Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-jbqgn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-01T07:33:59.689Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Gender as Lived Time: Reading The Second Sex for a Feminist Phenomenology of Temporality

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Megan M. Burke
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This article suggests that Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex offers an important contribution to a feminist phenomenology of temporality. In contrast to readings of The Second Sex that focus on the notion of “becoming” as the main claim about the relation between “woman” and time, this article suggests that Beauvoir's discussion of temporality in volume II of The Second Sex shows that Beauvoir understands the temporality of waiting, or a passive present, to be an underlying structure of women's existence and subordination. Accordingly, I argue that Beauvoir does not see “woman” as a mere becoming, as that which unfolds in time, but instead understands becoming a woman to be realized as lived time. As such, Beauvoir's account shows that gender and temporality are deeply entangled, and thus she challenges the classic phenomenological account of temporality as a general, given structure of human existence. More specifically, I argue that her account shows how a particular experience of time is an underlying structure of sexual objectification, a claim that expands on the feminist phenomenological claim that a particular relation to space becomes a way in which women take up and negotiate their own subordination and objectification.

Type
Found Cluster: Recent Scholarship on Simone de Beauvoir
Information
Hypatia , Volume 33 , Issue 1 , Winter 2018 , pp. 111 - 127
Copyright
Copyright © 2018 by Hypatia, Inc.

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Arp, Kristana. 2001. The bonds of freedom: Simone de Beauvoir's existentialist ethics. Chicago: Carus Publishing.Google Scholar
Arruzza, Cinzia. 2015. Gender as a social temporality: Butler (and Marx). Historical materialism 23 (1): 28–52.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bauer, Nancy. 2001. Simone de Beauvoir, philosophy, & feminism. New York: Columbia University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Beauvoir, Simone de. 1949. Le deuxième sexe I et II. Paris: Gallimard.Google Scholar
Beauvoir, Simone de. 1956. The mandarins. Trans. L. M. Friedman. Paris: Gallimard.Google Scholar
Beauvoir, Simone de. 2010. The second sex. Trans. Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany‐Chevallier. New York: Knopf.Google Scholar
Busch, Thomas. 2005. Simone de Beauvoir on achieving subjectivity. In The contradictions of freedom: Philosophical essays on Simone de Beauvoir's The Mandarins, ed. Scholz, Sally J. and Mussett, Sharon. Albany: State University of New York Press.Google Scholar
Butler, Judith. 1986. Sex and gender in Simone de Beauvoir's Second Sex. Yale French Studies 72: 35–49.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Butler, Judith. 1988. Performative acts and gender constitution: An essay in phenomenology and feminist theory. Theatre Journal 40 (4): 519–31.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Butler, Judith. 1990. Gender trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity. 2nd ed.New York: Routledge Classics.Google Scholar
Cahill, Ann. 2001. Rethinking rape. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
Deutscher, Penelope. 2008. The philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir: Ambiguity, conversion, resistance. New York: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Heidegger, Martin. 2006. Being and time. Trans. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson. New York: Harper and Row.Google Scholar
Heinämaa, Sara. 1996. Woman—nature, product, style? Rethinking the foundations of feminist philosophy of science. In Feminism, science, and the philosophy of science, ed. Hankinson Nelson, L. and Nelson, J.Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers.Google Scholar
Heinämaa, Sara. 1997. What is a woman? Butler and Beauvoir on the foundation of the sexual difference. Hypatia 12 (1): 20–39.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Heinämaa, Sara. 1999. Simone de Beauvoir's phenomenology of sexual difference. Hypatia 14 (4): 114–32.Google Scholar
Heinämaa, Sara. 2003. Toward a phenomenology of sexual difference: Husserl, Merleau‐Ponty, Beauvoir. Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield.Google Scholar
Heinämaa, Sara. 2014. Transformations of old age: Selfhood, normativity, and time. In Simone de Beauvoir's philosophy of age: Gender, ethics, and time, ed. Stoller, S.Berlin and Boston: Walter de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Holveck, Eleanore. 2005. When a woman loves a man: Ownness and otherness. In The contradictions of freedom: Philosophical essays on Simone de Beauvoir's The Mandarins, ed. Scholz, Sally J. and Mussett, Shannon. Albany: State University of New York Press.Google Scholar
Kruks, Sonia. 1995. Teaching Sartre about freedom. In Feminist interpretations of Simone de Beauvoir, ed. Simons, M.University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press.Google Scholar
Kruks, Sonia. 1998. Beauvoir: The weight of the situation. In Simone de Beauvoir: A critical reader, ed. Fallaize, E.New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Le Doeuff, Michè. 1987. Operative philosophy: Simone de Beauvoir and existentialism. In Critical essays on Simone de Beauvoir, ed. Marks, E.Boston: Hall & Co.Google Scholar
Lloyd, Genevieve. 1984. The man of reason: “Male” and “female” in Western philosophy. London: Methuen Press.Google Scholar
Lundgren‐Gothlin, Eva. 1996. Sex and existence: Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex. Trans. L. Schenck. London: Athlone Press.Google Scholar
Mann, Bonnie. 2008. Beauvoir and the question of a woman's point of view. Philosophy Today 52 (2): 136–49.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mann, Bonnie. 2012. Creepers, flirts, heroes, and allies: Four theses on men and sexual harassment. APA Newsletter on Feminism and Philosophy 11 (2): 24–31.Google Scholar
Mann, Bonnie. 2014. Sovereign masculinity: Gender lessons from the war on terror. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McWeeny, Jennifer. 2017. The Second Sex of consciousness: A new temporality and ontology for Beauvoir's “becoming a woman.” In “On ne naît pas femme: on le devient …”: The life of a sentence, ed. Mann, Bonnie and Ferrari, Martina. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Merleau‐Ponty, Maurice. 2012. Phenomenology of perception. Trans. D. A. Landes. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Miller, Elaine. 2012. Saving time: Temporality, recurrence, and transcendence in Beauvoir's Nietzschean cycles. In Beauvoir and Western thought from Plato to Butler, ed. Mussett, S. and Wilkerson, W.Albany: State University of New York Press.Google Scholar
Moi, Toril. 2008. Simone de Beauvoir: The making of an intellectual woman, 2nd ed.New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Schües, Christina. 2011. Introduction: Toward a feminist phenomenology of time. In Time in feminist phenomenology, ed. Schües, C., Olkowski, D., and Fielding, H.Bloomington: Indiana University Press.Google Scholar
Schües, Christina, Olkowski, Dorothea, and Fielding, Helen, eds. 2011. Time in feminist phenomenology. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.Google Scholar
Simons, Margaret. 1999. Beauvoir and The Second Sex: Feminism, race, and the origins of existentialism. Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield.Google Scholar
Spelman, Elizabeth. 1985. The inessential woman: Problems of exclusion in feminist thought. Boston: Beacon Press.Google Scholar
Tidd, Ursula. 1999. Simone de Beauvoir, gender, and testimony. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tidd, Ursula. 2001. For the time being: Simone de Beauvoir's representation of temporality. In The existential phenomenology of Simone de Beauvoir, ed. O'Brien, W. and Embree, L.Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic.Google Scholar
Veltman, Andrea. 2006. Transcendence and immanence in the ethics of Simone de Beauvoir. In The philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir, ed. Simons, Margaret A.Bloomington: Indiana University Press.Google Scholar
Young, Iris Marion. 1980. Throwing like a girl: A phenomenology of feminine body comportment motility and spatiality. Human Studies 3 (2): 137–56.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Young, Iris Marion. 2005. On female body experience: “Throwing like a girl” and other essays. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar