Week 2, 30 April - Kate Kirkpatrick (Oxford): The Myth of Recognition in The Second Sex 

Since Eva Lundgren-Gothlin’s Sex and Existence and Nancy Bauer’s Simone de Beauvoir, Philosophy, and Feminism, several philosophical interpreters of The Second Sex have shared the assumption that The Second Sex is Hegelian and that “the Hegel question”—namely, the debate about whether and to what extent Beauvoir’s account of woman as the Other is indebted to Hegel’s Master/Slave dialectic—is best answered by reading Beauvoir through “French Hegel”, and especially through the reading of Alexandre Kojève. This paper argues on historical, textual, and conceptual grounds that Beauvoir’s philosophical and political project in The Second Sex is better characterized as anti-Hegelian, sharing methodological and political commitments with the “turn to the concrete” and “French Marx”. Moreover, reading Beauvoir as a "French" Hegelian theorist of recognition overlooks her suspicion—a longstanding suspicion in French philosophy—of what she calls the "myth" of recognition itself.

Week 8, 11 June - Katherine Jenkins (Glasgow): Ephemeral Women: On structural injustice and “being real”

This talk explores the ways in which structural injustice can give rise to a particular kind of vexed relationship with reality. I argue that members of the oppressed groups frequently find that the way the world seems to them is not reflected in collective practices (I focus here on the case of women in the face of widespread sexual violence), and that this experience is philosophically interesting. It can, I suggest, give rise to a felt sense of dislocation from the world, or of not being quite “real”, and I consider what this feeling might tell us about the metaphysics of gender under structural injustice. To help me explore this, I turn to fiction, specifically to not–quite–human feminised figures that are found in speculative fiction generally and in the film Blade Runner 2049 in particular. Whilst the film received some criticism for its portrayal of women, I argue that a feminist reading is available. On this reading, the film’s treatment of some of its feminised figures in fact captures important truths about the vexed relationship with reality that women come to have under structural injustice.