This article argues that Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex continues to teach academic feminism why difference feminism holds productive and generative potential for feminists and why equality feminism has been consistently subject to criticism since the second wave of feminism. Using Hegel's master—slave dialectic as a lens to interpret subjectivity in The Second Sex, this text reveals an aspect of equality feminism that relies upon masculine subjectivity, a subjectivity that inherently constitutes otherness. This reliance on masculine subjectivity is anathema (...) to difference feminism because the otherness inherently constituted by such subjectivity simultaneously and paradoxically constitutes women's ongoing subordination. In assuming equality with men by adopting masculine subjectivity, women are not immune to constituting women as other. Difference feminisms, on the other hand, start from where women are as they choose to see themselves socially, economically, racially, sexually. The Second Sex reveals that difference feminisms imagine freedom in order to identify the difference that would empower women, not strictly towards sex equality with a stable referent, but towards emancipatory projects that make a difference for women themselves. The Second Sex portends that such imagined freedom has not been actualized, thus the present remains circumscribed by power that subordinates the difference in question. When read alongside The Second Sex, the tension between equality and difference feminisms can still be read as feminisms that coexist with one another, each with their limitations, each with productive potential and cautionary rejoinders. (shrink)

A large number of feminist philosophers and social critics accept that Simone de Beauvoir's conception of transcendence in The Second Sex relies on masculinist ontology. In contrast with feminist interpretations that see Beauvoir claiming the success of masculinist ontology, this article argues that transcendence as masculinist ontology does not succeed in The Second Sex because it requires a relation of domination, something contrary to its own definition of freedom-producing relations. The Second Sex obliquely reveals this failure, but Beauvoir does not (...) ruminate upon it. Instead, Beauvoir turns to imagine freedom-producing gender relations in the future where the body and consciousness are already emancipated from constitutive domination. This is a future that resonates with G. W. F. Hegel's `Stoic Consciousness'. The significance of this finding is that the location of freedom neither resides in the intertwinement of the male body and consciousness previously argued to be the case, for Beauvoir, nor does it reside in the intertwinement of the female body and consciousness. Rather, freedom resides in the intertwinement of male and female bodies and consciousness where domination is already absent, that is, a place outside of history. Thus, the conclusion of The Second Sex can be read as a consolation and an escape from the inescapable limits of the present. (shrink)

This thesis takes as a challenge to think about epistemology in a way that goes beyond epistemology understood as a philosophical discipline. I argue that it is important to deal with epistemological problems, because even in our everyday lives we are constantly in different epistemic situations that require explanations. Therefore, it is necessary to know what we claim when we claim to know something, that something we know is true, and how we explain or justify our knowledge or truth claims.Traditionally (...) speaking, all these problems have been considered within epistemology as a philosophical discipline, which is understood as abstract, disinterested and objective search for knowledge and truth, and its core concepts such as knowledge are defined as apolitical and devoid of any kind of social influence. In this thesis I argue for redefinition of the term ‘epistemology’ in order to keep the term while going beyond its understanding as a private conversation among philosophers themselves. Epistemology is understood now as an interdisciplinary field of research, which takes knowledge as a political event, and where knowledge and power are connected in various complex ways. Both French philosopher Michel Foucault and feminist epistemologists share this understanding of knowledge and in subsequent chapters I explore, first, their accounts of epistemological problems, such as knowledge, the subject of knowledge and the ways how knowledge can be a form of resistance to dominant knowledge, and second, the points of the convergence and differences between Foucault’s epistemology developed within his middle works – so-called ‘genealogical’, and feminist epistemological accounts, primarily developed by feminist standpoint theorist Nancy Hartsock and her feminist postmodern critics.The main goals of this thesis are to provide a dialogue between Foucault and feminist epistemology in order to see how and to what extent Foucault’s ideas of power, knowledge and resistance can be useful for feminist epistemological needs, and what feminist epistemological inquiry can be in the future. (shrink)