Book Launch: Emancipatory Thinking

The Arts and Letters Club of Toronto, 14 Elm Street, Toronto, ON
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Join Elaine Stavro for the launch of her new book, Emancipatory Thinking: Simone de Beauvoir and Contemporary Political Thought, in the LAMPS Room at The Arts and Letters Club of Toronto.

Most scholars have focused on The Second Sex and Simone de Beauvoir's fiction, concentrating on gender issues but ignoring her broader emancipatory vision. Though Beauvoir's political thinking is not as closely studied as her feminist works, it underpinned her activism and helped her navigate the dilemmas raised by revolutionary thought in the postwar period. In Emancipatory Thinking Elaine Stavro brings together Beauvoir’s philosophy and her political interventions to produce complex ideas on emancipation.

Drawing from a range of work, including novels, essays, autobiographical writings, and philosophic texts, Stavro explains that for Beauvoir freedom is a movement that requires both personal and collective transformation. Freedom is not guaranteed by world historical systems, material structures, wilful action, or discursive practices, but requires engaged subjects who are able to take creative risks as well as synchronize with existing forces to work towards collective change.

Elaine Stavro is associate professor of political studies at Trent University.

Emancipatory Thinking is part of the McGill-Queen's Studies in the History of Ideas Series >