ENN New Voices Podcast: Black Feminism

In this episode, Haley Brennan talks with Kathryn Sophia Belle, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Penn State University and founder of the Collegium of Black Women Philosophers, about Black Feminist critiques of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex. We talk about her upcoming book on the topic, with chapters on Claudia Jones, Lorraine Hansberry, Maria Stewart, Anna Julia Cooper, and Audre Lorde among others. We also talk about the philosophical-historical origins of the concept of intersectionality and the triple oppression thesis, what it looks like to offer alternative accounts to Beauvoir’s, and creating the spaces and projects that you need in academic philosophy. 
 
Bibliography 
Kathryn Sophia Belle, “Interlocking, Intersecting, and Intermeshing: Critical Engagements with Black and Latina Feminist Paradigms of Identity and Oppression” in Critical Philosophy of Race, Vol. 8, Nos 1-2, 2020, pages 165-198.
Kathryn Sophia Belle, “Maria Stewart (August 20, 1829 – August 19, 1834)” in 400 Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619-2019, edited by Ibram X. Kendi and Keisha N. Blain (Random House).
Kathryn Sophia Belle, “Being a Black Woman Philosopher: Reflections on Founding the Collegium of Black Women Philosophers” in Hypatia, Volume 26, Issue 2, Spring 2011, pages 429-437.
Claudia Jones, “An End to the Neglect of the Problems of Negro Women” (1949). 
Anna Julia Cooper, A Voice from the South (1892). 
bell hooks, “True Philosophers: Beauvoir and bell”, in Beauvoir and Western Thought from Plato to Butler, edited by Shannon M. Mussett and William S. Wilkerson (2012). 
Words of Fire: An Anthology of African-American Feminist Thought, edited by Beverly Guy-Sheftal (1995). 
Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower. Grand Central Publishing: 1993. 
Octavia Butler, Parable of the Talents. Grand Central Publishing: 1998. 
Elizabeth Spelman, Inessential Woman: Problems of Exclusion in Feminist Thought (1988). 
Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (1949). 
Audre Lorde, “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House.” 1984. Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Ed. Berkeley, CA: Crossing Press. 110- 114. 2007