Beauvoir and Belle A Black Feminist Critique of The Second Sex

by Belle, Kathryn Sophia

• ISBN13: 9780197660195
• ISBN10: 0197660193
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2024-02-16
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

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 Lorraine 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.

Author Biography

Kathryn Sophia Belle is Associate Professor of Philosophy and affiliate faculty in AFAM and WGSS at Pennsylvania State University. She is also Director of the Africana Research Center. Primary research and teaching interests include African American/Africana Philosophy, Black Feminist Philosophy, Continental Philosophy (especially Existentialism), and Critical Philosophy of Race. She is co-editor of Convergences: Black Feminism and Continental Philosophy (2010) and author of Hannah Arendt and the Negro Question (2014). Professor Belle is the founding director of Collegium of Black Women Philosophers and a founding co-editor (2013-2016) of the journal Critical Philosophy of Race.

Table of Contents

Preface
Introduction: "Beauvoir and Belle: A Black Feminist Critique of The Second Sex"
Part 1
1. A Select Genealogy of Black Feminist Frameworks for Identities and Oppressions: "If we are not careful the work we are doing now is going to have to be 'rediscovered' at some point"
2. Claudia Jones: "The Negro question in the United States is prior to, and not equal to, the woman question"
3. Lorraine Hansberry: "The Second Sex may well be the most important work of this century"
4. Audre Lorde: "Difference is that raw and powerful connection from which our personal power is forged"
Part 2
5. Simone de Beauvoir's Analogical Approach: "There are deep analogies between the situations of women and blacks"
6. Slavery and Womanhood: "Assimilating woman to the slave is a mistake"
7. Abolition and Suffrage in the US: "They undertook a campaign in favor of blacks"
Part 3
8. The Coloniality of Gender and the other Others: "The category of Other is as original as consciousness itself"
Conclusion: Simone de Beauvoir: "I think The Second Sex will seem like an old, dated book, after a while. But nonetheless. . . a book which will have made its contribution"
Index