Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: This article discusses French feminist philosopher and author Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex and her contribution to building a feminist discourse in poetry. The second half of the 20th century was a period when women’s issues were intensely debated, and Beauvoir was a prominent feminist of the time whose ideas have found an audience worldwide. In The Second Sex, to examine the reasons for women’s nominal inferiority, she combined her feminist understanding with an existentialist perspective, allowing her followers an opportunity to rethink women’s issues in existentialist terms. She problematizes the otherization and imprisonment of women into immanence and offers the necessity of women’s transcendence as a solution. Sylvia Plath and Gülten Akın meet on common ground in their mutual sensitivity to the concerns of Beauvoirian existentialism. Focusing on Plath and Akın’s poems which depict women as the Other and highlighting women’s encirclement by immanent activities associated with their biological fate and gender roles that underline the necessity for women’s transcendence, this study offers a comparative analysis and explores the influence of Beauvoirian existentialism on the development of feminist discourse in world poetry.
Author: Özgür Esen
Institution: Adnan Menderes University
Language: English
Subfield: Philosophy
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
SDG: Gender equality
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W7144062002