No abstract

Feminist care ethics has become a prominent ethical theory that influenced theoretical and practical discussions in a variety of disciplines and institutions on a global scale. However, it has been criticized by transnational feminist scholars for operating with Western-centric assumptions and registers, especially by universalizing care as it is practiced in the Global North. It has also been criticized for prioritizing gender over other categories of intersectionality and hence for not being truly intersectional. Given the imperialist and colonial legacies embedded into the unequal distribution of care work across the globe, a Western-centric approach may also carry the danger of paternalism. Hence, a critical approach to care ethics would require reckoning with these challenges. The aim of this article is first to unfold these discussions and the responses to them from care ethics scholars and then to present resources in Beauvoir’s existentialist ethics, specifically the tenet of treating the other as freedom, as productive tools for countering the Western-centric and paternalistic aspects of care practices.

No abstract

The prospect of a transnational feminist coalition is one of the most challenging questions that feminism faces today. The author analyzes Beauvoir’s involvement with the Algerian decolonization movement and her own self-critique as instructive tools for forming better ways for feminists to engage transnationally. Beauvoir’s existentialist ethics, political writings, and activism continue to offer models for developing an anticolonial and anti-imperialist transnational feminist ethics and are an underexplored resource in transnational feminist scholarship.

Beauvoir’s existentialist ethics relates to and informs eminently contemporary accounts of feminist ethics in the Western continental feminist canon. To date only a few scholars have emphasized this connection. In this work, I show the centrality of Beauvoirian philosophy to contemporary philosophical discussions by elucidating the influence of Beauvoir’s existentialist ethics on Judith Butler’s feminist philosophy. While I acknowledge other possible influences, especially by French philosophers, on Butler’s work, I find it important to emphasize Beauvoir’s contributions as they have not received the attention they deserve. My paper shows how Beauvoir’s account of agency as an ambiguous becoming reverberates in Butler’s theory of gender performativity developed in her early writings. I consider Butler’s theory of gender performativity to have existentialist roots based on the existentialist perception of the subject as a becoming that never coincides with itself. I also discuss how Butler takes on some basic ethical questions which Beauvoir already accentuates in her writings. I focus on three main points of intersection between the two philosophers, which are vulnerability and interconnectedness, violence and inevitability of ethical failure, and finally the ambiguity and opaqueness that come with situated ethics.