Oppression alienates the subordinate into viewing herself through the master’s eyes

Evidence

For Beauvoir, the greatest inhibition for women comes from their acquired tendency to see themselves as ‘other’ rather than as a transcendent subject. Here she drew on her wartime reading of Hegel, who had analysed how rival consciousnesses wrestle for dominance, with one playing ‘master’ and the other ‘slave’. The master perceives everything from his own viewpoint, as is natural. But, bizarrely, so does the slave, who ties herself in knots trying to visualise the world from the master’s point of view — an ‘alienated’ perspective. She even adopts his point of view on herself, casting herself as object and him as subject. This tormented structure eventually collapses when the slave wakes up to the fact that she has it all backwards, and that the whole relationship rests on the hard work that she is doing — on her labour. She rebels, and in doing so she becomes fully conscious at last. — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 674

Categorization

• XREF: Links Beauvoir to Hegel’s master-slave dialectic, and the labor-wakefulness payoff echoes Marx’s historical materialism — good connective tissue for building the reader’s map of the movement. — connects to: Subordinates actively cooperate in their own oppression; Woman’s subordinate situation makes her lovable but not genuinely equal in man’s eyes. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1930; The oppressed internalize the oppressor’s consciousness into a divided self. — Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 112 (+6 more)
• DEFINE: Defines Beauvoir’s key concept of women as ‘other’ and the alienated perspective that sustains it.
• SEED: Angle: internalized oppressor’s gaze — how the master-slave dialectic predicts the phenomenon of self-objectification, with modern analogs from beauty standards to workplace self-censorship.

Broader Connections

• The oppressed internalize the oppressor’s consciousness into a divided self. #expands (0.85) — Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 112
• Subordinates actively cooperate in their own oppression #expands (0.82)
• Benevolent beliefs can recruit subordinates into supporting their own oppression. #expands (0.80) — John F. Dovidio, Peter Glick, Laurie A. Rudman, On the Nature of Prejudice, 773
• Subordinates internalize negative stereotypes that make them self-fulfill those stereotypes #expands (0.78) — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 3210
• The white gaze returns the black body to its owner distorted and demonized #exemplifies (0.78)
• Woman’s subordinate situation makes her lovable but not genuinely equal in man’s eyes. #exemplifies (0.75) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1930