Beauvoir and Politics: A Toolkit

Approaching Simone de Beauvoir’s feminism and social commentary as a resource to understand our current crises, Beauvoir and Politics: A Toolkit brings together established and emerging scholars to apply her insights to gender studies, political philosophy, decolonisation, intellectual history, age theory, and critical phenomenology. The essays in this collection start from key concepts in Beauvoir’s oeuvre and relate them to contemporary debates, asking how her notion of ambiguity speaks to lived experiences that have been highly politicized in recent years, such as pregnancy, old age, sexual violence, and the exposure of black and brown bodies to police violence; how myths inform our notions of collective, national identities, as well as notions of masculinity and femininity; and how she provides conceptual tools that help to theorize the various political strategies that are used to challenge gendered and racialized systems of oppression. These and other issues are central to this critical appraisal of Beauvoir’s legacy, demonstrating the contemporary relevance of her thought as it diagnoses the present and looks toward change for a better future. This book will be of great interest to undergraduate and postgraduate students looking to engage with the political content of Simone de Beauvoir’s work and the timely application of her ideas.

Liesbeth Schoonheim is a post-doctoral researcher (Wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin) in political theory at Humboldt University in Berlin, Germany. Recent publications include "Resistance: An Arendtian Reading of Solidarity and Friendship in Foucault" (2021, Foucault Studies), "Beauvoir and Writing as the Creation of the Self: Memoirs, Diaries, Biography" (2020, Sartre Studies International), and "The ‘Rightful Place in Man’s Enduring Chronicle’: Arendt’s Benjaminian Historiography" (2020, History of European Ideas).

Karen Vintges is an associate researcher at the Amsterdam Institute for Humanities Research of the University of Amsterdam. Her publications include Philosophy as Passion: The Thinking of Simone de Beauvoir (1992), Feminism and the Final Foucault (co-edited with Dianna Taylor, 2004), A New Dawn for the Second Sex: Women’s Freedom Practices in World Perspective (2017), and other books in Dutch.