I've been looking for a MA thesis topic (wait a minute...didn't I already write a 120-something page MA thesis? Oh, that's right, I have to write another one anyway...) since I showed up in September. My last idea, Beauvoir's sociological/psychological sources on sexual attitudes and experience among women she used in Second Sex, is still a possibility. But then I got to thinking. What about a Beauvoir vs. Foucault grudge match to the finish? Let's take a look:
Beauvoir is very explicit in Second Sex that her perspective is inspired by the existentialism of Sartre's Being and Nothingness. * That gave her an ethic to work from. When she's discussing women in society, she can predicate her notions of injustice on a concrete ontological description of human life: to be human is to strive to transcend limitations. However problematic existentialism is/was, and however misguided the project of Sartrian Marxism that overshadowed both her and Sartre's political trajectory ended up being, Beauvoir's arguments about sex and gender are all the more compelling because she had an epistemological starting-point in existentialism.
Like all of you, I love Foucault. What one always runs into when reading Foucault, however, is the uneasy feeling that he was too careful about the context of ideas to endorse any political project. In the essays our reading group did this term, we ran across numerous areas wherein he seemed to be endorsing vaguely leftist liberation movements, but he refused to identify himself with any specific project. To his credit, he was always careful to explain himself; he viewed his role as elucidating power relations, not being a "piece on a chessboard."
That all being said, a refusal to engage is a choice unto itself (thank you Existentialism 101.) And when Foucault was talking about things like sex and gender, all he could really say is that ethics have changed, values have changed, identities have changed, and let's talk about some of the changes. I think there's tremendous utility in thinking of one's own identity in historical context, but I also think that Foucault would be unable to provide an ethic to any of the movements he would potentially endorse, because from his perspective it's very hard to arrive at an ethical foundation.
So, now I'm thinking about reading History of Sexuality alongside Second Sex and playing the intellectual history context game with the two of them (you know, post-liberation vs. post-May of '68, that kind of thing.) As ever, the question is "is that a history paper? Isn't that more of a philosophy paper?" I dunno. I'll just read a bunch of shit and figure something out, right?
* Yes, yes, I know. She either came up with most of the stuff in Being and Nothingness or she and Sartre both contributed to the finished product. The important thing for my purposes is that the philosophical framework she was working from is codified somewhere and she refers to it explicitly.
3 comments:
Why are you writing another MA thesis?
sounds like philosophy to me, but then what do I know? Half of the stuff I did could more properly be defined as theology/religious studies instead of history. So who cares? Do what you like, call it what you like. :) Isn't it all relative anyway?
I'm writing another thesis because everyone in my program has to, regardless of what they've done at other schools. Oh, except Ana, because they're not complete sticklers.
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