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Feminist Theory
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Re-reading the Second Sex

Theorizing the Situation

Elaine Stavro

Trent University

In this re-reading of The Second Sex, the author argues that Beauvoir transgressively employs Sartre’s universal binary categories of Being and Nothingnessin her effort to account for the economic, political, cultural and psychological conditions of women’s situation. In doing so, she challenges Sartre’s theory of radical ontological freedom and concretizes his abstract philosophic voice, thereby avoiding their rationalist and voluntarist implications. Contesting Beauvoir’s feminist critics, who saw her as emotionally and philosophically dependent on Sartre and her work as an amalgam of Sartrean existentialism and feminist insights, the author maintains that Beauvoir had her own independent project – to transform Sartrean existentialism to make it contextually sensitive. Distancing herself from Sartre’s theory of freedom and its valorization of masculine experience and disembodied consciousnesses, Beauvoir’s theory of situational freedom and embodied subjectivity draws her closer to the existentialism of Merleau-Ponty.

Key Words: agency • embodied reason • essentialism • relational subject • Sartre/Beauvoir relationship • situational freedom

Feminist Theory, Vol. 1, No. 2, 131-150 (2000)
DOI: 10.1177/14647000022229128
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[Abstract] [PDF]