Women's alterity and other Others in The Second Sex (1949)

• Grant number: 24/04797-5
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships abroad - Research Internship - Doctorate
• Start date: November 15, 2024
• End date: November 14, 2025
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Philosophy - Ethics
• Principal Investigator: Yara Adario Frateschi
• Grantee: Bruna Mello Gomes Bernardes
• Supervisor: Patricia Moynagh
• Host Institution: Instituto de Filosofia e Ciências Humanas (IFCH). Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Campinas , SP, Brazil
• Institution abroad: Wagner College, United States
• Associated to the scholarship: 23/00481-0 - Alterities in Simone de Beauvoir's thought: a materialist philosophical project, BP.DR

Abstract

During my doctoral research, when analyzing Beauvoir's travel diary to the United States entitled America day by day (1948), I noticed that the experience she had on this trip with the American reality of racial segregation imposed on blacks through Jim Crow laws was important for the philosopher to develop the thesis of the pure alterity of women in The Second Sex (1949). As the research progressed, I realized that Beauvoir's mentions of other oppressed groups, such as blacks, Jews, and the working class, are used by her as a methodological strategy to comprehend the situation of women's oppression through analogies with these other oppressed groups. However, as some scholars point out, Beauvoir's methodological choice highlights a problem when it comes to the lack of interrelationship between oppressions. My aim in this research internship (BEPE) is to investigate the extent of Beauvoir's analysis of women in The Second Sex concerning issues of race and class. Thus, in the first section of the chapter of my thesis I will develop during BEPE, based on the contributions of Beauvoir scholars, I propose to analyze the passages in The Second Sex in which Beauvoir relates the situation of women to that of other oppressed groups to point out the problems with Beauvoir's analogies, especially concerning issues of class and race. Finally, in the second section, I propose to evaluate the extent and the limitations of Beauvoir's particular analysis of the lived realities of bourgeois French white women.