Beauvoir and Belle: A Black Feminist Critique of The Second Sex

Kathryn Sophia Belle's work centers feminist frameworks, discourses, and vocabularies of Black women and other Women of Color, challenging Beauvoir's analogies and exposing the limits of The Second Sex. She highlights the writings of Black women and other Women of Color, such as Lorraine Hansberry, Angela Davis, and Claudia Jones, who have been ignored by Beauvoir's scholarship.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 376 pages
Publication date: 29 August 2024
Publisher: Oxford University Press Inc

Kathryn Sophia Belle's work centers feminist frameworks, discourses, and vocabularies of Black women and other Women of Color that existed prior to and have continued to exist after The Second Sex. She highlights the voices of Black women and other Women of Color, such as Lorraine Hansberry, Angela Davis, Chikwenye Ogunyemi, Deborah King, Oyèrónké Oywùmí, Mariana Ortega, Kathy Glass, bell hooks, Kyoo Lee, Stephanie Rivera Berruz, Patricia Hill Collins, and Alia Al-Saji. Special attention is also given to Claudia Jones and Audre Lorde, who implicitly and indirectly engage with The Second Sex. Belle argues against the frameworks of oppression used by Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex, a foundational text of white feminist philosophy. She frames Beauvoir's analogies as limitations and shows how Beauvoir either does not engage with Black women and other Women of Color or engages with them in problematic ways. Belle explores how Black and other Women of Color have critically written and talked about The Second Sex, exposing the ways in which the existing Beauvoir scholarship has mostly ignored these engagements, thereby replicating Beauvoir's exclusions.

Weight: 476g
Dimension: 211 x 142 x 36 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780197660201