Abstract
The European and American reception of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, particularly from the 1950s to 1980s, gave rise to much criticism. In intellectual circles as well as in gender and feminist studies, this criticism became consolidated as the dominant interpretation of Beauvoir’s thought. Today, new readings of her works in the light of previously unpublished texts by the author, released in the 1990s, suggest the need to examine what was said and written about this book. The purpose of this article is to understand the social and historical conditions of these critiques and consider how they became dominant, by investigating power relations within intellectual circles, especially in France and the United States, and the process Margaret Simons (1983) called “the silencing of Simone de Beauvoir”. The theoretical framework involves the concept of intellectual field, which originated in Pierre Bourdieu’s works but is also applied by researchers in different sociological currents, to think about conflicts among individuals and groups in intellectual circles. This theoretical framework will allow questioning several interpretations of Beauvoir's work.
Simone De Beauvoir; Gender; Silencing; Intellectual Field; Intellectual Trajectories; Feminism