A philosophical exploration of female submission, using insights from feminist thinkers--especially Simone de Beauvoir--to reveal the complexities of women's reality and lived experience

What role do women play in the perpetuation of patriarchy? On the one hand, popular media urges women to be independent, outspoken, and career-minded. Yet, this same media glorifies a specific, sometimes voluntary, female submissiveness as a source of satisfaction. In philosophy, even less has been said on why women submit to men and the discussion has been equally contradictory--submission has traditionally been considered a vice or pathology, but female submission has been valorized as innate to women's nature. Is there a way to explore female submission in all of its complexity--not denying its appeal in certain instances, and not buying into an antifeminist, sexist, or misogynistic perspective?

We Are Not Born Submissive offers the first in-depth philosophical exploration of female submission, focusing on the thinking of Simone de Beauvoir, and more recent work in feminist philosophy, epistemology, and political theory. Manon Garcia argues that to comprehend female submission, we must invert how we examine power and see it from the woman's point of view. Historically, philosophers, psychoanalysts, and even some radical feminists have conflated femininity and submission. Garcia demonstrates that only through the lens of women's lived experiences--their economic, social, and political situations--and how women adapt their preferences to maintain their own well-being, can we understand the ways in which gender hierarchies in society shape women's experiences. Ultimately, she asserts that women do not actively choose submission. Rather, they consent to--and sometimes take pleasure in--what is prescribed to them through social norms within a patriarchy.

Moving beyond the simplistic binary of natural destiny or moral vice, We Are Not Born Submissive takes a sophisticated look at how female submissiveness can be explained.

I am a philosopher and my primary research is in political and moral feminist philosophy. I also work on questions in 20th Century French philosophy, critical theory, philosophy of social sciences (esp. economics), and phenomenology.

Currently I am a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows and in July 2021, I will become an assistant professor of philosophy at Yale University.

In October 2018, Flammarion published my first book, On ne naît pas soumise, on le devient. I authored a revised and expanded English version of the book entitled We Are Not Born Submissive: How Patriarchy Shapes Women's Lives, published by Princeton University Press in March '21. The book is currently being translated in Spanish, German, Japanese, Chinese, and Korean. You can find more information on the reception of the book on my press page.

I have also edited a reader of feminist philosophy entitled Textes clés de philosophie féministe published in January 2021 by Vrin. This reader is made of ten seminal papers of feminist philosophy, five of them translated for the first time in French. I also authored significant introductions.

I am a former student of the École Normale Supérieure de Paris, I hold a Master in Economics and Public Policy (Sciences Po/Polytechnique/ENSAE), and I passed the agrégation in philosophy. I received my Ph.D. in Philosophy from the Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne in 2017. Since then, I was an Edmond J. Safra Post-Doctoral Fellow-in-Residence and a Lecturer of Philosophy at Harvard University, then a Harper-Schmidt Fellow and a Collegiate Assistant Professor at the University of Chicago. 

Source: manon-garcia.com