The Second Sex is fundamentally ethical and political, not epistemological

Evidence

If we ignore Beauvoir’s affi nities with Sartre, however, we risk forgetting that Th e Second Sex’s existential-phenomenological analyses of women’s situations are taken up in the name of a political liberatory project. If Beauvoir’s only goal was to decipher the lived experience of being a woman, showing the ways in which her phenomenological analyses are indebted to Merleau-Ponty might be suffi cient. But Th e Second Sex is not an epistemological treatise. It is an ethical and political work. In showing us the how and what of the lived woman’s body, Beauvoir intends for us to see that women are oppressed. Getting us to see this is the fi rst step in enlisting us as her allies in the political and ethical project of liberating women from their subjection. — Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb (eds.), Beauvoir and Sartre, 62

Categorization

• DEFINE: Fixes the interpretive stance: The Second Sex must be read as a political liberatory work, which constrains which philosophical debts matter.
• XREF: connects to: French backlash against The Second Sex hindered its acceptance as philosophy — Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb (eds.), Beauvoir and Sartre: The Riddle of…, 56; Beauvoir’s The Second Sex applied existentialist method to the history of patriarchy — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 666

Broader Connections

• Beauvoir’s The Second Sex applied existentialist method to the history of patriarchy #expands (0.85) — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 666