Beauvoir And Belle

"In Beauvoir and Belle: A Black Feminist Critique of The Second Sex my intention is to center some of the feminist frameworks, discourses, and vocabularies of Black women and other Women of Color that existed prior to and have continued after The Second Sex. This approach also functions as a corrective to some of the exclusionary tendencies in The Second Sex itself. Having said that, I also take seriously the ways that Black women and other Women of Color have productively engaged this text. By presenting how Black and other Women of Color have critically engaged with this text, I am also exposing the ways that existing Beauvoir scholarship has mostly ignored these engagements, thereby replicating Beauvoir's exclusions in the text. I make the following main arguments about The Second Sex: despite its noteworthy contributions and insights, some of the limitations of the text include the analogical approach to identity and oppression, the deployment of comparative and competing frameworks of oppression, as well as the ways in which Black women and other Women of Color are either not engaged at all in some cases or problematically engaged in other cases in the text. Additionally, focusing on select secondary literature, I argue that while seeking to enshrine Beauvoir in the gilded halls of philosophy, much of the white feminist secondary literature on The Second Sex duplicates her exclusions of Black women and other Women of Color (e.g., by not citing Black feminists and other Women of Color feminists who explicitly take up this text or by citing but not substantively engaging the arguments offered by Black women and other Women of Color), thereby perpetuating the very silencing of women's voices that they often decry in the discipline of philosophy"--

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.

A systemic analysis of anti-Black racism in the work of political philosopher Hannah Arendt. While acknowledging Hannah Arendt’s keen philosophical and political insights, Kathryn T. Gines claims that there are some problematic assertions and oversights regarding Arendt’s treatment of the “Negro question.”Gines focuses on Arendt’s reaction to the desegregation of Little Rock schools, to laws making mixed marriages illegal, and to the growing civil rights movement in the south. Reading them alongside Arendt’s writings on revolution, the human condition, violence, and responses to the Eichmann war crimes trial, Gines provides a systematic analysis of anti-black racism in Arendt’s work. “Hannah Arendt: political progressive and committed anti-racist theorist? Think again. As Kathryn Gines makes inescapably clear, for Arendt the “Negro” was the problem, whether in the form of savage “primitives” inseparable from Heart-of-Darkness Africa, social climbers trying to get their kids into white schools, or unqualified black university students dragging down academic standards. [Gines’s] boldly revisionist text reassesses the German thinker’s categories and frameworks.” —Charles W. Mills, Northwestern University “Takes on a major thinker, Hannah Arendt, on an important issue—race and racism—and challenges her on specific points while raising philosophical and methodological shortcomings.” —Richard King, Nottingham University “Gines carefully moves through Arendt scholarship and Arendt’s texts to argue persuasively that explicit discussions of the “Negro question” point up the limitations of her thinking.” —Kelly Oliver, Vanderbilt University “Gines has delivered an intellectually challenging book, that presents one of the most important figures in Western philosophy of the 2nd half of the 20th century in a different and, perhaps, somewhat less favorable perspective.” —Philosophia “Offers a wealth of research that will be valuable to scholars and graduate students interested in how racial bias operates in Arendt’s major works. Gines’s writing style is lucid and to the point, and her engagement with secondary sources is comprehensive.” —Hypatia

Black Feminism and Continental Philosophy in dialogue.

Simone de Beauvoir and Luce Irigaray famously insisted on their philosophical differences, and this mutual insistence has largely guided the reception of their thought. What does it mean to return to Simone de Beauvoir and Luce Irigaray in light of questions and problems of contemporary feminism, including intersectional and queer criticisms of their projects? How should we now take up, amplify, and surpass the horizons opened by their projects? Seeking answers to these questions, the essays in this volume return to Beauvoir and Irigaray to find what the two philosophers share. And as the authors make clear, the richness of Beauvoir and Irigaray's thought far exceeds the reductive parameters of the Eurocentric, bourgeois second-wave debates that have constrained interpretation of their work. The first section of this volume places Beauvoir and Irigaray in critical dialogue, exploring the place of the material and the corporeal in Beauvoir's thought and, in doing so, reading Beauvoir in a framework that goes beyond a theory of gender and the humanism of phenomenology. The essays in the second section of the volume take up the challenge of articulating points of dialogue between the two focal philosophers in logic, ethics, and politics. Combined, these essays resituate Beauvoir and Irigaray's work both historically and in light of contemporary demands, breaking new ground in feminist philosophy.

Essays on Beauvoirs influences, contemporary engagements, and legacy in the philosophical tradition. Despite a deep familiarity with the philosophical tradition and despite the groundbreaking influence of her own work, Simone de Beauvoir never embraced the idea of herself as a philosopher. Her legacy is similarly complicated. She is acclaimed as a revolutionary thinker on issues of gender, age, and oppression, but although much has been written weighing the influence she and Jean-Paul Sartre had on one another, the extent and sophistication of her engagement with the Western tradition broadly goes mostly unnoticed. This volume turns the spotlight on exactly that, examining Beauvoirs dialogue with her influences and contemporaries, as well as her impact on later thinkersconcluding with an autobiographical essay by bell hooks discussing the influence of Beauvoirs philosophy and life on her own work and career. These innovative essays both broaden our understanding of Beauvoir and suggest new ways of understanding canonical figures through the lens of her work.

Recent critics have affirmed the difficulty—perhaps the impossibility—of defining modern comedy; at the same time, some feminist scholars are seeking to understand the special comedy often present in literature written by women. Comedy and the Woman Writer responds to both these concerns of recent criticism: feminist literary theory and theories of comedy. Judy Little develops a critical apparatus for identifying feminist comedy in recent fiction, especially the radical political and psychological implications of this comedy, and then applies and tests her theory by examining the novels of Virginia Woolf and Muriel Spark. Despite recent scholarly attention to Woolf, the profound comedy of her work has been largely overlooked, and the comic fiction of Spark has seldom had the responsible and attentive criticism that it deserves. The introductory chapter draws upon anthropology and sociology, as well as literary criticism and the fiction of feminist writers such as Woolf, Doris Lessing, and Monique Wittig, to define a modern feminist comedy. Four central chapters then explore the implications of this comedy in the novels of Woolf and Spark. Little distinguishes between, on the one hand, several varieties of traditional comedy and satire and, on the other, the festive or “liminal” comedy to which feminist comedy belongs. Both Woolf and Spark mock centuries-old mythic patterns and behaviors deriving from basic social norms, as well as the values emerging from these norms. It is one thing, the author points out, to find “manners” amusing, to scourge vices, or to mock the follies of lovers; it is a much more drastic act of the imagination to mock the very norms against which comedy has traditionally judged vices, follies, and eccentricities. While the comedy of Woolf and Spark has some precedent in festive or liminal celebrations, during which even basic values and behavior are abandoned, feminist comedy displays its radical nature by implying that there is no resolution to the inverted overturned world, the world in revolutionary transition. The final chapter considers briefly, in the light of the critical model of feminist comedy, the work of several other twentieth-century writers, including Jean Rhys, Penelope Moritmer, and Margaret Drabble. The presence of radical comedy in the fiction of these and other writers suggests the need for continuing attention to the theory of feminist comedy proposed in this study.

Drawing on international examples, this book interrogates the relationship between the arts, culture and community development. Contributors from six continents, reimagine community development as they consider how aesthetic arts contribute to processes of peacebuilding, youth empowerment, participatory planning and environmental regeneration.