Beauvoir vs Beauvoir: The Politics of Extinction: Feminist Knowledge Production and Its Erasure

Article

Abstract

[In Russian]

Although Beauvoir identified herself as an author not as a philosopher;
and for more than three-quarters of her life, insisted
that she was not a feminist, in this paper I explore tensions in The
Second Sex between the philosophical Beauvoir and Beauvoir as
a pioneering feminist theorist. By situating Beauvoir in relation
to «the politics of extinction», a standard philosophical move that
caricatures and dismisses feminism, I analyze the implications of
the continuing discrediting of feminist knowledge production by
those who accredit themselves as keepers of authoritative knowledge.
In treating Beauvoir as a philosopher who changes course,
as one who initially positions herself as a keeper of knowledge
who polices the borders to keep feminists out but later changes
her stance, we can learn something about the politics of extinction
and how to move beyond it.