Women's & Gender Studies

The work of Simone de Beauvoir has endured and flowered in the last two decades, thanks primarily to the lasting influence of The Second Sex on the rise of academic discussions of gender, sexuality, and old age. Now, in this new Companion dedicated to her life and writings, an international assembly of prominent scholars, essayists, and leading interpreters reflect upon the range of Beauvoir s contribution to philosophy as one of the great authors, thinkers, and public intellectuals of the twentieth century. The Companion examines Beauvoir s rich intellectual life from a variety of angles including literary, historical, and anthropological perspectives and situates her in relation to her forbears and contemporaries in the philosophical canon. Essays in each of four thematic sections reveal the breadth and acuity of her insight, from the significance of The Second Sex and her work on the metaphysics of gender to her plentiful contributions in ethics and political philosophy. Later chapters trace the relationship between Beauvoir s philosophical and literary work and open up her scholarship to global issues, questions of race, and the legacy of colonialism and sexism. The volume concludes by considering her impact on contemporary feminist thought writ large, and features pioneering work from a new generation of Beauvoir scholars.  Ambitious and unprecedented in scope, A Companion to Simone de Beauvoir is an accessible and interdisciplinary resource for students, teachers, and researchers across the humanities and social sciences.

This collection of essays takes up the most famous feminist sentence ever written, Simone de Beauvoir's "On ne nait pas femme: on le devient," finding in it a flashpoint that galvanizes feminist thinking and action in multiple dimensions. Since its publication, the sentence has inspiredfeminist thinking and action in many different cultural and linguistic contexts. Two entangled controversies emerge in the life of this sentence: a controversy over the practice of translation and a controversy over the nature and status of sexual difference. Variously translated into English as"One is not born, but rather becomes a woman" (Parshley, 1953), "one is not born but rather becomes woman" (Borde and Malovany-Chevallier, 2010), and "women are made, not born" (in popular parlance), the conflict over the translation crystallizes the feminist debate over the possibilities andlimitations of social construction as a theory of sexual difference. When Sheila Malovany-Chevallier and Constance Borde (contributors to this volume), translated Le Deuxieme Sexe into English in 2010, their decision to alter the translation of the famous sentence by omitting the "a" ignited debatethat has not yet exhausted itself. The controversy over the English translation has opened a conversation about translation practices and their relation to meaning more generally, and broadens, in this volume, into an examination of the life of Beauvoir's key sentence in other languages andpolitical and cultural contexts as well. The philosophers, translators, literary scholars and historian who author these essays take decidedly different positions on the meaning of the sentence in French, and thus on its correct translation in a variety of languages - but also on the meaning and salience of the question of sexual difference as it travels between languages, cultures, and political worlds.