Beauvoir and Belle

Abstract Beauvoir and Belle: A Black Feminist Critique of The Second Sex examines feminist frameworks, discourses, and vocabularies of Black women and other Women of Color that existed prior to and have continued after The Second Sex. Black women and other Women of Color connections to and engagements with this text—e.g., Claudia Jones, Lorraine Hansberry, Audre Lorde, bell hooks, Angela Davis, Deborah K. King, Oyèrónké Oyěwùmí, Chikwenye Okonjo Ogunyemi, Mariana Ortega, Stephanie Rivera Berruz, Alia Al-Saji, and Kyoo Lee—are intentionally centered. This approach offers a corrective to some of the exclusionary tendencies in The Second Sex itself as well as replications of these exclusions in the secondary literature (e.g., not citing Black feminists and other Women of Color feminists who explicitly take up this text, or citing but not substantively engaging the arguments offered). The following main arguments are made about The Second Sex: despite its noteworthy contributions and insights, some of its limitations include the analogical approach to identity and oppression as well as the deployment of comparative and competing frameworks of oppression. At times Beauvoir suggests that sexism on the one hand, and racism, antisemitism, colonialism, and classism on the other hand, are comparative systems of oppression. But she also sets up competing frameworks of oppression, privileging gender difference and woman’s subordination as a more significant and constitutive form of oppression than racism, antisemitism, colonialism and/or class oppression. Beauvoir and Belle offers a critique of analogical approaches to identity and oppression, while presenting triple oppression, intersectionality, multiplicity, and decolonial feminism as viable alternatives.