Simone de Beauvoir (Routledge Critical Thinkers)
Ursula Tidd
Language: English
Pages: 172
ISBN: 0415263646
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Simone de Beauvoir's groundbreaking work has transformed the way we think about gender and identity. Without her 1949 text The Second Sex, gender theory as we know it today would be unthinkable. A leading figure in French existentialism, Beauvoir's concepts of 'becoming woman' and of woman as 'Other' are among the most influential ideas in feminist enquiry and debate.
This book guides the reader through the main areas of Simone de Beauvoir's thought, including:
*existentialism and ethics
*gender studies and feminism
*literature and autobiography
*sexuality, the body and ageing
Drawing upon Beauvoir's literary and theoretical texts, this is the ideal introduction to her thought for students on a range of courses including literature, cultural studies, gender, philosophy and modern languages.
Sanctifying Misandry: Goddess Ideology and the Fall of Man
Vindicación de los derechos de la mujer (Taurus Great Ideas)
or 'standing out from'), meaning that it is radically separated from itself by the three ecstases of past, present and future. So we can never 'just exist' in the present moment because the past, present and future are deeply enmeshed in our decisions to act. According to Heidegger, human beings are also not alone in the world, but 'Mitsein', or 'being-with-others'. Other people form part of our 'being-in-the-world', or 'thrown-ness', as do our locations in time and place. Heidegger sees
during this period. She firmly rejected differentialist feminism because, as she had demonstrated in The Second Sex, discourses of 'sexual difference' had traditionally been exploited by patriarchy to oppress women. She viewed differentialist feminism as espousing an ideology of neo-femininity which was politically regressive. Consequently, she continued to reject any recourse to notions of repressed female difference as an effective political strategy to combat women's oppression. Beauvoir's
feminism, especially to the work of Christine Delphy (Jackson 1996:92–114). Feminist theorists outside France (for example, Canadian radical feminist, Shulamith Firestone, in The Dialectic of Sexin 1972) have also conceptualised women as a class, on the basis of relations of reproduction and sexuality. condemned the radical lesbian position of Wittig and her supporters, accusing them of excluding heterosexual women from the class of women. In 1978, Beauvoir seized another opportunity to
that she had underestimated the political significance of women's sexuality. She recognised that deriving political praxis from theoretical works such as The Second Sex was no longer valid; in all political struggles, theory should now be derived from collective praxis. 5 LITERATURE So far we have looked at some of Beauvoir's key philosophical ideas; the purpose of this chapter will be to acquaint ourselves with some of her key ideas about literature. Now, as indicated at the beginning
important differences, all the modern feminist meanings of gender have roots in Simone de Beauvoir's claim that "one is not born a woman"' (Haraway 1991:131). Indeed, the notion of gender as a construct, rather than a natural, undisputed 'fact' of identity, is so deeply embedded in much second-wave feminist thinking that it has become part of feminism's conceptual framework. Beauvoir's notion of woman as being positioned as relative absolute 'Other' to man as the masculine universal subject is
