Beauvoir and Belle

Kathryn Sophia Belle here argues against the analogical, comparative, and competing frameworks of oppression used by Simone de Beauvoir in her foundational white feminist philosophy text The Second Sex. She frames Beauvoir's analogies as limitations and shows how Beauvoir either does not engage with Black women and other Women of Color, or engages with them problematically. By presenting how Black and other Women of Color have critically written and talked about The Second Sex, Belle also exposes the ways in which the existing Beauvoir scholarship has mostly ignored these engagements, thereby replicating Beauvoir's exclusions in the text.