. This imperious, sovereign role was seriously at odds with Beauvoirs sense of reality, history, and the self. Simone de Beauvoir is one of the leading figures within the strand of thought known as socialist feminism. 5. Miranda onSex and The Cityechoed this concern several decades later when she stormed out of a caf complaining that all that her (very successful) friends talked about was men, but it is revealed later in the episode that she was only upset because she wasnt really over her ex-boyfriend. . . manipulations.29 In the very exercise of bodily freedomfor example, in opening up the body in free, active, open extension and bold outward-directednesswomen risk objectification, Young argues.30. If ladies are all softness, helplessness and modesty, black women have been tough, capable, independent and immodest.80, Audre Lorde explores similar themes. Feminist Political Theory is a branch of political philosophy that studies and critiques political institutions and practices from a feminist perspective. 177. Articles are published in English and French. (New York: W. W. Norton, 2019); Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God, introd. . Saidiya V. Hartman, Lose Your Mother: A Journey along the Atlantic Slave Route (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008), 6. Simone de Beauvoir was one of the most preeminent French existentialist philosophers and writers. Pamela Sue Anderson, Creating a New Imaginary for Love in Religion, in Love and Vulnerability: Thinking with Pamela Sue Anderson, ed. Some have avoided self-identifying as a feminist, self-identifying as a black woman writer instead. See Eileen Myles, The Lady Who Appears to Be a Gentleman, Harpers Magazine, June 2019. Gender is the primary and irreducible division.35, In 1994 feminist literary critic Toril Moi compares Beauvoir to Irigaray and Frantz Fanon, one of the founders of postcolonial theory. Jack Halberstam, Trans*: A Quick and Quirky Account of Gender Variability (Oakland: University of California Press, 2018), 95, 5253, 4. . She rightly points out in her work, One is not born a woman but becomes one. In her book The Second Sex, she goes on to explain this very idea by investigation and exploring the very definition and notion of femininity, womanhood and what constitutes this and what makes a woman feminine in nature. @media(min-width:0px){#div-gpt-ad-englishsummary_com-medrectangle-4-0-asloaded{max-width:250px!important;max-height:250px!important}}if(typeof ez_ad_units!='undefined'){ez_ad_units.push([[250,250],'englishsummary_com-medrectangle-4','ezslot_4',655,'0','0'])};__ez_fad_position('div-gpt-ad-englishsummary_com-medrectangle-4-0'); According to Beauvoir, femininity is not inherent to a woman and is, like any other idea we of an individual, the result of social and cultural construction. However, Simone de Beauvoir did not at first define herself as a feminist. 3 (July 2018): 453464, 462. Irigaray insists on the political autonomy of womens struggles from other liberation movements and, controversially, the priority of feminism over other movements because of the priority of gender over class, race, and so on. 24. 131. SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR AND THE WRITING OF CONTEMPORARY FEMINIST THEORY: RICH, BUTLER, AND THE SECOND SEX MARGARET REEVES YORK UNIVERSITY, ONTARIO, CANADA In The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir gives feminist theorists the conceptual categories with which to understand the oppression of women as a second sex, as "Other," and In the first part of her book, de Beauvoir examines the feminist criticism views of women advanced by biology, psychology, and historical materialism, in an endeavor to show how the concept of the feminine has been fashioned and to consider why woman has been defined as the other. They have also written a number of books for scholars and counsellors on these topics, drawing on their own research and therapeutic practice. Al-Saji, Phenomenology of Hesitation, 136. [3] George Eliot,Mill on the Floss, ed. . See Dorota Filipczak, The Disavowal of the Female Knower: Reading Literature in the Light of Pamela Sue Andersons Project on Vulnerability, in Love and Vulnerability: Thinking with Pamela Sue Anderson, ed. Such lacunas are often due to the systemic epistemic marginalization of some groups, and any progress (for example, in adopting a proposed new term) is contingent upon a virtuous hearer who will try to listen without prejudice but also requires systemic change.51 In George Eliots Mill on the Floss Maggie Tulliver suffers both testimonial and hermeneutical injustice.52, This article will now turn to feminist phenomenology within queer theory and critical race theory. 128. 35. This account of feminist theory will include African American, postcolonial, and Islamic feminists as well as queer and transgender theorists and writers who identify as feminists. Indeed, they contend that what underpins the gender binary (the polarization of two genders) is the institution of compulsory heterosexuality or heteronormativity. The projection, by everyone, of all ugliness onto poor, dark-skinned Pecola, combined with white norms that are impossible for her, lead to Pecolas madness. Beauvoir held that there was no separable self, a self able to stand apart from the process of thinking. Margaret A. Simons (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 1119, 12. To the extent that women lack freedom by virtue of their social situation qua women, they need to claim their freedom in collective revolt.14 Beauvoirs 1949 call to organized political action was the movement before the movement, according to Michle Le Doeuff.15, However, Beauvoir also advocates writing literature as a means of liberation for women and considers all her writingphilosophical, literary, life-writinga form of activism. The chosen term is privileged as the only term that stands for marginality, potential for change, or openness to the past or future. First, they must be able to participate in their own creative projects despite the fear of rejection and uncertainty. Yes, on the whole, French men are freer, less constrained than French women. A Comic Drama (London: Jonathan Cape, 2012); Anne Carson, Antigonick, ill. Bianca Stone (Tarset: Bloodaxe, 2012); Maggie Nelson, Jane: A Murder (London: Zed Books, 2019); Maggie Nelson, The Argonauts (London: Melville House, 2016); and Paul B. Preciado, Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era, trans. (New York: Routledge, 1995), 3558, 5051. Walker, In Search, xi (emphasis added). See Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso, 2004); and Judith Butler, Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? But the performativity and iterability of gender show up the imitative structure of gender and its historical contingency.153 In spite of the pervasiveness of genderizing practices and the unavailability of a position outside gender, the very performativity and iterability of gender open up the possibility of repeating it slightly differently. Beauvoir's underlying claim is that women only exist in society as men's "Other." Youngs description of the deviation of womens bodily experience from this norm is a powerful indictment of womens social situation. . These are the main characteristics of the philosophical work of Simone de Beauvoir: The point of departure of Beauvoir was to realize that all the cultural productions of humanity, from art to the use of language, have man as a central point, the main reference. They have fought against assumptions that All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men and that white women are saving brown women from brown men.73 African American and postcolonial writers and thinkers (from Toni Morrison to Chandra Talpade Mohanty) have hesitated to self-identify with a primarily white movement that, they argued powerfully, effectively excluded them in unthinkingly prioritizing the concerns of white, middle-class women. If people become their gender rather than being born into them, and if we regard freedom to become, without limitations, as a vital part of the picture, perhaps the important thing to do is open up possibilities for becoming as much as we can. Many commentators have seen this asdeeply problematic or even abusive. maintain the status quo of womens exclusion from public life.139 Particularly pernicious has been the iteration in African mens writing of the conventional colonial trope of Africa as female.140 Stratton discerns a ubiquitous pattern in African postcolonial mens writing. . See Sara Ahmed, Whats the Use? Butler, Bodies That Matter, 46 (emphasis added). As she stresses in Feminism without Borders (2003): the application of the notion of women as a homogeneous category to women in the Third World colonizes and appropriates the pluralities of their complex location and robs them of their historical and political agency.132, Saba Mahmood, in Feminist Theory, Embodiment, and the Docile Agent: Some Reflections on the Egyptian Islamic Revival (2001), argues that rather than reading a specific cultural phenomenon through an established conception of agency, agency should be theorized through the specific phenomenon studied.133 Her target is the Western feminist equation of feminist agency with secularism, resistance, and transgression, which she finds unhelpful when studying the urban womens mosque movement that is part of the larger Islamic revival in Cairo.134 While in some contexts feminist agency might take the form of dramatic transgression and defiance, for these Egyptian women it took the form of active participation and engagement with a religious movement.135 It would be a neocolonial gesture to understand their involvement as due to false consciousness or internalized patriarchy.136 Mahmoods situated analysis thus endorses plural, local theories and concepts.137, Florence Stratton focuses on gender in African postcolonial literature and criticism.
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