Lori Marso

Noticing that, in The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir deftly describes patriarchy as a male sensorium encompassing vision, smell, touch, taste, and sound, this article focuses on the way feminist directors utilize sound in film and television. Three examples—Chantal Akerman’s 1968 Blow Up My Town, Emerald Fennell’s 2020 Promising Young Woman, and Michaela Coel’s 2020 I May Destroy You—show how feminist media showcases the white noise of patriarchy to reorient the ears of its audience to hear the way feminists do.

Beauvoir's writings index the politics of ontological, structural, instrumental, and affective instances of violence. In all cases, she sees violence as a result of political practices. Rather than simply deploring or condemning violence, however, Beauvoir demonstrates that we have to understand that it delineates and is manifest in all our relationships and representations. Nevertheless, we need not accept violence, and indeed, we must struggle against it. Oppressive human relationships situate us as systematically and unequally exposed to violent injury and premature death, and as unequally able to nourish a creative and flourishing life. These conditions are never justified. Beauvoir insists that we must affirm ambiguity and freedom against structural conditions of oppression, and act politically to minimize violence and its tragic effects.

The feminist thinkers in this collection are the designated "fifty-one key feminist thinkers," historical and contemporary, and also the authorsof the entries. Collected here are fifty-one key thinkers and fifty-one authors, recognizing that women are fifty-one percent of the population. There are actually one hundred and two thinkers collected in these pages, as each author is a feminist thinker, too: scholars, writers, poets, and activists, well-established and emerging, old and young and in-between. These feminists speak the languages of art, politics, literature, education, classics, gender studies, film, queer theory, global affairs, political theory, science fiction, African American studies, sociology, American studies, geography, history, philosophy, poetry, and psychoanalysis. Speaking in all these diverse tongues, conversations made possible by feminist thinking are introduced and engaged. Key figures include: Simone de Beauvoir Doris Lessing Toni Morrison Cindy Sherman Octavia Butler Marina Warner Elizabeth Cady Stanton Chantal Akerman Betty Friedan Audre Lorde Margaret Fuller Sappho Adrienne Rich Each entry is supported by a list of the thinker's major works, along with further reading suggestions. An ideal resource for students and academics alike, this text will appeal to all those interested in the fields of gender studies, women's studies and women's history and politics.

This article explores the life and work of Emma Goldman to formulate a radical critique of intimacy. Goldman’s theory of sexual freedom and revolutionary love offers a feminist vision that challenges contemporary debates concerning uses of the language of feminine desire. Goldman appealed to ideals of feminine instinct and feminine desire in order to challenge the conventional meanings attached to femininity in her day. Her views on marriage, love, sexuality and the feminine are analysed alongside her writings on her own personal experience, in order to illuminate the continuing paradoxes feminists face in regard to definitions and experiencesof femininity.

Starting with Richard Wright’s controversial address to the Paris Congress of Black Writers and Authors of 1956, this article explores Wright’s and Simone de Beauvoir’s focus on existential freedom as key to an emancipatory political subjectivity. Both Wright and Beauvoir reject the content of identity formed via oppression, seeking to move beyond categories of culture, religion, femininity and blackness. They argue that solidarity can be better forged across identity groups by nurturing a political subjectivity that recognizes the historical and political impact of embodied identities but is driven by ontological freedom expressed in collective action and dissociation with normative categories. Putting Wright’s 12 Million Black Voices in conversation with Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, we can more fully appreciate Wright’s political writing after he left the United States. Here we see the potential for solidarity across borders, and with women and other oppressed peoples. Most important, we witness these two thinkers imagining political invocations that do not reinforce political meanings given to bodies, thus allowing new forms of solidarity and collective action to emerge

This article compares Hannah Arendt's famous essay on Adolf Eichmann's trial in Israel in 1961 to Simone de Beauvoir's little studied piece, "An Eye for an Eye," on the trial of Robert Brasillach in France in 1945. Arendt and Beauvoir each determine the complicity of individuals acting within a political order that seeks to eliminate certain forms of otherness and difference, but come to differing conclusions about the significance of the crimes. I explain Beauvoir's account of ambiguity, on which she draws in her judgment of Brasillach and elaborates in her 1948 Ethics of Ambiguity, ana measure it against Arendt's account of Eichmann's thoughtlessness and its effects on the destruction of conditions of worldly plurality. Linking the failure of ethical judgment on the part of individuals to prior systemic political conditions, Beauvoir helps us recognize struggles over the meaning of bodies and conditions of inequality as central to politics

In my dissertation, I compare two models of gendered morality put forth as appropriate for citizenship in the eighteenth century: detached men and passionate women. Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Germaine de Stael complicate and challenge the Enlightenment philosophy in which they were steeped by seeking to embody women and men in their claim that subjectivity, and hence moral sensibility, is gendered. The political theory they develop includes the determination that our bodies have a profound impact on the construction of our identities, and in particular, our identities as citizens. ;I focus my comparison of Rousseau and Stael not on their political works, but rather, on the women they brought to life in their novels. It is in their novels that political theory, particularly that which relates to women and citizenship, is embedded. I discuss Rousseau's Sophie, Julie, and Claire, and Stael's Delphine and Corinne, each in turn. ;Rousseau posits that the moral political self must be a man: detached, autonomous, rational. Yet, Rousseau is keen to valorize women in their virtuous reign over the household. In describing men's and women's conflictive yet complimentary moralities, Rousseau articulates a morality for women derived from their situation in the home that is at the heart of the dynamic of democratic politics. My focus on this aspect of Rousseau's portrayal of gender distinction is subversive in articulating his alternative conception of morality. This vision of moral action completely alters the structure of the patriarchal family and restructures Rousseau's vision of the polity to be truly participatory. ;Stael was attracted to this subversive Rousseau, the Rousseau who advocates a feminist sensibility. Stael immediately rejects Rousseau's prescription for women's complete confinement to the home and his delineation of a boundary between thinking and feeling in defining an epistemology appropriate for the general will. In detailing the nature and morality of the woman who Stael identifies as exceptional , she carves out a legitimate space for women as moral democratic citizens and deconstructs the division between reason and feeling in moral deliberation

Counting himself as a boring liberal who would usually dismiss the likes of thinkers such as Emma Goldman as the radical fringe, Don Herzog purports to engage with Goldman's work in order to interrogate the political centrality of reasonableness among liberals and deliberative democrats. Casting Goldman as a lovesick radical, Herzog invites us to read her activism and politics as an affective stance resulting in an accurate critique of the Soviet state. This move countenances Herzog's perverted depiction of Goldman as a swooning girl in love with anarchism and authorizes his lack of engagement with her searing political critique of capitalism and liberal democracy. Hence, Herzog's strategy--to read Goldman's politics as an emotional stance--serves to undermine precisely the sort of political engagement he claims to celebrate

In (Un)Manly Citizens, political theorist Lori Jo Marso explores an alternative vision of citizenship in the writings of French Enlightenment figures Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Germaine de Staël. This critique transgresses the boundary between political philosophy and literature in turning explicitly to fictional texts as the site of an alternative conception of the self, citizenship, and democratic politics. Marso departs from previous feminist scholarship on Rousseau by reading Emile and La Nouvelle Héloïse from the perspective of his women characters. In this reading, Sophie and Julie emerge as subversive of the narrow range of femininity usually understood as advocated by Rousseau. Tracing the words, gestures, and even the silence of the women characters in Rousseau's texts, Marso argues that these women display an uncanny ability to deconstruct the qualities and dictates of scholarship for which Rousseau is infamous. Germaine de Staël builds on the perspective of Rousseau's women to uncover the radical potential of the feminine as a way to reconceptualize citizenship. Based on her experience of the French Revolution, Staël demonstrates the limits of establishing strict identities as prerequisites for citizen participation. In Staël's novels, Delphine and Corinne, Marso locates a citizenship practice premised on the recognition of individuals in terms of their concrete histories and situations. Marso's scholarship makes us aware of how early in the history of modern political thought the potential of an unmanly vision of citizenship as a radical critique of politics was already being discussed and formulated.

In _Politics with Beauvoir_ Lori Jo Marso treats Simone de Beauvoir's feminist theory and practice as part of her political theory, arguing that freedom is Beauvoir's central concern and that this is best apprehended through Marso's notion of the encounter. Starting with Beauvoir's political encounters with several of her key contemporaries including Hannah Arendt, Robert Brasillach, Richard Wright, Frantz Fanon, and Violette Leduc, Marso also moves beyond historical context to stage encounters between Beauvoir and others such as Chantal Akerman, Lars von Trier, Rahel Varnhagen, Alison Bechdel, the Marquis de Sade, and Margarethe von Trotta. From intimate to historical, always affective though often fraught and divisive, Beauvoir's encounters, Marso shows, exemplify freedom as a shared, relational, collective practice. _Politics with Beauvoir_ gives us a new Beauvoir and a new way of thinking about politics—as embodied and coalitional.