2nd Annual Jeffrey Douglas Jones Memorial Talk

Laura E. Hengehold (Case Western Reserve University)

The Bourgeoise in Her Sunday Best: Simone de Beauvoir on Anonymity and on Being a Character.

Over the last fifty years, social psychologists have documented and commented on the phenomenon of “imposter syndrome” affecting qualified women and men who nevertheless feel that their professional and social recognition is unearned. Rather than dismissing this as a neurosis, I will investigate some philosophical insights that might be lurking within this unsettling and apparently irrational feeling. Specifically, I argue that the way “individuality” is conceptualized in relation to gender, race and other positioning characteristics in our culture constructs it as an object of competition as well as something we might lose, thereby provoking anxieties. I use Simone de Beauvoir’s novels and memoirs to explore ways in which “authentic” individuality can only be posited as an ethical ideal, even though it ultimately eludes demonstration, and to identify alternative responses to the uncanny sensation of being a character rather than being “real.” Such an exploration promises a clearer understanding of the relationship between concepts such as privacy, anonymity, and recognition, which are deeply contested in contemporary debates over technology design, reproductive freedom, and the politics of cultural visibility.