Les Belles Images

This paper reads Simone de Beauvoir’s Les Belles Images as a warning about the future of gender equality in a neoliberal economy. Drawing on Herbert Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man and on contemporary neoliberal feminism descended from Betty Friedan’s ideal of a “balanced life,” it shows how capitalist and patriarchal norms underpin both consumer society and emancipatory discourse. Beauvoir resists these through her “unbalanced” protagonist, whose refusal of harmony gestures toward a provisional freedom within structures of control and alienation.