Pre-reading, I thought:
- another gender-related text?
- a short text? I haven’t seen this in awhile.
- a short text WITH footnotes? cool, less reading, could prove to be beneficial when writing that essay…
Post-reading:
I felt that even though de Beauvoir advocates for different things than the last text we read, Wollstonecraft, there were many things that they had in common, like the use of Adam and Eve and how the story is essentially a call for action for women. I think I would have enjoyed Wollstonecraft more if these two texts were grouped together instead of Paine. While I thought Wollstonecraft was a bit too wordy for my liking, as her use of adjectives was a bit overkill, de Beauvoir gets to the point a lot quicker, which is probably why this reading was so much shorter.
When I reached the section where de Beauvoir talks about Freud, I was slightly disappointed because I thought that we were done with him, not that I dislike Freud or anything, but I’ve had my fill of Freud-talk for the year. This section would have been a really good essay in response to the set of essay questions on Freud.
A couple ideologies were brought up in this text, the Subject and the Other and the castration complex. The latter I wasn’t completely sold on, maybe because it was reminiscent of Freud, which creeps me out a bit. The Subject and the Other was intriguing. Remembering back to when we read Fanon and discussed “the Other” in that text and the mentioning of the minority groups in this text , I had never previously seen a woman being compared to as a slave.
So I hope this hybrid blog post with the mention of Fanon, Freud, Wollstonecraft and de Beauvoir wasn’t complete crap and will somewhat compensate for my many weeks of missed posts (although I know it won’t, sorry!).
(The title was the first thing that came to my mind… headaches and creativity don’t mix.)
