Bsp Podcast

This episode of Season 5 of the BSP Podcast features Filipa Melo Lopes, from the Philosophy Department of the University of Edinburgh. The presentation is taken from our 2020 annual conference: ‘Engaged Phenomenology’ Online.   ABSTRACT: At the end of 2017, Kristen Roupenian’s short story, Cat Person, went viral. Published at the height of the #MeToo movement, it depicted a ‘toxic date’ and a disturbing sexual encounter between Margot, a college student, and Robert, an older man she meets at work. The story was widely viewed as a relatable denunciation of women’s powerlessness and routine victimization. In this paper, I push against this common reading. I suggest that it fails to capture the disturbing and ‘skin-crawling’ quality of the story because it fails to engage with its rich phenomenological description. I propose an alternative feminist interpretation of Cat Person through the lens of Simone de Beauvoir’s notion of narcissism. For Beauvoir, narcissism is a particular form of alienation that consist