The goal of "The Second Sex" is to get women, and men, to crave freedom — social, political and psychological — more than the precarious kind of happiness that an unjust world intermittently begrudges to the people who play by its rules. Beauvoir warned that you can't just will yourself to be free, that is, to abjure relentlessly the temptations to want only what the world wants you to want. For her the job of the philosopher, at least as much as the fiction writer, is to re-describe how things are in a way that competes with the status quo story and leaves us craving social justice and the truly wide berth for self-expression that only it can provide.
She is a member of the Society for Interdisciplinary Feminist Phenomenology.
Awards
Joseph A. and Lillian Leibner Award for Distinguished Advising and Teaching, 2005
"Hegel and Feminist Politics: A Symposium," with Kimberley Hutchings, Tuija Pulkkinen, and Alison Stone, Feminist Engagements With Hegel, Columbia University Press, forthcoming.
"Beauvoir on the Allure of Self-Objectification," découvrir l'oeuvre de Simone de Beauvoir: Du Deuxième Sexe à La Cérémonie des adieux, edited by Pascale Fautrier, Pierre-Louis Fort, and Anne Strasser : 249 – 256.
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"How to Do Things With Pornography," Reading Cavell, edited by Sanford Shieh and Alice Crary.
"On Human Understanding," Wittgensteinian Fideism, edited by Kai Nielsen and D. Z. Phillips.
"Beauvoir's Heideggerian Ontology," The Philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir: Critical Essays, edited by Margaret A. Simons.
"Cogito Ergo Film: Plato, Descartes, and Fight Club," Film as Philosophy: Essays on Cinema After Wittgenstein and Cavell, edited by Rupert Read.
"Must We Read Simone de Beauvoir?" The Legacy of Simone de Beauvoir, edited by Emily Grosholz.
"Is Feminist Philosophy a Contradiction in Terms?" Twenty Questions: An Introduction to Philosophy, 5th ed., edited by G. Lee Bowie, Robert C. Solomon, Meredith W. Michaels. An abridgement of chapter 1 of Simone de Beauvoir, Philosophy, and Feminism.
"First Philosophy, The Second Sex, and the Third Wave," Labyrinth, Vol. 1, No. 1. Reprinted in Simone de Beauvoir: 50 Jahre nach Dem Anderen Geschlecht, edited by Yvanka B. Raynova and Susanne Moser. A different version of chapter 2 of Simone de Beauvoir, Philosophy, and Feminism.
"Sum Femina Inde Cogito: Das andere Geschleht und Die Meditationen," Die Philosophin 20 : 41 – 61.
