This episode of Season 5 of the BSP Podcast features Filipa Melo Lopes, from the Philosophy Department of the University of Edinburgh. The presentation is taken from our 2020 annual conference: ‘Engaged Phenomenology’ Online.
ABSTRACT: At the end of 2017, Kristen Roupenian’s short story, Cat Person, went viral. Published at the height of the #MeToo movement, it depicted a ‘toxic date’ and a disturbing sexual encounter between Margot, a college student, and Robert, an older man she meets at work. The story was widely viewed as a relatable denunciation of women’s powerlessness and routine victimization. In this paper, I push against this common reading. I suggest that it fails to capture the disturbing and ‘skin-crawling’ quality of the story because it fails to engage with its rich phenomenological description. I propose an alternative feminist interpretation of Cat Person through the lens of Simone de Beauvoir’s notion of narcissism. For Beauvoir, narcissism is a particular form of alienation that consists in making oneself both the subject and the ultimate project of one’s life. Framing Margot as a modern-day narcissist casts her as engaging, not in subtly coerced, undesired sex, but rather in sex that is desired in a tragically alienated way. I argue that Beauvoir’s notion of narcissism is an important tool for feminists today –well beyond the interpretation of Cat Person. It presses us to see systematic subordination not just as something done to women, but also as something women do to themselves. This in turn highlights the neglected role of self-transformation as a key aspect of feminist political resistance.
BIO: Filipa Melo Lopes is a Lecturer in Social and Political Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh. She completed her Ph.D. in Philosophy, in 2019, at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Her research interests include Social Theory, Feminist Philosophy, Philosophy of Disability and Philosophy of Sexuality.
This recording is taken from the BSP Annual Conference 2020 Online: 'Engaged Phenomenology'. Organised with the University of Exeter and sponsored by Egenis and the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health. BSP2020AC was held online this year due to global concerns about the Coronavirus pandemic. For the conference our speakers recorded videos, our keynotes presented live over Zoom, and we also recorded some interviews online as well. Podcast episodes from BSP2020AC are soundtracks of those videos where we and the presenters feel the audio works as a standalone: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/bsp-annual-conference-2020/
You can check out our forthcoming events here:
https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/events/
The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast. Why not find out more, join the society, and subscribe to our journal the JBSP? https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/
Dan Zahavi - ‘Pure and Applied Phenomenology’
Luna Dolezal - Interviewed by Jessie Stanier & Hannah Berry
Keith Crome - Education as Child’s Play
Hannah Berry - Empathy: the border between narratives
Francesca Brencio - “Fill the gap”. A phenomenological perspective of exercising psychiatry
William Large - Atheism of the Word: A Genealogy of the Concept of God
Pablo Andreu - Death as an “Ontological Infidelity”
Marco Di Feo - The Human Right to Family Reunification
Botsa Katara - Reassessing the Super-crip Stereotype
Pablo Fernandez Velasco - Disorientation and Self-consciousness: A Phenomenological Inquiry
Andreas Sandner - ‘Visible Odours? On the Issue of Visuocentricism in “Olfactory Austerity”
Matteo Valdarchi - The circle and the origin. An interpretation of Heidegger's Habilitationsschrift
Katherine Burn - Recalibrating the Contemporary: Reading the phenomenology of shame in Metamodernism
Dylan Trigg - Who is the Subject of Birth?
Prabhsharanbir Singh - The Auseinandersetzung with Colonialism and the Oblivion of Other Beginnings in Heidegger’s History of Being
Salvatore Spina - “Sacrificing for Being”: Opfer and Seinsfrage in Heidegger’s Black Notebooks
Lin Ma - On the Double Role of Going-Under in the History of Beyng – Thinking beneath and beyond Heidegger’s Ponderings in the Black Notebooks
Matthew Kruger-Ross - What can Heidegger teach us? After the Black Notebooks
Gülben Salman - From Pseudos to Falsum: Heidegger on Truth
Niall Keane - The World as Natural or Abysmal? The Threat of Naturalism and the History of Beyng
Join Podbean Ads Marketplace and connect with engaged listeners.
Advertise Today
Create your
podcast in
minutes
It is Free
The No-Frills Teacher Podcast
Heal, Survive & Thrive!
Summarize | رادیو سامرایز
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
The Mel Robbins Podcast