Simone De Beauvoir
Of the critical essays assigned I found Simone De Beauvoir’s to be the most useful to me in terms of its effect on my own interpretations of literary texts, films, music videos, comics, and every other strata of media created by human hands. Beauvoir’s concept of woman as “mystery” as an “other” that is typically defined, not by her own character and agency, but in relation to her role within the patriarchal structure of society. Six decades after The Second Sex, female characters still largely represent the alien “other” that is either an object to be attained by male authority or as a wicked usurper and dissident to it. The prevalence of this reductive binary of female representation can perhaps be most commonly seen in contemporary popular-