Word: beauvoir
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...145th of Abraham Lincoln’s assassination, the 98th of the Titanic’s iceberg collision, and the 71st of John Steinbeck’s magnum opus, “Grapes of Wrath.” Among these decaying men and doomed machines stood Simone de Beauvoir, her death one year shy of its quarter-century mark. Although Lincoln gave us “four score and forty years,” the Titanic spawned an eponymous Hollywood blockbuster, and Steinbeck became the bane of freshman reading lists, Beauvoir’s “The Second Sex?...
...Beauvoir, for her part, took on the question by denying its validity. Rejecting essentialist explanations for the female condition, Beauvoir famously declared, “one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.” The “eternal feminine”—those behaviors and character traits that set women apart from men—were humanly created, Beauvoir argued, not natural. Rather than evidencing a perverted female essence or mistaken choice, feminine traits reflected woman’s situation. For Beauvoir, women’s biological nature could never be experienced apart from...
...Wretched of the Earth.” In the area of sex and gender theory, students not only read Freud, but spend two weeks on Michel Foucault, including a week on his “History of Sexuality.” Aside from their virtues as social theories, the Beauvoir, Fanon, and Foucault texts are foundational in feminism, post-colonial studies, and theories of sexuality respectively. Given the time limitations of the course and the need to choose works of the greatest substance, these texts are appropriately chosen. Moreover, discussions of other social theorists frequently include discussions of family structure...
...criticism, but sexism [or racism, imperialism, etc…] is not.” I cannot see how Social Studies gives this impression by the sheer design of its syllabus, nor would an attentive listener to the lectures ever get this impression. For one thing, including Fanon and Beauvoir clearly demonstrates that Social Studies takes the study of gender, race, and imperialism as seriously as it takes all other important topics. More to the point, Social Studies is quite explicitly taught at a high level of abstraction because the purpose is to show how social theories are applicable...
...social phenomena, but rather that they ought to learn to criticize not just capitalism but sexism, racism, etc… That is dogmatism, not education or critical thinking. Social Studies exposes students to many different approaches and views –Marx and Smith, Freud and Foucault, Mill and Beauvoir. Indeed, students read not just critics of, say, imperialism and capitalism, but also its defenders (i.e., Mill and Hayek.) Social Studies presents its students with conflicting theoretical approaches amongst which they must choose. Regardless of whether they find psychoanalytic, post-structuralist, Marxist, or Weberian theory more compelling, all students...