Dana Rognlie

Visiting Assistant Professor of Philosophy
Wabash College

The Smiles of Hélène: On Complicity and Resistance in the Academy
This paper considers the implicit institutional demand in U.S. academic institutions to “smile” upon university police officers and their involvement in Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives, including sexual violence prevention and response. I bring Beauvoir’s novel The Blood of Others (1945), resuscitating the anti-fascism in her feminist existentialist philosophy, in conversation with contemporary Black abolitionist feminism. Set in Nazi-occupied Paris, the novel is an important one in Beauvoir’s philosophical development on women’s freedom and oppression, feminine resistance and complicity. I suggest that reading Beauvoir today alongside Black abolitionist feminism underscores that in order for liberatory models of justice to take hold requires we risk ourselves and sacrifice the values and myths of white male supremacy, especially the racialized police-as-hero narratives and white, damsel-in-distress femininity. We must refuse interpellations to “smile” upon it yet without falling into a new attitude of seriousness. By moving back and forth through the archives of Hypatia, engaging Rognlie’s article in the most recent issue, Holveck’s analysis of the novel in the 1999 special issue on Beauvoir, and Burke’s When Time Warps (2019), the paper articulates what must be sacrificed in charting our feminist futures.

Sessions:

• Experience, Phenomenology, and Beauvoir
• Feminist Engagements with Ancient Philosophy: Birth, Belonging, and Corporeality