This piece explores the contributions of Simone de Beauvoir, Luce Irigaray, and Judith Butler to feminist thought, focusing on their differing interpretations of gender. Beauvoir's "The Second Sex" introduces the idea that one is not born but becomes a woman, challenging traditional notions of femininity as innate. Irigaray critiques Beauvoir, arguing for a recognition of women as truly Other, beyond mere opposition to men, suggesting a radical reevaluation of femininity as valuable in its own right. Butler takes this further by questioning the very distinction between sex and gender, proposing that what we consider to be sex may have been gender all along, highlighting the cultural construction of both concepts. Through these discussions, the piece delves into the evolution of feminist philosophy, showing how these three feminists have shaped and redefined our understanding of gender and identity.
We have three feminists and three texts that we're looking at. Each of these feminists comes from a different tradition. So we're going to take a look at Beauvoir's The Second Sex, particularly the introduction, and her often quoted message that one is not born, but becomes a woman. As you might already know, Beauvoir is a French feminist who was very active after World War II, in 1949.
The Second Sex was originally published in French in 1949, and she passed away in 1986, I believe. So, that is her time period. The other two feminists are contemporary feminists, so Luce Irigaray is still alive and working today. And we're going to take a look at her essay, a rather polemical essay, about Beauvoir's The Second Sex, entitled 'The Question of the Other.' Irigaray is trained in Freudian school psychoanalysis, but keep in mind that she was actually kicked out of the Freudian school for her critique of Freud. Yay for Irigaray. We'll take a look at what her interpretation and reading of Beauvoir is.
Then, finally, we're going to take a look at Judith Butler's 'Sex and Gender in Beauvoir's Second Sex,' which I believe is the best, not only interpretation but really appreciation of what Beauvoir contributed, not only to feminist philosophy but to existentialism as well. Judith Butler is also still working and teaching today. Her background is in continental philosophy, German idealism, and post-structuralism. So we're going to take a look at how she queers Simone de Beauvoir's Second Sex.
We're not going to cover these texts in full. We're simply going to try to see what answer they give us to these particular questions. So this will keep us narrowly focused. We only have 50 minutes. So, we'll spend about 15 on each of these thinkers, and then, in the end, a Q&A session can go as long as you guys want to stay and want to keep asking questions, as I've already said. So here are the three questions:
How does Simone de Beauvoir's pronouncement that we're not born but become women reframe feminist thought?
What is Luce Irigaray's interpretation of the question of woman and woman as other?
How does Judith Butler's post-structuralist reading of Beauvoir queer feminist philosophy?
One Is Not Born, But Becomes A Woman - Beauvoir
Okay, let's go to Simone de Beauvoir. I'm going to start with a quote from the introduction to Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex. And I'll go ahead and read this with you guys. "If her functioning as a female is not enough to define woman, if we decline also to explain her through the eternal feminine, and if we nevertheless admit provisionally that women do exist, then we must face the question, what is a woman?"
So, let me unpack this for you to start with. She says, "If her functioning as a female is not enough to define woman," here, she's referring to the most common interpretation and answer to the question of what is a woman, that identifies women with their reproductive capacity, their biology. And this is the answer, what is a woman? Woman is womb, right? And the problem with this answer, according to Beauvoir, is that if this were the case, then being a woman would be a matter of kind, not of degree. If this were the case, then there wouldn't be any controversy or even the need to ask, what is a woman? Because it would be very clearly defined, but there wouldn't be controversy about women's role in society and whether women are fulfilling that role or not.
The second part says, "if we also decline to explain her through the eternal feminine," and here Beauvoir is referring to what Betty Friedan, another forerunner of second-wave feminism, calls the feminine mystique. This is an ideal of femininity that puts women up on a pedestal, and it's an ideal that we may try to approximate, but none of us ever fully embody that ethereal ideal, that eternal feminine. df8ytvgAnd the problem with this answer is that there are a lot of women who aren't feminine, and we don't want to say they're not women. And also that no woman fully embodies that ideal. And so if this were what woman is, then there would actually be no women per se, by definition. So neither of these two answers make sense at the very basic logical level.
Now, what about this part? "If nevertheless we admit provisionally that women do exist," and this is my favorite part of her answer because what she is referring to here is that in the first paragraph where she first raises the question, Beauvoir says, do women, do we, can we actually assume that women exist? Maybe they don't exist. What could that possibly mean? She means to refer to the fact that we name things and we have concepts of things that don't exist, such as unicorns, right? Unicorns, as far as I know, don't actually exist. And yet we have an idea of a unicorn that functions in our myths.
So is woman a myth like a unicorn? And she's going to say that provisionally, we're going to say that women are not a non-existing entity, but they do actually exist. So there is something that we're referring to when we say woman. And yet we can't yet answer what that is. And so Beauvoir gives us two different answers to the question, what is a woman?
The first is that woman is other with respect to man. And this is an answer that I explained pretty fully in the series of podcasts that have been underway for the last month. So if you want, you can listen to the podcast on Beauvoir's question of woman. The answer, though, that we want to pay closer attention to here, is that of becoming a woman.
That is, that one is not born but becomes a woman. This is also something that I've begun to explain in explaining Sartre and existentialism. But this is where I think Beauvoir really does a wonderful job of reframing feminism. So by saying one is not born a woman, Beauvoir is saying that being a woman is not something that is given through the fact of one's being born female, that again, that is a refusal to accept the reduction of woman to her sex, her biological reproductive function.
But she also means that in a more existential way. That human beings are not born with a predetermined end and the meaning of their lives is not immediately given with the fact of their birth, but that they must make meaning. Make their lives meaningful through the choices that they make and the actions that they take in the world.
One is not born, but rather becomes a woman in the sense that what it means to be a woman, for individuals, means to receive traditions and social norms around what it means to be a woman and then to choose to affirm and to negate through our actions in the world those received notions. And this means that what it means to be a woman has a history and that it can and does indeed change over time. Our conceptions of what it means to be a woman have changed. This is really apparent if you look at how much the notion of woman has changed in response to feminism as a political movement.
Now, the question that we want to ask is how does Simone de Beauvoir's pronouncement that we are not born but become women reframe feminist thought? Up to this point, feminist politics had been about creating a situation where women were given reproductive rights, equal education, and in the second wave, it will become also increasingly a matter of equal pay for equal work and reproductive rights as well.
Beauvoir is making a point of saying that you can organize politically until the cows come home, but if you're not clear about the logic by which women are othered, then you're not clear on what the problem is. And that means that any solutions that you fashion will only partially address the problem. And her frustration with feminist politics is very evident in this. In the very first paragraph, the first thing she says in The Second Sex introduction is that she has long thought of writing a book about women, but the subject is very aggravating, especially for women. It is an irksome topic.
The most important way in which Beauvoir reframes feminist thinking is that up to this point, in the first wave that is, a lot of feminist arguments on behalf of women had relied on this idea of women as mothers and on women's roles. So it was as mothers that women needed the education necessary to educate their sons and daughters because women were the primary educators in the home. Previously, during the first wave, and even before that, the arguments that were given against women's liberation in the forms that that took referred women back to their reproductive capacities, to their sex, to their biological "nature." So let me give you my favorite terrible example of this.
So there's this argument going on between Rousseau, who was a very well-known intellectual of his era, and Mary Wollstonecraft. And this would have been around 1750. So this is actually a precursor to the first wave of feminism, which doesn't really begin until 100 years later in the 1850s, right? The first wave of what was called women's liberation, the women's liberation movement.
Rousseau argued, and he was very liberal for his time for arguing this, that women should be educated, but that they should be educated in ways that were proper to their sex. That is, men and women, young boys and young girls should receive an education, but that the topics and the ways in which they were educated should be different because their education should help to bring out the virtues of what it meant to be a woman at that time.
Mary Wollstonecraft, who was also a very well-known intellectual of her time, she argued, no, women should be educated alongside men in the same ways as men and in the same topics. So they shouldn't just receive education in music and art appreciation and maybe history, these topics that would make them more interesting companions, let's say, to men.
But they should receive an education in mathematics and logic and philosophy and the harder, more rigorous "topics." And the argument that was given against this, my favorite terrible argument that I'm going to give you, the argument went that if women were educated in these more rigorous topics, that all of the blood that was in their wombs would rush up to their brains to do all this processing and that that would lead to them becoming infertile.
And an infertile woman was thought to be a great tragedy because a childless woman, a woman who could not have children, was not viewed as being valuable socially. Women would become lesser women by becoming educated in these rigorous ways and in these rigorous topics. So women kept running into these natural "conceptions" of what it meant to be a woman that reduced her to being female and being female reduced to also reproduction to the "ability" to procreate and to having a womb basically.
What Beauvoir allowed us to do was to separate or bracket out that conversation and to begin talking about not sex or the facts of sex that are harder to argue with, but to talk about gender norms that are culturally produced gender norms. By making a clear distinction between sex and gender, Beauvoir allowed feminists, especially liberal feminists, who were looking to create a more equal society that upheld the principles of egalitarianism, but also individualism and freedom. Which really resonates in existentialism and in the American cultural imagination. That by making this distinction between sex and gender, Beauvoir and feminists who read her were able to say, look, there's this thing called sex. We're going to bracket it. What we're interested in are changing our gender norms.
We can't change the fact that people are born; it's what they become that we can address. Because those are based on cultural practices and norms, gender norms. So that we can agitate politically to change those norms to create a society that is more accommodating for women and also more equal, more egalitarian so that men and women can become equals politically and thinking that also economically and socially would follow from this.
Now this is actually pretty complicated because Beauvoir was a Marxist, not a liberal, so her understanding of a woman as other is very much influenced by Hegel's Marxism. Master-slave dialectic from which Marx also takes his analysis of class. So there is a reading of Beauvoir that highlights her Hegelian roots. In that sense, Beauvoir is more radical than liberal. And let me make that distinction clearer because it will become important in the next two feminist philosophers that we'll be looking at in their interpretation of Beauvoir. Liberal feminism says basically the system, the ideals that we have are basically sound.
We just need to even out the playing field so that more people, women, can be heard. That is our main concern here, have the access socially to become what they want to become so that women and men's lives are more equal. So women seek political equality, seek to be brought up to the level of men socially.
And in that case, if one thinks that the system is basically sound, then there's just the need to tinker with and to adjust things to make things better, to make the system work better. A radical, the term radical comes from the word root. The radical believes that the assumptions and the overall ideals of the system are misguided.
And so we need to uproot the system and create a different system in its stead. So the radical doesn't see a point of kind of tinkering with and fixing and making a system stronger, so critiquing it from within. The radical works on creating alternatives outside of the system. So there is a big debate as to how to read Beauvoir, because her existentialism goes so very well with liberalism, individualism, freedom.
These are all things that are very strong in existentialist philosophy. And so she's read in that way, but she's also very much a Marxist and a radical in her own right. So both readings are really possible here. And we see that in the differences between Irigaray's reading and Butler's reading. Butler will take her in a more radical direction. Irigaray will read her in a more egalitarian, conservative way.
The Other Of The Same - Irigaray
So let's take a look at Luce Irigaray, 'The Question of the Other.' I'm going to begin with a quote from Irigaray that I want us to really ponder. She writes, "If de Beauvoir's critical work on the devalorization of woman as secondary in culture is valid on one level, her refusal to consider the question of woman as other represents philosophically and even politically a significant regression."
Now, I don't know about you, but when I first read this, I thought, Whoa, wait a second. She's saying that Beauvoir doesn't consider the question of woman as other. And that should be shocking because Beauvoir's first answer to the question, what is woman, is woman is other with respect to man. And it's that last part that Irigaray here is going to explain more.
That is, woman is other with respect to man. Irigaray is going to say that is the other of the same. That's not true otherness or alterity. So I'll explain in just a minute. But let me point out that she says that philosophically and politically, it's not even a mistake.
It's a regression. That is, Beauvoir is taking us backward. By reading woman as other and then interpreting that in the Hegelian way that she does to mean woman as other to man. This points to a big difference between Beauvoir and Irigaray. That is, Beauvoir is grounded in Hegel and phenomenology, and Luce Irigaray, as we will find out, is grounded in psychoanalysis.
And those two orientations are very hard to reconcile at this stage. So why does Irigaray say that Beauvoir does not consider woman as the other and that she refused to identify woman with the other? First, there are these ideological differences, but Irigaray wrote to Beauvoir and sent her a copy of 'Speculum,'
that was her first book, for which she got thrown out of the Freudian enclave. And Beauvoir never answered her. And I think that really upset Irigaray, and she mentions it, in fact, in this essay that Beauvoir didn't get back to her. But I imagine the reason is that Luce Irigaray was being trained in psychoanalysis, and psychoanalysis at this point is very much a discredited school.
Beauvoir probably just wanted nothing to do with a psychoanalyst feminist. She blew off Irigaray, and I think Irigaray just never forgave her. Thus the kind of polemical tone of this interpretation. And really a, almost purposeful misinterpretation of Beauvoir as, an egalitarian feminist. So let's take a look at that next.
It's clear from what Irigaray says that she identifies Beauvoir with the egalitarian interpretation, with the liberal feminist interpretation of Beauvoir, and that she considers that Beauvoir's other is really an other of the same. Which is really not a complicated idea conceptually, but I think a very difficult philosophically, philosophical idea.
And that is that if you interpret woman as other to man and woman and man as part of this kind of primordial couple, accepting woman's otherness with respect to man reaffirms and reentrenches woman's secondary class according to Irigaray. That is, as long as the other is only other with respect to the one, that is to man, as long as it's from man's perspective that woman is defined as not rational, as not strong, as immanence, not transcendence, that it's very difficult to break out of this logic of the self and the other, which is a notion of other that comes from Hegel.
Irigaray wants to point to an alterity, a notion of radical otherness, which she is in part taking from psychoanalysis, but in part taking from Levinas. This is an other that is irreducible to the one. That is an other who is unrecognizable from the perspective of the one alone. Another who has yet to be articulated. And she believes that woman's subjectivity is irreducible to man's subjectivity. That women's experiences, that women's worlds, that women's knowledge cannot be understood so long as we begin from, and we raise man's subjectivity as that through which all other experiences must be interpreted.
She wants to assert that there are at least two subjects, woman and man, and these are irreducible to each other. So it's like apples and oranges, as opposed to different types of, two different kinds of apples, green and red. This seems like a very simple idea, right? And yet, the very logic of the language that we speak depends on maintaining otherness, as subjugated to the, the one, whatever functions as the one in discourse.
In this discourse, it's man's experience or, Western philosophy as it's understood through the canon of philosophy, which is dominated by certain problems and questions that come from, if Irigaray is to be believed, men's concerns with the world and their environment, which do not reflect and are not reducible to women's concerns with their existence.
And finally, Luce Irigaray says, we must be careful to treat others as other. So this goes against our idea that we must treat others as if they were other us's, right? We must not do to others what we do not wish to be done unto us. We must do to others what we wish to be done unto us. Irigaray says no, actually we must be very careful not to treat the other as a version of us, even if it's an equal, like a secondary version, a copy, a mimesis.
Because that is what we reduce others to when we do this operation. See if we can answer this question now. What is Luce Irigaray's interpretation of the question of woman and woman as other? She interprets Beauvoir to mean woman as other in a way that reduces woman's otherness to the contrary, the negation of man, and that by diagnosing this is the problem, says the solution is to raise woman's status.
So that she is treated as socially equal with men, so that from her perspective, man is her other as well. So there's an equivalence between their positions. Woman is to become the one with respect to whom man is her other, and that is going to level out the field somehow. Says no, that's to treat the other as if they were a version of you.
And the other that we seek is one that we have yet to imagine because it's an other that is ulterior, that is irreducible, that is unimaginable even using the language that we have available to us. So she goes on to say that we must really discover our own language that comes from our own experiences as women.
Sex Has Been Gender All Along - Butler
All right, so let's go to Judith Butler. 'Sex and Gender in Simone de Beauvoir's Second Sex.' I'm going to give you three quotes. They come from the beginning, one at the beginning and then two that come at the end that are related. And from that, unpacking these, then we'll get to the question that we have about Beauvoir.
So she writes, "If the distinction is consistently applied, it becomes unclear whether being a given sex has any necessary consequence for becoming a given gender." Okay, so what she is saying here is a little vague. She's going to get a lot more pointed, a lot clearer and focused. At the end, right now she's only hinting at something.
So let's go to the end, the last couple of pages of this essay. She writes, "If we understand the body as a cultural situation," and she has done a lot of work in explaining how the body isn't a natural body, but it's a situation and an occasion for cultural interpretation, "then the notion of a natural body, indeed a natural sex, seems increasingly suspect."
So now she's getting closer to saying what she wants to say. And then here's when she spits it out. "If a pure body cannot be found, if what can be found is the situated body, then Simone de Beauvoir's theory seems implicitly to ask whether sex was not gendered all along." And this is the queering point, as I call it.
Butler is saying that if we take Beauvoir's analysis of sex and gender to its further, most radical conclusion, if we follow it all out, we end up making a discovery. And that is that there is no natural body. There is no given sex. Why? Because bodies have histories, concepts of sex, the concept of sex has a history, and these are always interpreted within a cultural framework.
We don't find in bodies, we don't find bodies, female or male, that are outside of culture. There's no nature outside of culture. She says that it seems that sex will have been gender all along, which is another way of saying that we acknowledge that gender is a cultural construct and that these are norms that we agree to or that we are free to reject in the way that we cannot reject the force of gravity, which is a natural law, right?
If you take a rock and you have it in your hand and you open your hand, the rock is going to drop down to the ground every time. It's a law of nature, gravity. If sex was like a law of nature, then sex would always unfold into a predetermined Woman. But by showing that that woman is subject to change, and that it changes over time, and that we are free, "quote unquote," or doomed, if you want to say, to assert our rights.
And agree or reject certain cultural norms. What we're saying is that sex doesn't have that force of the rock that falls down to the ground. That sex is always a matter of interpretation. So sex is simply conceptions of gender that have been naturalized or given the kind of gloss of being natural laws that bodies conformed to two sexes.
But this is a very high functioning myth, cultural myth, that sex and gender are two separate things. So in the end, Butler queers Beauvoir by reversing and deconstructing the very distinction that Beauvoir makes that helps to set off second-wave feminism, and that is the distinction between sex and gender.
Beauvoir makes a distinction, Butler deconstructs and puts that very distinction into question because it now looks like there is no such thing as a natural sex or a natural body, but what there is, is gender and gender norms, and those norms become codified scientifically. And two kinds of bodies are produced, male and female, but those are largely arbitrary.
Not arbitrary isn't the right word. It is for us a fact that there are two kinds of bodies, but that's a fact that is a cultural norm as well. And in order to discover really what this means, I think that we have to then go to Fausto Sterling's 'The Five Sexes' or 'Why Five Sexes is Not Enough.'
And to Jennifer Terry's 'The Fluid Sexes,' which gives the history of the concept of sex. So we're going to actually treat that in the next podcast. I'm going to do both of those. They might turn into two different podcasts, but that is where we're headed. So let's see if we can now answer the question.
How does Judith Butler's post-structuralist reading of Beauvoir queer feminist philosophy? What does queering mean? It means in this sense, deconstructing the sex-gender system to show that what underlies that distinction between nature and culture itself is a cultural operation by which gender norms become codified scientifically or naturalized and function as if they were natural facts that are scientifically separate from, objectively separate from culture, but we now know better than to make that very easy to make slippage and mistake in our understanding. Okay, so I hope that was a good introduction to Beauvoir and different interpretations of Beauvoir's sex-gender distinction, and The Second Sex.
Three Feminist Philosophers On the Woman Question