Comparing Hegel And Fanon's Narrative

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, in Phenomenology of Spirit, discusses a “Lordship and Bondage” dialectic, in which the politics of recognition are explored through mutual recognition. Simone de Beauvoir, in her introduction to The Second Sex, uses Hegel’s dialectic to emphasize the master-slave relationship between men and women; women, like the bondsman, become “Others” through binaries in relation to men, forcing them into a being-for-other consciousness (Beauvoir 14-15). Similarly, Frantz Fanon’s “The Negro and Recognition” highlights the master-slave relationship between the colonizer and “Negro,” where the consciousness of colonial is “contingent on the presence of The Other” (Fanon 163). Although de Beauvoir and Fanon use Hegel’s basic dialectic in their examination of relations between women, race, and colonizer, both authors critique the applicability of the dialectic and mutual recognition in gaining equal recognition for both women and blacks. Hegel begins the narrative through the discussion of two individuals who express being-for-self consciousness, which enables both …show more content…
Beauvoir attempts to define a woman, in so, highlighting the binaries that the “woman” identity is constructed in relation to man. Woman, according to de Beauvoir, becomes “the Other,” similar to the bondsman, in relation to man (Beauvoir 16). Within the binaries described, woman becomes the slave to the dominant male master. In accordance with Hegel, de Beauvoir identifies how the “other is posed as such by the One in defining himself as the One” (Beauvoir 17). Thus, in a man defining himself it is in the creation of a subordinate other of the woman. In comparing women to Jews and “American Negroes,” de Beauvoir emphasizes how women, like Jews and Negroes, are subjugated in relation to the dominating male