Beauvoir and Politics A Toolkit

"This wonderful new collection features well-known scholars writing on new topics alongside important emerging voices. These essays bring the full force of Beauvoir's uncompromising insight into human experience and political life to bear on urgent problems facing us today: from the ambiguous lived experiences of aging and pregnancy, to the mobilization of myth, affect, and counter-violence in contemporary political discourse, to the troubling world of the 'incel' and the bewildering and terrifying landscape of anti-Black violence and global pandemic. The authors set out, not to reify or rescue Beauvoir as the author of a system, but to think alongside her, to show that the conceptual tools she provides, always rooted in her own experience of concrete engagement, are still, or perhaps newly, 'good to think with.' Beauvoir scholars will certainly want to read it; so will anyone working through current debates in political theory, and anyone concerned (as we all must be) with the current emergencies of political culture."

- Meryl Altman, Professor Emerita of English and Women's Studies, DePauw University, author of Beauvoir in Time

"This lively collection offers a toolkit of Beauvoirian 'takes' on political, ethical, feminist conversations about burqinis on French beaches, the expectant anxiety experienced by pregnant persons, women's experiences of aging and raced embodiment, and more. Its several essays demonstrate the scope and continuing relevance of Beauvoir's political thought as this diverse group of feminists deepen conversations that began more than a half-century ago."

- Lori Jo Marso, Doris Zemurray Stone Professor of Literary and Historical Studies, Union College, author of Politics with Beauvoir: Freedom in the Encounter

"The fine papers in this innovative and timely volume share a focus on activism and nuanced readings of Beauvoir's life and work that I find deeply sympathetic and welcoming. It has my highest recommendation."

- Margaret A. Simons, Distinguished Research Professor Emerita, Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, author of Beauvoir and The Second Sex: Feminism, Race, and the Origins of Existentialism and editor of the Beauvoir Series

"This wonderful community of philosophers and political theorists pay appropriate respect to Beauvoir's thought through not fetishizing but instead engaging its continued relevance for 21^st-century social and political problems. Non-reductive, non-totalizing, it is the usefulness of her thought that comes to the fore, the conceptual tools in the kit, which makes this collection nothing short of living thought."

-Lewis R. Gordon, author of Freedom, Justice, and Decolonization and Fear of Black Consciousness