Simone de Beauvoir, Women's Oppression and Existential Freedom

Abstract

Via a close reading of The Ethics of Ambiguity and The Second Sex, this chapter examines how Simone de Beauvoir's analogical thinking about race and gender shape her arguments concerning oppression and freedom. First, Beauvoir uses gender as an analytical category to examine women's oppression. In contrast, Beauvoir uses race, age, class and ethnicity as descriptive experiences that provide evidence for her analysis of women's oppression. Second, Beauvoir's analysis of women's oppression relies on an uncritical analogical method to develop arguments about gender oppression, with the race/gender analogy granted special prominence. Third, the substance of Beauvoir's analogies undermines her theory of existentialist freedom: manipulating root metaphors that depict Black people as silent slaves or non-independent women as complicit in their own subordination makes existential freedom difficult if not impossible for the majority of human beings.

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