Friendship between Subjects: A Philosophical Analysis of Authentic Relationships between Women in Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex and Beyond

In this presentation I present an overview of my thesis. Using the existentialist feminist philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir, my thesis investigates friendship between girls or women in Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1949/2011). I argue that Beauvoir focuses on relations between women in their object-mode-of-being or in the immanent sphere. I extend Beauvoir’s account to analyse what it means for women to be subjects together, specifically authentic subjects who experience friendships that open up possibilities of existential freedom. To do so, I connect her work to the feminist philosophy of Luce Irigaray, the Italian feminist movement, and the literature of Elena Ferrante.