Doll Power
Where do thoughts of death lead?
Barbie is forever denied the awkward self-consciousness that makes possible both ambition and disappointment. ...
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What Does It Mean to Be “Authentic”?
Skye C. Cleary chats with Luis Jaramillo about her new book on Simone de Beauvoir’s philosophy-from-life method
Finding your “authentic self” is often taken to mean: “Let’s turn inward and look for the blueprint that’s going to tell us what decisions we should make and that will make us happy.” But Beauvoir argued that we’re humans who are always growing, always changing....
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QAnon as a Byproduct of a Broken America
Alienation, anxiety, and religion
QAnon is a conspiracy theory alleging that the current president of the United States, Donald Trump, is battling an organized and criminal deep state—which also happens to be a Satan-worshipping cabal of pedophiles engaged in sex-trafficking—and that this battle is moving towards an apocalyptic showdown in which our president will ...
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Feminists Say
Gagging on rape
Last year the journal Studies in Gender and Sexuality published a panel called "The ontology of the rape joke," organized around a performance by Vanessa Place of her piece, "Rape joke." The panel included responses from Jamieson Webster, Jeff Dolven, Gayle Salamon, Kyoo Lee, Katie Gentile, and Virginia Goldner, and ended with ...
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Reading The Second Sex in the Age of #MeToo
Where are we coming from, and where do we go?
In the firestorm of debates about the implications of #MeToo, feminist activists and commentators have found themselves circling around the definitions of a handful of essential terms: rape, harassment, assault, consent. We have seen the word “pleasure” disentangled, and the word “inappropriate” expanded. We have discussed power and victimhood, empowerment ...
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The Importance of Losing ‘Virginity’
I first questioned the concept of virginity’s validity when I was eighteen. I had just watched a Laci Green video entitled ‘Let’s Lose Virginity,’ and it depicted ‘virginity’ as a harmful myth created to oppress women. Reading Simone De Beauvoir’s ‘The Second Sex,’ a text that demonstrates why the myth ...
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Judith Butler and The Many Subjects of Feminist Theory
This post is part of the Gender and Domination Course in OOPS.
Despite their differences, various authors of feminist theory have been mobilized by a similar question regarding the subject of feminism -- more precisely, what kind of theory of the subject is most productive for the feminist debate? Ever since ...
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Psychoanalysis’ Reductio Ad Sex, Beauvior’s Better Critique
This post is part of the Gender and Domination Course in OOPS.
In the chapter of The Second Sex entitled “The Psychoanalytic Point of View,” Simone De Beauvoir ends her exploration of the way in which traditional psychoanalysis treats ideas of womanhood and femininity with a critique of the discipline as ...
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Are Female Characters Impossible?
This post is in relation to the Gender and Domination course in OOPS.
She is the Giddiness of Loss, the Fascination of Damnation, of Death
Euripides’ Alcestis offers a unique exemplification of the themes and arguments in Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex. Admetus’ elderly parents fail to step up and die for their son, ...
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Feminism, Marxism and Social Transformation: Beyond Economic Monism
Friedrich Engels’ Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State (1884) has been a central text for Marxist-feminist thinkers in the 20th century and up until the present. But its centrality is not marked by a universal acceptance or agreement with the central tenets of Engels’ elaboration of Lewis ...
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