The Reciprocity of Violence in Simone de Beauvoir’s Thought

• In Event: Feminism, Resistance, Violence

Abstract

This essay returns to Simone de Beauvoir’s thought, specifically The Ethics of Ambiguity and The Second Sex, to rethink the concept of violence. As Beauvoir argues in Ethics, freedom requires the acknowledgement of human ambiguity—that each person is both a subject and an object in the world. Beauvoir defines oppression as the systematic reduction of people to object status through violence, and The Second Sex focuses on the ways patriarchal oppression violently objectifies women. There, Beauvoir contends that women cannot act in the world because they lack the violent training that young men receive. Through a creative re-reading of Beauvoir, I argue that women’s liberation depends on women learning to exercise violence from an early age. Beauvoir therefore disrupts the construction of men as active subjects who perpetrate violence and women as passive objects victimized by patriarchal violence. Rather than a pacifist vision of a world without violence, I conclude, Beauvoir offers a much more complicated picture of women’s freedom as requiring the reciprocity of violence between women and men. The essay situates Beauvoir in a broader political theoretical conversation about violence, with particular attention to her Hegelian and existentialist influences, and in turn traces Beauvoir’s influence on U.S. second-wave feminism. It is part of a broader project that uncovers historical debates over the use of violence for feminist purposes.

Author

• Rose Owen, The New School