Beauvoir supplied the politics Sartre’s account of the look lacked

Evidence

Whereas in his discussion of bad faith, Sartre holds me responsible for evading my freedom by becoming what the social and/ or individual Other makes of me, in his analysis of the look, Sartre does not hold me responsible for becoming an object for the Other or for objectifying the Other. Th is move is left to Beauvoir. … She dissects the ways in which the dynamics of the struggle for freedom, the look, can become reifi ed such that certain people come to “legitimately” occupy the position of the subject, while others are “legitimately” objectifi ed as the Other. Th e subject-object dichotomy, in other words, is not simply an innocent epistemological error. It is the ground of an oppressive politics that renders its oppression invisible by reifying the fl ows of anonymous perceptual structures. Calling humanly constituted reifi cations natural facts, this politics transforms mutable historical structures into natural realities, thereby foreclosing the possibility of demands for change. — Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb (eds.), Beauvoir and Sartre, 68

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the standing debate on who originated key existentialist concepts between Beauvoir and Sartre; also resonates with feminist standpoint critiques of objective neutrality elsewhere in the reader’s knowledge base. — connects to: Beauvoir reframed Sartre’s alienating male Look as a reciprocal female gaze — Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb (eds.), Beauvoir and Sartre: The Riddle of…, 277
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: does Sartre’s later work (Critique of Dialectical Reason) absorb Beauvoir’s politicized reading of the look, or does the gap remain his?

Broader Connections

• Beauvoir reframed Sartre’s alienating male Look as a reciprocal female gaze #corroborates (0.80) — Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb (eds.), Beauvoir and Sartre, 277