PHIL 235 - Beauvoir and The Second Sex

FDR: HU
Credits: 4
Planned Offering: Spring 2014 and alternate years.

The Second Sex (1949) is Simone de Beauvoir’s most well-known work in philosophy. It is a deep and urgent meditation on a true hope that is still elusive for many of us: to become, in every sense. one’s own. It weaves together philosophy, history, social studies, economics, and biology to analyze the notion of “woman” and to explore the making and the power of gender and sexuality. Newly translated, The Second Sex is an important philosophical and political document about inequality and enforced otherness. In this course, we read this text together with recent work in the field and discuss it both as an important historical document and as a still relevant work on our gendered being in the world. Verhage.