Beauvoir, The Second Sex – II

Posted: Tue, Oct 15, 2024

Recap

Two interconnected claims:

  • Woman as the Other: womanhood is a second-class status.
    • For Beauvoir, women’s subordination is ahistorical.
  • Woman as a social becoming: womanhood is a social situation, not a biological given.

The Sentence That Set the World on Fire

“On ne naît pas femme: on le devient.”

  • Literal translation: “One is not born woman; one becomes it.”
  • Popular translation: “Women are made, not born.”
  • Parshley translation: “One is not born, but rather becomes a woman.”
  • Borde & Malovany-Chevallier translation: “One is not born, but rather becomes, woman.”

The social constructivist reading: gender is the social meaning of sex.

  • To become a woman is to be socialized into the (social) institution of womanhood.
  • Womanhood as an institution exists prior to the self; the self is inducted into it.
  • B & M-C: “‘Woman’ in English used alone without an article captures woman as an institution, a concept, femininity as determined and defined by society, culture, history.”

The existentialist reading: gender is an individual’s response to sex.

  • “Existence precedes essence”: womanhood is not a given, but an active, situated process of creation, of becoming; it is an individual’s (sometimes-idiosyncratic) response to the situation they find themselves in (anatomical, relational, social, political etc.).
  • Bonnie Mann explains that “to ‘become’ a woman is not the same as to be made into one, as if one were exclusively a passive object being acted on by external social forces. . . . To ‘become’ is to actively take up one’s social condition in a way that is, at least potentially, spontaneous, creative and free. . . . On this view, Beauvoir could never be understood to have claimed that ‘women are made not born.’”

Please find from the chapters we read

  1. passages that support the social constructivist reading;
  2. passages that support the existentialist reading; and
  3. passages that are ambiguous between the two.

Some complications to consider:

  • Even if one is sympathetic to the social constructivist reading, does it really make sense to say any particular individual becomes woman the social institution?
  • Are the two readings mutually exclusive? Does, for example, the social constructivist reading have to deny the possibility of agency in socialization?
  • To what extend do you think what Beauvoir says still holds true today? What has (not) changed?

The Role of Biology in Beauvoir’s View

The penis, according to Beauvoir:

  • External: tangible, not mysterious, something concrete that you can hold onto and project yourself onto.
  • Functional: more useful than sitting down to pee?
  • Ornamental: initially not particularly impressive.
  • Agential: active, manifests power and conquer, infused with agency and subjectivity.
  • Meaningful:
    • Pleasure matches with service to the species.
    • Projective: extruding into the world.
    • People take it seriously!
    • Girls regret not having a penis rather than contest its social significance.

Contrast this with:

  • The clitoris: childish, non-penetrative.
  • The vagina: lack, mysterious, hidden, moist, bleeds, shameful, “dangerous” with a secret life of its own, personal interest diverging from species interest.
  • The breast: for young women, no function other than to stand out, to be looked at.
  • Menstruation: either joyful or disgusting, shameful, undermining, and defeating,
  • Sex: it’s to be taken by men, which turns you from a girl into a woman.