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Somaesthetics and The Second Sex: A Pragmatist Reading of a Feminist Classic

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 March 2020

Richard Shusterman
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Abstract

This paper explains the discipline of somaesthetics, which emerges from pragmatism's concern with enhancing embodied experience and reconstructing the aesthetic in ways that make it more central to key philosophical concerns of knowledge, ethics, and politics. I then examine Beauvoir's complex treatment of the body in The Second Sex, assessing both her arguments that could support the pragmatic approach of somaes-thetics but also those that challenge its bodily focus as a danger for feminism.

Type
Research Article
Information
Hypatia , Volume 18 , Issue 4: Special Issue: Women, Art, and Aesthetics , Fall Winter 2003 , pp. 106 - 136
Copyright
Copyright © 2003 by Hypatia, Inc.

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