In this first episode, Jennifer McWeeny elaborates on an important yet frequently mistranslated distinction found in Le Deuxième Sexe between saisir, se faire objetand se faire femme. Attending to the technical language of phenomenology that Beauvoir employs in these distinctions yields a new, 21st Century reading of Beauvoir’s philosophy of woman with social and political implications.

Hosted by Ashika Singh and Liesbeth Schoonheim

More reading…

• Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier, New York, Vintage, 2010 [1949], p. 283.
• Simone de Beauvoir, “Literature and Metaphysics,” trans. Veronique Zayteff and Frederick M. Morrison, in Simone de Beauvoir: Philosophical Writings, ed. Margaret A. Simons with Marybeth Timmerman and Mary Beth Mader, Urbana, IL, University of Illinois Press, 269-277.
• Simone de Beauvoir, “What Is Existentialism?” trans. Marybeth Timmermann, in Simone de Beauvoir: Philosophical Writings, ed. Margaret A. Simons with Marybeth Timmerman and Mary Beth Mader, Urbana, IL, University of Illinois Press, 323-326.
• Simone de Beauvoir, “A Review of The Phenomenology of Perception by Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1945),” trans. Marybeth Timmermann, in Simone de Beauvoir: Philosophical Writings, ed. Margaret A. Simons with Marybeth Timmerman and Mary Beth Mader, Urbana, IL, University of Illinois Press, 159-164.
• Emmanuel de Saint Aubert, “The Blood of Others: Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Simone de Beauvoir, Part I: I Exist, Therefore I Encroach,” trans. Jennifer McWeeny, Simone de Beauvoir Studies, vol. 30, no. 1, 2019, 33-66, p. 34.
• Emmanuel de Saint Aubert, “The Blood of Others: Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Simone de Beauvoir, Part II: Between Birth and Death: Freedom Struggling with Existentialist Divinities,” trans. Jennifer McWeeny, Simone de Beauvoir Studies, vol. 30, no. 2, 2019, 341-366.
• W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, Boston, Bedford Books, 1997.
• Lewis Gordon. 1995. Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism. New York: Humanity Books.
• Sara Heinämaa. 2003. Toward a Phenomenology of Sexual Difference: Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Beauvoir. New York: Rowman & Littlefield.
• Deborah King, “Multiple Jeopardy, Multiple Consciousness: The Context of Black Feminist Ideology,” Signs 14 (1) (1988), pp. 42-72.
• Jennifer McWeeny, “The Second Sex of Consciousness: A New Temporality and Ontology for Beauvoir’s ‘Becoming a Woman,’” “On ne naît pas femme: on le devient…”: The Life of a Sentence, ed. Bonnie Mann and Martina Ferrari, 231-273 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017).
• Jennifer McWeeny, “Varieties of Consciousness under Oppression: False Consciousness, Bad Faith, Double Consciousness, and Se faire objet,” in Phenomenology and the Political, ed. S. West Gurley and Geoffrey Pfeifer, 149-163 (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2016).