Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex

Acknowledged by many feminists as the single most important theoretical work of the twentieth century, Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex (1949) nevertheless occupies an anomalous place in the feminist 'canon'. Yet it has had an undeniable impact, not only on the development of critiques of sexual politics but on twentieth-century western thinking about the concept of 'woman' in general. This collection of six new essays by scholars from the disciplines of French, English literature, history, cultural criticism, feminist theory and philosophy makes a valuable contribution to the task of re-reading and reassessing this enormously influential text for a new generation of feminist readers, and also for cultural theorists, for whom the question of 'the feminine' is at the centre of key debates in philosophy and postmodernity. The contributors provide a significantly new rethinking of the place of The Second Sex in cultural history and of women and representation, the role of 'fictions' and the problem of ethical agency in the work of the leading intellectual woman of this age.

Ruth Evans is Dorothy McBride Orthwein Professor in the Department of English at St Louis University

1. Introduction: The Second Sex and the postmodern - Ruth Evans 2. Writing from the centre: ironies of otherness and marginality - Margaret Atack 3. The influence of The Second Sex on the French feminist scene - Catherine Rodgers 4. Simone de Beauvoir: transcending fictions - Lorna Sage 5. A certain lack of symmetry: Beauvoir on autonomous agency and women's embodiment - Catriona Mackenzie 6. Reading, resistance and disempowerment - Stephen Horton 7. To become or not to become; or, Must two be second? Simone de Beauvoir and The Second Sex in conversation - Nicole Ward Jouve Bibliography Index