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Blah Blah Blah Although Butler usually refers to de Beauvoir as a intercourse/gender feminist (that’s, a feminist who subscribes to the theoretical distinction between sex and gender), in an early essay from 1986, ʻVariations on Sex and Genderʼ, Butler provides a sympathetic reading of de Beauvoir as having already moved past the distinction. And since it’s Butlerʼs Foucauldian place that intercourse has no extra ontological substantiality than gender, Butlerʼs essay would also seem implicitly to ask whether or not de Beauvoir was not Butler all along. Within the later work Bodies That Matter, Butlerʼs position is less sympathetic to de Beauvoir. Following these questions through, The Second Sex could also be read in such a way as to supply grounds for a critique of Butlerʼs own theoretical place on the ontological standing of intercourse, gender and the physique in her work of the Gender Trouble interval, and shed gentle on what’s, I’ll The pre-eminent place of Simone de Beauvoirʼs The Second Sex in the event of gender idea and feminist philosophy is undeniable.

This seems to be consistent with de Beauvoirʼs more normal assumption that biological givens are in themselves meaningless, and that ʻthe bodyʼ, subsequently, is lived as at all times already culturally interpreted. ʻOne will not be born, but moderately turns into, a womanʼ: at first sight this is, Butler says, a dislocation of gender from intercourse, a recognition that being born with a certain chromosomal or genital configuration does not dictate how these details of biology, the fact of biological sex distinction, will probably be interpreted within the human world and thus how oneʼs sex will probably be lived as gender – where gender is not a thing that I have or which I appropriate however a posh set of cultural norms and values wherein I all the time already find myself and others situated. The boundaries to gender, the range of possibilities for a lived interpretation of a sexually differentiated anatomy, seem much less restricted by anatomy than by the load of the cultural establishments that have conventionally interpreted anatomy. In other words ʻgenderʼ is the cultural interpretation of ʻsexʼ, and ʻsexʼ (how one is born) doesn’t decide this interpretation in any significant manner, although this latter is the presumption of sure naturalistic and biologistic discourses which utilize the intercourse/gender distinction.

If gender is the cultural interpretation of intercourse, ʻwhat, if anything, is left of “sex” as soon as it has assumed its social character of gender? De Beauvoir, The Second Sex, p. Using the word ʻgenderʼ to check with socio-cultural types of id, or to culturally and institutionally normative sets of guidelines governing patterns of behaviour, did not seem in English till the 1960s. No French word seems within the Second Sex which might neatly and unproblematically be translated as ʻgenderʼ with these explicit meanings. It is a brief step, then, to the questioning of these ʻfactsʼ themselves, as de Beauvoir herself appears to acknowledge at the top of The Second Sex within the chapter on ʻThe Independent Womanʼ. But de Beauvoir goes on: ʻNo biological, psychical, or economic fate determines the figure that the female human being presents in society; it is civilization as a complete that produces this creature, intermediate between male and eunuch, which is described as feminine.ʼ On the one facet, then, the human female, an apparently biological category; on the other, this biological category figured in society, a production of civilization described as ʻfeminineʼ. The ʻfacts of biologyʼ, then, would emerge only as already culturally interpreted, such that one such reality, the very fact of oneʼs intercourse, ʻnatural sexʼ, will turn out to have been gender all along.

Thus, while it might be the case that a notion of gender, understood as a predominantly social class in opposition to the biological category of sex, is still the principle theoretical software in most feminist scholarship and in feminist-led discussions of social policy, the affiliation of de Beauvoir with the sex/ gender distinction assigns The Second Sex the same fate as the distinction itself: historically vital and attention-grabbing, the sex/gender distinction and The Second Sex are seen as being of only limited contemporary theoretical relevance. ʼ In up to now as the ʻradical distinction between sex and gender has been essential to the de Beauvoirian version of feminismʼ, and in as far as this distinction replicates the character/tradition distinction now beneath criticism, this version of feminism will even be called into query. For some, it was the sex/gender distinction that allowed second-wave feminism to get off the ground, and few feminist scholars would disagree on the fact, if not the nature, of its historical importance. References to The Second Sex in historic and theoretical work in gender concept seem as if obligatory, not solely due to the immense debt which many feminist scholars feel they owe de Beauvoir personally, but in addition due to the recognition that it was in great part The Second Sex that made gender theory itself doable.

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