Word: beauvoir
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...Woman, like man, is her body,” Beauvoir wrote, “but her body is something other than herself.” Although masculinity coincided with the for-itself—that freedom which makes one uniquely human—femininity coincided with the in-itself—the 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...
...Beauvoir thus found herself caught between asserting and denying difference. Pushing too far toward the former, she risked reifying false understandings of “female nature”; turning toward the latter, she risked refuting the very distinctions that make men men and women women. To be sure, 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?...
Critics latched onto this ambiguity and lambasted “The Second Sex” for ascribing to a masculinist paradigm. By trivializing women’s reproductive labor, the argument went, Beauvoir reinscribed the gendered binaries which she purported to deny, conflating culture with man and nature with woman. In this view, Beauvoir figured liberation as a masculine concept—as the ability to transcend the limitations of the traditionally feminine. The model of liberation that she offered woman, therein, seemed no different from the existing paradigm proffered...
Ultimately, Beauvoir wanted to have it both ways. Rebuffing the idea of a fixed female essence, Beauvoir envisioned a woman who realized herself in economic and social independence. At the same time, she upheld the need for gender difference, however qualified, deriding women who denied their femininity and became no more men than women in the process. Since gender equality entailed neither difference nor imitation, and the biological binary of XX and XY occluded any middle ground, Beauvoir seemed to render all feminist stances equally untenable...
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...