This paper examines Simone de Beauvoir's account of marriage in The Second Sex and argues that Beauvoir's dichotomy between transcendence and immanence can provide an illuminating critique of continuing gender inequities in marriage and divisions of domestic work. Beauvoir's existentialist ethics not only establishes a moral wrong in marriages in which wives perform the second shift of household labor but also supports the need to transform existing normative expectations surrounding wives and domestic work.

Conceiving political agency in terms of an interaction between the categories that Simone de Beauvoir called 'immanence' and 'transcendence' illuminates the role that attachments and desires play in supporting commitments to abstract principles of political right, and so clarifies the structure and sources of political agency. Communitarians and feminist theorists have shown in recent years that attachments to particular others can support a strong sense of individual efficacy. This analysis goes beyond those prior studies by showing the importance for political (...) agency of partial attachments not to particular others but to abstract principles such as justice, liberty and equality. Motivating principled political action is a fundamental concern for constitutional liberal democracies such as the USA, in which citizens are to rule themselves on the basis of a constitutionally established set of abstract principles, rather than simply on the basis of attachments to particular persons or communities. Key Words: citizenship • gender • justice • political agency • Simone de Beauvoir. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This paper presents an analysis of motherhood as potentially ambiguous and empowering, using the Beauvoirian concept of the erotic. I argue that Beauvoir’s notion of the erotic can allow us to reevaluate “nonproductive,” repetitive, apparently immanent activities—such as going through pregnancy, giving birth, breastfeeding, and raising a child—as projects through which we disclose freedom, and, thus, as projects that possibly lead to transcendence.It is often argued that Beauvoir considered these experiences to be ways of embracing immanence and avoiding transcendence. (...) Yet even supposing Beauvoir’s argument was against not maternity per se, but the oppressive construction of the institution of motherhood under patriarchy, can maternal engagement be viewed as an existentialist, phenomenological project? I claim that Beauvoir’s own premises show that it must be so considered once motherhood is recognized as potentially joyful, ambiguously erotic, and creative. (shrink)

One of the most important concepts in Simone de Beauvoir’s existentialist and phenomenological ethics is the concept of freedom. In this article, I would like to argue that Beauvoir’s concept of freedom is problematic in being strongly constrained by its essentially active character. This constraint contradicts some of Beauvoir’s major ideas, such as the one that considers the body as a situation, as a source of activity and of freedom in itself, as well as the idea of eroticism as one (...) of the most important expressions of authenticity. I will show that Beauvoir’s concept of freedom can appear to be less constrained by the necessity to be inherently active if we look at it through the ‘crack’ provided by her conception of the erotic body as already embodying freedom. Using this ‘crack’, I will attempt to shed new light on the aspects of Beauvoir’s idea of the erotic that are productive for her conceptions of ethics and of freedom. (shrink)

This paper develops a new account of Beauvoir's "Hegelianism" and argues that the strand of contemporary interpretation of Beauvoir that seeks to represent her thought in isolation from that of Jean-Paul Sartre constitutes a betrayal of the philosophy of recognition that she denves from Hegel. It underscores the extent to which Beauvoir influenced Sartre's Being and Nothingness and shows that Sartre and Beauvoir both adapted Hegel's ideas and agreed in rejecting his optimism.

Abstract Feminists have interpreted Rousseau's attitudes to women as characteristic of a patriarchal ideology in which passion, nature and love are associated with the feminine and repressed in favour of masculine reason, culture and justice. Yet this reading does not cohere with Rousseau's adulation of nature, nor with the repression of writing and culture in favour of natural speech which Derrida finds in his texts. This paper uses Rousseau's accounts of his personal experiences to resolve this conflict and to develop (...) a more complex understanding of Rousseau's attitudes to women. The reading emphasizes that Rousseau operated with a triadic picture in which reason, the passions of the heart and the passions of the body are distinguished. The discussion of Derrida's reading of Rousseau gives rise to some reflections on the relationship of speech and writing to subjectivity, autonomy and women's oppression. (shrink)

This paper explores two phases of the early modern genre wars. The first was fought by Marie de Gournay, in her “Preface” to Montaigne's Essays, on behalf of her adoptive father and in defense of his naked and masculine prose. The second was fought half a century later by Nicholas Boileau in opposition to Gournay's feminizing successor, Madeleine de Scudéry. In this debate Gournay's position is egalitarian, whereas Scudéry's approximates to a feminism of difference. It is claimed that both female (...) protagonists in this early debate occlude the female body. The far more sexually explicit prose of Mary Delarivier Manley is then used to raise the question: is it genre, or is it, rather, the very nature of erotic sexuality, that makes it so difficult for women to masterfully expose themselves as authoritative subjects? (shrink)