Critiquing Analogical Approaches to Difference in "The Second Sex"
Kathryn Sophia Belle, Ph.D
In a 2010 essay, “Sartre, Beauvoir, and the Race/Gender Analogy: A Case for Black Feminist Philosophy” (the second chapter ofConvergences: Black Feminism and Continental Philosophy, 2010),I offered a preliminary examination of the race/gender analogy in Jean-Paul Sartre’s Respectful Prostitute and Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, taking into account the influence of Richard Wright and Gunnar Myrdal on both Sartre’s and Beauvoir’s understanding of racial oppression as a white problem rather than a so-called Negro problem. I argued that the analogizing of racial oppression with gender oppression problematically codes race as Black male and gender as white female, erasing the ways in which Black women (and women of color more generally) experience racism and sexism – or racialized sexism and sexualized racism – simultaneously. In that essay, I turned to Anna Julia Cooper’s (proto-)intersectional Black feminist philosophy as a counter-example to the more narrowly conceptualized single axis oppression operating in these race/gender analogies.
Later in a 2014 article, “Comparative and Competing Frameworks of Oppression in Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex” (2014) I argue that a problem in this classic text is the way she deploys comparative and competing frameworks of oppression. At times Beauvoir describes the woman, the Black, the Jew, the colonized and the proletariat in ways that suggest sexism on the one hand and racism, antisemitism, colonialism and classism on the other hand are comparative systems of oppression. But when pointing to key differences between woman and other groups she sets up competing frameworks of oppression - privileging gender difference in ways that suggest woman’s subordination is a more significant or constitutive form of oppression than racism, antisemitism, colonialism and/or class oppression.
Most recently, in my chapter “Simone de Beauvoir and the Race/Gender Analogy Revisited” (just published in Nancy Bauer’s and Laura Hengehold’s Blackwell Companion to Beauvoir, 2017), I expand my argument that Beauvoir’s utilization of the race/gender analogy omits the experiences and oppressions of Black women. I offer a more extensive examination of how the analogy is functioning in the text while also providing a more nuanced exploration of the influences on Beauvoir.
If it is not already obvious, one of the guiding arguments in these earlier essays (that persists in the current book project) is my contention that Beauvoir’s analogical reasoning – from the race/gender analogy, to the slave/woman analogy, to the gender/suffrage analogies, and the ways in which her comparisons between the gender oppression of the white woman (as if all of the women are white) and the racial oppression of Black men (as if all of the Blacks are men) ignores the multiple oppressions confronting Black women and other women of color (those of us who are brave).[i] I draw attention to the unarticulated specificity that is actually operating in The Second Sex and the ways that the text’s analogical approach and unspoken coding occlude analyses of the experiences and oppressions of women of color.
There has been a concerted effort to recover Simone de Beauvoir as a legitimate philosophical figure despite her protestations to the label of philosopher and her preference for self-identifying as an author or writer. This recovery of Beauvoir, which celebrates her foundational contributions to feminism, as well as her insights on other forms of oppression such as anti-Black racism, antisemitism, and colonialism, stands in stark contrast to sharp criticism of Beauvoir for her exclusions of women of color and her appropriations of the suffering of others as a rhetorical strategy to advance her arguments about the oppression of white women.[ii] Focusing on Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, I argue that a major problem in that seminal and controversial text is the way she deploys comparative and competing frameworks of oppression. At times, Beauvoir describes the woman, the Black, the Jew, the colonized, and the proletariat in ways that suggest that sexism on the one hand, and racism, antisemitism, colonialism, and classism on the other hand, are comparative systems of oppression. But when pointing to key differences between women and other groups, she sets up competing frameworks of oppression, privileging gender difference in ways that suggest that woman’s subordination is a more significant or constitutive form of oppression than racism, antisemitism, colonialism and/or class oppression.
In many cases the “woman” that Beauvoir describes is not a Black woman, a Jewish woman, a colonized woman, or proletariat woman, but rather a white woman. In this way—using the term “woman” without qualifiers such as “white” or “French”—Beauvoir conceals the whiteness of the woman/women she is most often describing as Other while also dismissing the gendered aspects of anti-Black racism, antisemitism, colonialism, and class oppression to which she compares white women’s oppression. Furthermore, her figurative description of free white women as slaves or as enslaved displaces the existence and oppression of women and men that are subjugated to ancient and modern forms of institutional slavery. Looking closely at these comparative and competing frameworks of oppression in The Second Sex—alongside select divergent secondary literature on Beauvoir’s analogical analyses of oppression in that text—I have observed that Beauvoir’s critics are keenly aware of the arguments in support of Beauvoir. However, some of her supporters maintain an epistemological standpoint of ignorance concerning certain limitations of her feminist philosophy.[iii] Consequently, in their zealous attempts to enshrine Beauvoir in the gilded halls of philosophy, some of her supporters not only duplicate her exclusions of women of color but they also perpetuate the very silencing of women’s voices that they decry in the discipline of philosophy.
My book project, Critical Intersectional Approaches to Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (working title), offers a corrective to some of the exclusive tendencies in Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex and the replications of these exclusions in existing white feminist scholarship on Beauvoir (and perhaps by extension in white feminist philosophy more generally). In part, I am critiquing the analogical approaches to identity and oppression in the text and examining intersectionality and multiplicity as more viable alternatives. Beyond that, the constructive focus of my project is my intention to bring attention to women of color scholarly engagements with Beauvoir and this classic text (e.g. Loraine Hansberry, bell hooks, Angela Davis, Debora King, Oyewonke Oyewumi, Chikwenye Ogunyemi, Alia Al-Saji, Mariana Ortega, Norma Alarcon, Stephanie Berruz, Kyoo Lee and Qresent Mason).
Kathryn Sophia Belle
Pennsylvania State University
[i] See All of the Women are White All the Blacks are Men, But Some of Us are Brave. Eds. Gloria Hull, Patricia Bell Scott, and Barbara Smith (New York: The Feminist Press at CUNY Graduate Center, 1982).
[ii] I prefer to keep “Black” and “Blackness” and “anti-Black” racism capitalized in the same way as “African American” is capitalized, though I use Black rather than African American throughout because it is a more inclusive term. Also, I prefer to keep “white” in lowercase as an intended disruption of the norm (i.e., using either capitals or lowercase letters for both terms). This preference is applied to the text in my own voice, but not to quotes of other texts.
[iii] This observation has also been made while attending recent philosophy conferences where Beauvoir has been prominently featured. When pointing to certain exclusions, some scholars attempt to defend Beauvoir based on her lack of access to resources on Black women in the 1940s and 1950s. Other responses include claims that The Second Sex has had more impact on women’s lives around the world than any other text because it resonates with so many women—suggesting that if the text was so exclusive it could not resonate with other women.