Historically, philosophers, psychoanalysts, and even some radical feminists have conflated femininity and submission. Manon Garcia’s book We Are Not Born Submissive (published in English this year) offers the first in-depth philosophical exploration of female submission, focusing on the thinking of Simone de Beauvoir, and more recent work in feminist philosophy, epistemology, and political theory. In it, she argues that to comprehend female submission, we must invert how we examine power and see it from the woman’s point of view. In conversation with fellow Beauvoir scholar Kate Kirkpatrick, Garcia will discuss some of the main themes in her book, encouraging us to move beyond the simplistic binary of natural destiny or moral vice to a more sophisticated explanation of female submissiveness.
Manon Garcia is currently a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows and in July will become an assistant professor of philosophy at Yale University. Her primary research is in political philosophy, feminist philosophy, moral philosophy, and philosophy of economics. We Are Not Born Submissive is her first book and will be published in March by Princeton University Press. manon-garcia.com / twitter.com/manongarciafr
Kate Kirkpatrick is Tutorial Fellow in Philosophy and Christian Ethics at Regent’s Park College, University of Oxford. She is a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, an associate fellow of the Higher Education Academy, and treasurer of the UK Sartre Society. She is the author of, most recently, the highly acclaimed biography Becoming Beauvoir (2019). twitter.com/philosofemme