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Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction: Our Beauvoir -- 1. (Re)Encountering The Second Sex -- 2. "An Eye for an Eye" with Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem -- 3. The Marquis de Sade's Bodies in Lars von Trier's Antichrist -- 4. Violence, Pathologies, and Resistance in Frantz Fanon -- 5. In Solidarity with Richard Wright -- PART III. FRIENDS CONVERSATIONS THAT CHANGE THE RULES -- 6. Perverse Protests from Chantal Akerman to Lars von Trier -- 7. Unbecoming Women with Violette Leduc, Rahel Varnhagen, and Margarethe von Trotta -- Conclusion: A Happy Ending -- Notes -- References -- Index

Kathy Ferguson's anarchist women enact walking as freedom's pose. In my response, I ask how the way we imagine poses and postures, comporting our bodies this way or that, alone or together, shapes the way we practice freedom. I worry that the focus on walking, a dominant and frequent metaphor for freedom in many diverse political registers, occludes our ability to see freedom in other poses, registers, and spaces. I argue that highlighting walking as freedom's preferred pose hovers too close to the replication of the posture (and maybe the perspective too?) of the masculine self. These moves, and this movement, make it harder to discover other sites and kinds of freedom, and to fully appreciate contingency, non-necessity, and the unexpected possibilities available in every encounter. Drawing on the work of Adriana Cavarero, Simone de Beauvoir, and Hannah Arendt, I explore postures of inclination—Beauvoir's housewives stooped over pots and pans—and consciously chosen inactivity—Arendt lying on her daybed thinking. These postures and poses open up our ability to see freedom in the encounter, an affective and agonistic freedom enacted only with others, and too easily hidden or missed.

Feminist critics of the institution of marriage point to its tendency to reproduce and solidify a gendered division of labor, norms of dependency and protection, and mandated monogamy. While I support the feminist call for a decoupling of state benefits, such as rights to health care and legal proxy, from the institution of marriage in light of discrimination against same-sex couples who are denied the right to marry, in this essay I draw attention to a separate but related issue. I focus here on what I consider one of the most troubling aspects of marriage for feminists, one highlighted by Simone de Beauvoir in her classic and still timely critique of marriage in The Second Sex (1952): the fact that marriage automatically confers bourgeois respectability on its participants. Even as we oppose antigay marriage legislation and recognize that marriage can protect vulnerable parties by guaranteeing health care, equity upon divorce, tax benefits, and so forth, feminists must continue to refuse the bourgeois respectability that is so deeply linked with the institution of marriage. Having the state accord legitimacy to some kinds of intimate relationships and consensual sex, but not others, goes against basic ideas of feminist freedom articulated most convincingly, I argue, by Beauvoir. While arguing this position, however, I will also ask whether only the relatively privileged are able to refuse the bourgeois respectability that marriage promises.

This article explores the life and work of Emma Goldman to formulate a radical critique of intimacy. Goldman's theory of sexual freedom and revolutionary love offers a feminist vision that challenges contemporary debates concerning uses of the language of feminine desire. Goldman appealed to ideals of feminine instinct and feminine desire in order to challenge the conventional meanings attached to femininity in her day. Her views on marriage, love, sexuality and the feminine are analysed alongside her writings on her own personal experience, in order to illuminate the continuing paradoxes feminists face in regard to definitions and experiencesof femininity.

Rousseau is known as both exalted democrat and father of totalitarianism. Steven Johnston's book demonstrates that the two interpretations cannot be separated. Johnston evaluates Rousseau's texts hoping that the "costs of Rousseau's virtuous republic, many of them hidden or muted, can be reckoned alongside its accomplishments" (p. x.). Not surprisingly, Rousseau's accomplishments are called into question. This elegantly written and forcefully argued book claims that order is the essential ingredient in Rousseau's recipe for democracy. Developing the argument via Nietzsche's tragic perspective, Johnston wonders aloud whether all attempts at democracy will collapse under the weight of their internal contradictions.