The Return to Beauvoir (on Topicality of Beauvoir’s Feminist Heritage)

Article

Abstract

[In Belarusian]

The article considers importance and ongoing relevance of
Simone de Beauvoir’s philosophical and feminist contribution.
She was one of the most outstanding personalities of French leftwing
school of thought and universalist feminism of the 20th century.
Despite the fact that this philosopher and writer belonged
to the previous century, despite all the successes of essentialist
projects such as equality, feminization of language etc., de Beauvoir
continues to touch minds and hearts. Socialists, the Greens
and many intellectuals (E. Badinter, J. Kristeva) often refer to her
in the questions of gender equality and in the most recent debates
on the place of religion in the Republic, as it was in the case of
the ban of wearing niqab in public. De Beauvoir is an object of a
renewed interest in other countries too: The Second Sex is being
translated in the USA and Japan anew due to the unsatisfactory
quality of the original translation of the 1960s. At the same time,
her literary works which previously remained in the shadow of
Sartre also receive a renewed attention.