By Mann, Bonnie Recently, philosophers have taken to announcing a revival or a renaissance in the study of the philosophical work of Simone de Beauvoir.1 Sonia Kruks argues that feminist Beauvoir studies, having passed through an early ( 1970s) phase in which women related to Beauvoir as an icon, and through a middle (1980s) phase in which feminist thinkers related to Beauvoir as an adversary, has now entered a phase of serious philosophical engagement.2 This latter phase tends to be celebratory and corroborative, and is marked by "careful and creative unwindings and rewindings of Beauvoir's arguments."3 The new feminist work on Beauvoir is, to my mind with great success, in the process of repudiating a series of claims that were frequently stated with certainty during the age of antagonism: that Beauvoir was simply Sartre's mouthpiece; that she in fact disparaged women and particularly loathed female bodies; that she was an essentialist; alternately that she was a radical constructiv