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Somaesthetics and The Second Sex : A Pragmatist Reading of a Feminist Classic
- Hypatia
- Indiana University Press
- Volume 18, Number 4, Fall/Winter 2003
- pp. 106-136
- 10.1353/hyp.2003.0089
- Article
- Additional Information
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 somaesthetics but also those that challenge its bodily focus as a danger for feminism.