Word: beauvoirã
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...doomed machines stood Simone de Beauvoir, her death one year shy of its quarter-century mark. Although Lincoln gave us “four score and forty years,” the Titanic spawned an eponymous Hollywood blockbuster, and Steinbeck became the bane of freshman reading lists, Beauvoir??s “The Second Sex” posed the seminal question, “What is a woman...
...inhuman or object-like. Man encountered the body as pure instrument, able to be dominated and controlled; woman, by contrast, experienced her body as an inscrutable burden. Biological givens may have had no meaning outside that which society conferred on them, but they still had an objective reality: In Beauvoir??s understanding, they placed real constraints on the projects that women could undertake. Enmeshed in the reproduction of the species, woman’s life was inherently directed toward means—producing and caring for other beings—rather than ends—those concrete projects...
...Beauvoir unequivocally rejected the notion of equality in difference, which, in her mind, spelled inferiority. Yet, as per her claims, since the essence traditionally assigned to women was unacceptable and no new essence loomed on the horizon, women’s only chance at liberation lay in emulating men. Beauvoir??s woman, it seemed, was really just a man in drag—or, worse yet, a eunuch...
More than 60 years later, Beauvoir??s text continues to invite more questions than it resolves. Turning the final page, the reader is left wondering: Does sexual difference exist? If so, is it natural or artificial? Should it be exalted or condemned? Must the hierarchy of masculine and feminine be nullified, and, if so, by what paradigm can it be replaced? Is the cultivation of a new model of gender, beyond the binary of male and female, possible? Or can gender only be overcome when female becomes male—when sexual difference ceases to serve...
...Beauvoir??s “The Second Sex” has since succumbed to obsolescence. New paradigms, denying the structuring of sexual difference as a binary opposition, claim to relegate Beauvoir??s text to a realm of secondary importance. Yet, even if Beauvoir never unequivocally answered the question she posed, she provided the terms of a debate which remains intensely contested. As Beauvoir??s tombstone turns 24, her legacy—whether fully or pseudo feminist—commands our continued attention...