The past decade has seen many significant moments in feminist history, amplified by the rise of social media. The consent revolution, from #MeToo to #Balancetonporc, led to a reevaluation of power dynamics in the workplace and in society at large. The Women’s March demonstrated the power of mass-mobilization, as well as its limits. Developments in queer studies have led to evolving notions of what womanhood means, complicating the contours of feminism and the groups it represents. Racial justice movements have brought the question of intersectionality to the forefront of feminist philosophies. As social life rapidly changes around us, Is a unified definition of feminism–as a set of principles, a practice, an approach to life–still possible? Was it ever? Join philosophers of feminism Kate Kirkatrick and Manon Garcia to discuss.
About the speakers:
Kate Kirkpatrick is a 2022-23 American Library in Paris Visiting Fellow. She is a philosopher based in Oxford, where she is Tutorial Fellow in Philosophy and Christian Ethics at Regent’s Park College. Kirkpatrick is author of Sartre on Sin (2017), Sartre and Theology (2017), and the internationally acclaimed biography Becoming Beauvoir: A Life (2019), which was selected as one of the best books of 2019 by the Times Literary Supplement, the Guardian, and the Telegraph, and is currently being translated into over a dozen languages. In 2021 she was awarded a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship to write a philosophical commentary on Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex.
Manon Garcia teaches philosophy at the Free University in Berlin. Trained as a philosopher in France, she taught philosophy at the University of Chicago, Harvard, and Yale, before moving to Berlin. She is a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows and the author of We Are Not Born Submissive: How Patriarchy Shapes Women’s Lives (2021) partly devoted to Beauvoir’s philosophy. La Conversation des sexes, her second book, was awarded best philosophical work published in France in 2022 and is forthcoming in English in 2023 as The Joy of Consent: A Philosophy of Good Sex. Photo: Astrid di Crollalanza © Flammarion.
Important information: The discussion will be available both online and in person. While the conversation will happen in person (Kirkpatrick and Garcia will appear in the Reading Room), the Library will stream the conversation on Zoom for a live viewing experience. Both in-person and online attendees will be able to pose questions.
This event requires advance registration.
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