Simone de Beauvoir and the Ambiguity of Childhood
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 4389668 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Clémentine Beauvais (0000-0002-5854-4866, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2015 |
| Volume | 38 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 329-346 |
| Publication date | 2015-11-01 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Paragraph (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0264-8334 • E-ISSN: 1750-0176 |
| Publisher | Edinburgh University Press (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.3366/para.2015.0171 |
| OpenAlex | W1668345302 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 3 |
| References cited | 3 |
This article explores Simone de Beauvoir's conceptualization of childhood and its importance for her existentialist thought. Beauvoir's theorization of childhood, I argue, offers a sophisticated portrayal of the child and of the adult-child relationship: the child is not a normal 'other' for the adult, but what I call a temporal other, perceived by adults as an ambiguous being; in turn, childhood is conceptualized as the origin of the ambiguity of adulthood. This foregrounding of childhood has important implications for Beauvoir's existentialism, in particular regarding her ethics. Through the adult-child relationship, her vision of an ethical relation to otherness emerges - one which foregrounds both the violence and the mutual liberation involved in encounters with the other
Ambiguity · Childhood studies · Conceptualization · Developmental psychology · Epistemology · Existentialism · Foregrounding · Linguistics · Psychoanalysis · Sociology · French Historical and Cultural Studies · Gender Studies · Hannah Arendt's Political Philosophy · Philosophy · Psychology · Simone de Beauvoir and Sartre
| Citations per year | 0.38 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2018 - 2026 (9) |
| Highly cited | No |