title: Simone de Beauvoirs The Second Sex (Texts in Culture MUP)
author: Ruth Evans
description: <br />Ruth Evans is Dorothy McBride Orthwein Professor in the Department of English at St Louis University<br />
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  THE PHILOSOPHY OF SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR
  Many studies of Simone de Beauvoir have concentrated on her literature, her life,
  and her famous  work The Second Sex. The Philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir
  places Beauvoir’s theory of women’s “otherness” in the context of a number of
  contemporary theories of ambiguity. Professor Deutscher reconsiders the resources
  on which Beauvoir drew and the innovation involved in their transformation to
  her purposes.
  The focus given to Beauvoir’s philosophy on gender and thus to her earliest
  work has overlooked the transformations she effected to her own concepts of
  ambiguity, reciprocity, and ethics as she considered different modes of otherness.
  Gender was just one of a number of these, and this book counterbalances its
  grip on our memory of her work, by situating gender in the context of ageing,
  generational difference, embodied time, and race. By differentiating these aspects
  of otherness, Beauvoir revisited some of th