This issue of Simone de Beauvoir Studies, “Dialogues avec Beauvoir/Beauvoir in Conversation,” brings reviews of three exciting new works in Beauvoir scholarship. They include a monograph on the importance of the concept of “submission” in The Second Sex, another book that demonstrates the potential of Beauvoir’s work to articulate international feminist practices, and an edited collection of diverse essays on Beauvoir’s most famous sentence, “On ne nâit pas femme: on le devient.”

First, Esther Demoulin reviews Manon Garcia’s On ne nâit pas soumise: on le devient from 2018. This is Garcia’s first book, and it has made a serious international impact, with reviews in major French, Italian, and Belgian newspapers, while Garcia has taken a book tour in France and Belgium, and has given a series of interviews on French radio and television.¹ The title is translated as “women aren’t born submissive” and the book provides a philosophical consideration of women’s ambivalence about their submission to men. Garcia’s view is that Beauvoir’s work makes it possible to reflect theoretically on women’s lived experience of submission as a willing acceptance of, or lack of resistance to, domination. The book shows how the analyses in The Second Sex are relevant to describing and explaining women’s everyday lives in the twenty-first century, as well as thinking about how they could be improved. In her review, Demoulin finds that Garcia demonstrates the productivity and relevance of Beauvoir’s thought to understanding contemporary debates such as that surrounding the #MeToo movement, and suggests how Garcia’s analysis could be extended through considering more of Beauvoir’s oeuvre.

Our second review is Deniz Durmuş’s examination of Karen Vintges’s A New Dawn for “The Second Sex”: Women’s Freedom Practices in World Perspective, published in 2016. Vintges has previously published Philosophy as Passion: The Thinking of Simone de Beauvoir (1996) and Feminism and the Final Foucault (2004), a co-edited collection, both of which demonstrate interests that Durmuş shows are combined in this recent work in order to criticize the neoliberal subject and to develop the concept of “freedom practices.”² Vintges uses Beauvoir’s The Ethics of Ambiguity and Michel Foucault’s late works on ethics to articulate examples of freedom practices that include diverse women’s experiences, such as that of activism, Islamic piety, scholarly work, and even those depicted in The Twilight Saga.³ In Durmuş’s view, despite Beauvoir’s Western situation, Vintges’s analysis shows that her work has relevance that goes far beyond Western contexts, which allows it to be put into conversation with radically contrasting forms of feminism.

Finally, Tove Pettersen reviews Bonnie Mann’s and Martina Ferrari’s edited volume, “On ne naît pas femme: on le devient…”: The Life of a Sentence, which came out in 2017. Mann’s earlier works include Sovereign Masculinity: Gender Lessons from the War on Terror (2014) and Women’s Liberation and the Sublime: Feminism, Postmodernism, Environment (2006), while this is Ferrari’s first book.⁴ As Pettersen describes in her review, the volume brings together both previously published essays and new ones from an interdisciplinary team who dispute the interpretation and translation of The Second Sex, especially its best-known sentence. Pettersen’s witty reading of the book demonstrates how the interlocutors from English, French, German, Nordic, Slavic, and Spanish-speaking contexts engage with each other’s interpretations and how the contributions are a testament to the intertextual and inter-contextual networks of translation.

Each of these books, in a distinctive way, point to new challenges and new resources in Beauvoir studies and the reviews provide a strong sense of the richness of these works. They suggest that we need to continue these conversations about the complexities of women’s submission, the diversity women’s of practices of freedom, and the multiplicity of interpretations of the meaning of “becoming a woman.”