Sex and Gender in Simone de Beauvoir's Second Sex
Author(s): Judith Butler
Source: Yale French Studies , 1986, No. 72, Simone de Beauvoir: Witness to a Century
(1986), pp. 35-49
Published by: Yale University Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2930225
REFERENCES
Linked references are available on JSTOR for this article:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/2930225?seq=1&cid=pdf-
reference#references_tab_contents
You may need to log in to JSTOR to access the linked references.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide
range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and
facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
https://about.jstor.org/terms
Yale University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to
Yale French Studies
This content downloaded from
86.49.251.249 on Mon, 21 Oct 2024 09:53:01 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
JUDITH BUTLER
Sex and Gender in Simone de
Beauvoir's Second Sex
"One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman"'-Simone de Beauvoir's
formulation distinguishes sex from gender and suggests that gender
is an aspect of identity gradually acquired. The distinction between
sex and gender has been crucial to the long-standing feminist effort to
debunk the claim that anatomy is destiny; sex is understood to be the
invariant, anatomically distinct, and factic aspects of the female body,
whereas gender is the cultural meaning and form that that body acquires,
the variable modes of that body's acculturation. With the distinction
intact, it is no longer possible to attribute the values or social
functions of women to biological necessity, and neither can we refer
meaningfully to natural or unnatural gendered behavior: all gender is,
by definition, unnatural. Moreover, if the distinction is consistently
applied, it becomes unclear whether being a given sex has any necessary
consequence for becoming a given gender. The presumption of a causal
or mimetic relation between sex and gender is undermined. If being a
woman is one cultural interpretation of being female, and if that interpretation
is in no way necessitated by being female, then it appears
that the female body is the arbitrary locus of the gender 'woman', and
there is no reason to preclude the possibility of that body becoming the
locus of other constructions of gender. At its limit, then, the sex/gender
distinction implies a radical heteronomy of natural bodies and constructed
genders with the consequence that 'being' female and 'being' a
woman are two very different sorts of being. This last insight, I would
suggest, is the distinguished contribution of Simone de Beauvoir's formulation,
"one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman."
1. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (New York: Vintage Books, 1973), 301.
Henceforth, references will be given in the text.
35
This content downloaded from
86.49.251.249 on Mon, 21 Oct 2024 09:53:01 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
36 Yale French Studies
According to the above framework, the term 'female' designates a
fixed and self-identical set of natural corporeal facts (a presumption, by
the way, which is seriously challenged by the continuum of chromosomal
variations), and the term 'woman' designates a variety of
modes through which those facts acquire cultural meaning. One is
female, then, to the extent that the copula asserts a fixed and selfidentical
relation, i.e. one is female and therefore not some other sex.
Immeasurably more difficult, however, is the claim that one is a woman
in the same sense. If gender is the variable cultural interpretation of sex,
then it lacks the fixity and closure characteristic of simple identity. To
be a gender, whether man, woman, or otherwise, is to be engaged in an
ongoing cultural interpretation of bodies and, hence, to be dynamically
positioned within a field of cultural possibilities. Gender must be understood
as a modality of taking on or realizing possibilities, a process of
interpreting the body, giving it cultural form. In other words, to be a
woman is to become a woman; it is not a matter of acquiescing to a fixed
ontological status, in which case one could be born a woman, but,
rather, an active process of appropriating, interpreting, and reinterpreting
received cultural possibilities.
For Simone de Beauvoir, it seems, the verb "become" contains a
consequential ambiguity. Gender is not only a cultural construction
imposed upon identity, but in some sense gender is a process of constructing
ourselves. To become a woman is a purposive and appropriative
set of acts, the acquisition of a skill, a 'project', to use Sartrian
terms, to assume a certain corporeal style and significance. When 'become'
is taken to mean 'purposefully assume or embody', it seems that
Simone de Beauvoir is appealing to a voluntaristic account of gender. If
genders are in some sense chosen, then what do we make of gender as a
received cultural construction? It is usual these days to conceive of
gender as passively determined, constructed by a personified system of
patriarchy or phallogocentric language which precedes and determines
the subject itself. Even if gender is rightly understood to be constructed
by such systems, it remains necessary to ask after the specific mechanism
of this construction. Does this system unilaterally inscribe gender
upon the body, in which case the body would be a purely passive medium
and the subject, utterly subjected? How, then, would we account for
the various ways in which gender is individually reproduced and reconstituted?
What is the role of personal agency in the reproduction of
gender? In this context, Simone de Beauvoir's formulation might be
understood to contain the following set of challenges to gender theory:
to what extent is the 'construction' of gender a self-reflexive process? In
This content downloaded from
86.49.251.249 on Mon, 21 Oct 2024 09:53:01 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
JUDITH BUTLER 37
what sense do we construct ourselves and, in that process, become our
genders?
In the following, I would like to show how Simone de Beauvoir's
account of 'becoming' a gender reconciles the internal ambiguity of
gender as both 'project' and 'construct'. When 'becoming' a gender is
understood to be both choice and acculturation, then the usually oppositional
relation between these terms is undermined. In keeping "become"
ambiguous, Beauvoir formulates gender as a corporeal locus of
cultural possibilities both received and innovated. Her theory of gender,
then, entails a reinterpretation of the existential doctrine of choice
whereby 'choosing' a gender is understood as the embodiment of possibilities
within a network of deeply entrenched cultural norms.
SARTRIAN BODIES AND CARTESIAN GHOSTS
The notion that we somehow choose our genders poses an ontological
puzzle. It might at first seem impossible that we can occupy a position
outside of gender from which to stand back and choose our genders. If
we are always already gendered, immersed in gender, then what sense
does it make to say that we choose what we already are? Not only does
the thesis appear tautological, but insofar as it postulates a choosing
agent prior to its chosen gender, it seems to adopt a Cartesian view of the
self, an egological structure which lives and thrives prior to language
and cultural life. This view of the self runs contrary to contemporary
findings on the linguistic construction of personal agency and, as is the
problem with all Cartesian views of the ego, its ontological distance
from language and cultural life seems to preclude the possibility of its
eventual verification. If Simone de Beauvoir's claim is to have cogency,
if it is true that we 'become' our genders through some kind of volitional
and appropriative sets of acts, then she must mean something other
than an unsituated Cartesian act. That personal agency is a logical
prerequisite for taking on a gender does not imply that this agency itself
is disembodied; indeed, it is our genders which we become, and not our
bodies. If Simone de Beauvoir's theory is to be understood as freed of the
Cartesian ghost, we must first turn to her view of bodies and to her
musings on the possibilities of disembodied souls.
Whether consciousness can be said to precede the body, or whether
it has any ontological status apart from the body-these are claims
alternately affirmed and denied in Sartre's Being and Nothingness, and
this ambivalence toward a Cartesian mind/body dualism reemerges,
although less seriously, in Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex. In fact,
This content downloaded from
86.49.251.249 on Mon, 21 Oct 2024 09:53:01 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
38 Yale French Studies
we can see in The Second Sex an effort to radicalize the Sartrian program
to establish an embodied notion of freedom. Sartre's chapter, "The
Body," in Being and Nothingness echoes Cartesianism which haunts
his thinking as well as his own efforts to free himself from this Cartesian
ghost. Although Sartre argues that the body is coextensive with
personal identity ("I am my body"),2 he also suggests that consciousness
is in some sense beyond the body ("My body is a point of departure
which I am and which at the same time I surpass. . . ").3 Rather than
refute Cartesianism, Sartre's theory seeks to understand the disembodied
or transcendent feature of personal identity as paradoxically, yet
essentially, related to embodiment. The duality of consciousness (as
transcendence) and the body is intrinsic to human reality, and the effort
to locate personal identity exclusively in one or the other is, according
to Sartre, a project in bad faith.
Although Sartre's references to "surpassing" the body may be read
as presupposing a mind/body dualism, we need only conceive of this
self-transcendance as itself a corporeal movement to refute that assumption.
The body is not a static phenomenon, but a mode of intentionality,
a directional force and mode of desire. As a condition of access
to the world, the body is a being comported beyond itself, sustaining a
necessary reference to the world and, thus, never a self-identical natural
entity. The body is lived and experienced as the context and medium for
all human strivings. Because for Sartre all human beings strive after
possibilities not yet realized or in principle unrealizable, humans are to
that extent 'beyond' themselves. This ek-static reality of human beings
is, however, a corporeal experience; the body is not a lifeless fact of
existence, but a mode of becoming. Indeed, for Sartre the natural body
only exists in the mode of being surpassed, for the body is always involved
in the human quest to realize possibilities: "we can never apprehend
this contingency as such insofar as our body is for us; for we are
a choice, and for us, to be is to choose ourselves . . . this inapprehensible
body is precisely the necessity that there be a choice, that I do not
exist all at once."4
Simone de Beauvoir does not so much refute Sartre as take him at
his non-Cartesian best.5 Sartre writes in Being and Nothingness that "it
2. Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay in Phenomenological Ontology,
trans. Hazel E. Barnes (New York: Philosophical Library, 1947), 329.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid., 328.
5. Simone de Beauvoir's defense of the non-Cartesian character of Sartre's account of
the body can be found in "Merleau-Ponty et le Pseudo-Sartrisme," Les Temps Modernes,
10:2, 1955. For a general article tracing Sartre's gradual overcoming of Cartesianism, see
This content downloaded from
86.49.251.249 on Mon, 21 Oct 2024 09:53:01 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
JUDITH BUTLER 39
would be best to say, using 'exist' as a transitive verb, that consciousness
exists its body ... //.6 The transitive form of 'exist' is not far
removed from her disarming use of 'become', and Simone de Beauvoir's
becoming a gender seems both an extension and a concretization of the
Sartrian formulation. In transposing the identification of corporeal existence
and 'becoming' onto the scene of sex and gender, she appropriates
the ontological necessity of paradox, but the tension in her theory does
not reside between being 'in' and 'beyond' the body, but in the move
from the natural to the acculturated body. That one is not born, but
becomes, a woman does not imply that this 'becoming' traverses a path
from disembodied freedom to cultural embodiment. Indeed, one is one's
body from the start, and only thereafter becomes one's gender. The
movement from sex to gender is internal to embodied life, i.e. a move
from one kind of embodiment to another. To mix Sartrian phraseology
with Simone de Beauvoir's, we might say that to 'exist' one's body in
culturally concrete terms means, at least partially, to become one's
gender.
Sartre's comments on the natural body as "inapprehensible" find
transcription in Simone de Beauvoir's refusal to consider gender as natural.
We never experience or know ourselves as a body pure and simple,
i.e. as our 'sex', because we never know our sex outside of its expression
as gender. Lived or experienced 'sex' is always already gendered. We
become our genders, but we become them from a place which cannot be
found and which, strictly speaking, cannot be said to exist. For Sartre,
the natural body is an "inapprehensible" and, hence, a fictional starting
point for an explanation of the body as lived. Similarly, for Simone de
Beauvoir, the postulation of 'sex' as fictional heuristic allows us merely
to see that gender is non-natural, i.e. a culturally contingent aspect of
existence. Hence, we do not become our genders from a place prior to
culture or to embodied life, but essentially within their terms. For Simone
de Beauvoir at least, the Cartesian ghost is put to rest.
Although we 'become' our genders, the temporal movement of this
becoming does not follow a linear progression. The origin of gender is
not temporally discrete because gender is not originated at some point
in time after which it is fixed in form. In an important sense gender is
not traceable to a definable origin precisely because it is itself an originating
activity incessantly taking place. No longer understood as a prodThoman
W. Busch, "Beyond the Cogito: The Question of the Continuity of Sartre's
Thought," The Modern Schoolman 60 (March 1983).
6. Being and Nothingness, 329.
This content downloaded from
86.49.251.249 on Mon, 21 Oct 2024 09:53:01 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
40 Yale French Studies
uct of cultural and psychic relations long past, gender is a contemporary
way of organizing past and future cultural norms, a way of situating
oneself with respect to those norms, an active style of living one's body
in the world.
GENDER AS CHOICE
One chooses one's gender, but one does not choose it from a distance
which signals an ontological juncture between the choosing agent and
the chosen gender. The Cartesian space of the deliberate 'chooser' is
fictional, but the question persists: if we are mired in gender from the
start, what sense can we make of gender as a kind of choice? Simone de
Beauvoir's view of gender as an incessant project, a daily act of reconstitution
and interpretation, draws upon Sartre's doctrine of prereflective
choice and gives that difficult epistemological structure a concrete
cultural meaning. Prereflective choice is a tacit and spontaneous act
which Sartre terms "quasi knowledge." Not wholly conscious, but nevertheless
accessible to consciousness, it is the kind of choice we make
and only later realize we have made. Simone de Beauvoir seems to rely
on this notion of choice in referring to the kind of volitional act through
which gender is assumed. Taking on a gender is not possible at a moment's
notice, but is a subtle and strategic project which only rarely
becomes manifest to a reflective understanding. Becoming a gender is
an impulsive yet mindful process of interpreting a cultural reality laden
with sanctions, taboos, and prescriptions. The choice to assume a certain
kind of body, to live or wear one's body a certain way, implies a
world of already established corporeal styles. To choose a gender is to
interpret received gender norms in a way that organizes them anew.
Rather than a radical act of creation, gender is a tacit project to renew
one's cultural history in one's own terms. This is not a prescriptive task
we must endeavor to do, but one in which we have been endeavoring all
along.
The predominance of an existential framework has been criticized
by Michele Le Doeuff7 and others for resurrecting "a classical form of
voluntarism" which insidiously blames the victims of oppression for
'choosing' their situation. When the doctrine of existential choice is
used in this context, it is assuredly insidious, but this uage is itself a
misusage which diverts attention from the empowering possibilities of
7. Michele Le Doeuff, "Simone de Beauvoir and Existentialism," Feminist Studies 6,
no. 2 (1980):278.
This content downloaded from
86.49.251.249 on Mon, 21 Oct 2024 09:53:01 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
JUDITH BUTLER 41
the position. The phenomenology of victimization that Simone de
Beauvoir elaborates throughout The Second Sex reveals that oppression,
despite the appearance and weight of inevitability, is essentially contingent.
Moreover, it takes out of the sphere of reification the discourse
of oppressor and oppressed, reminding us that oppressive gender norms
persist only to the extent that human beings take them up and give
them life again and again. Simone de Beauvoir is not saying, however,
that oppression is generated through a series of human choices. Her own
efforts in anthropology and history underscore her awareness that oppressive
systems have complicated material origins. The point is rather
that these systems persist only to the extent that gender norms are
tacitly yet insistently taken up in the present through individual strategies
which remain more or less disguised. Over and against a less
sophisticated view of 'socialization', she is using the existential apparatus
to understand the moment of appropriation through which socialization
occurs. Through this emphasis on appropriation, she is
providing an alternative to paternalistic explanatory models of acculturation
which treat human beings only as products of prior causes,
culturally determined in a strict sense, and which, consequently, leave
no room for the transformative possibilities of personal agency.
By scrutinizing the mechanism of agency and appropriation, Beauvoir
is attempting, I believe, to infuse the analysis with emancipatory
potential. Oppression is not a self-contained system which either confronts
individuals as a theoretical object or generates them as its cultural
pawns. It is a dialectical force which requires individual participation
on a large scale in order to maintain its malignant life.
Simone de Beauvoir does not directly address the burden of
freedom8 that gender presents, but we can extrapolate from her vie
how constraining norms work to subdue the exercise of gender freedom.
The social constraints upon gender compliance and deviation are so
great that most people feel deeply wounded if they are told that they are
not really manly or womanly, that they have failed to execute their
manhood or womanhood properly. Indeed, insofar as social existence
requires an unambiguous gender affinity, it is not possible to exist in a
socially meaningful sense outside of established gender norms. The fall
from established gender boundaries initiates a sense of radical dislocation
which can assume a metaphysical significance. If existence is always
gendered existence, then to stray outside of established gender is
8. A term commonly used by Sartre to describe the experience of having to make
choices in a world devoid of objective moral truths.
This content downloaded from
86.49.251.249 on Mon, 21 Oct 2024 09:53:01 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
42 Yale French Studies
in some sense to put one's very existence into question. In these moments
of gender dislocation in which we realize that it is hardly necessary
that we be the genders we have become, we confront the burden of
choice intrinsic to living as a man or a woman or as some other gender
identity, a freedom made burdensome through social constraint.
The anguish and terror of leaving a prescribed gender or of trespassing
upon another gender territory testifies to the social constraints upon
gender interpretation as well as to the necessity that there be an interpretation,
i.e. to the essential freedom at the origin of gender. Similarly,
the widespread difficulty in accepting motherhood, for instance, as
an institutional rather than an instinctual reality expresses this same
interplay of constraint and freedom. Simone de Beauvoir's view of the
maternal instinct as a cultural fiction often meets with the argument
that a desire so commonly and so compellingly felt ought for that very
reason to be considered organic and universal. This response seeks to
universalize a cultural option, to claim that it is not one's choice but the
result of an organic necessity to which one is subject. In the effort to
naturalize and universalize the institution of motherhood, it seems that
the optional character of motherhood is being denied; in effect, motherhood
is actually being promoted as the only option, i.e. as a compulsory
social institution. The desire to interpret maternal feelings as organic
necessities discloses a deeper desire to disguise the choice one is making.
If motherhood becomes a choice, then what else is possible? This
kind of questioning often engenders vertigo and terror over the possibility
of losing social sanctions, of leaving a solid social station and
place. That this terror is so well known gives perhaps the most credence
to the notion that gender identity rests on the unstable bedrock of
human invention.
AUTONOMY AND ALIENATION
That one becomes one gender is a descriptive claim; it asserts only that
gender is taken on, but does not say whether it ought to be taken on a
certain way. Simone de Beauvoir's prescriptive program in The Second
Sex is less clear than her descriptive one, but her prescriptive intentions
are nevertheless discernible. In revealing that women have become
"Other," she seems also to be pointing to a path of self-recovery. In
criticizing psychoanalysis, she remarks that,
Woman is enticed by two modes of alienation. Evidently to play at
being a man will be for her a source of frustration; but to play at being a
woman is also a delusion: to be a woman would mean to be the object,
This content downloaded from
86.49.251.249 on Mon, 21 Oct 2024 09:53:01 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
JUDITH BUTLER 43
the Other-and the Other nevertheless remains subject in the midst
of her resignation.... The true problem for woman is to reject these
flights from reality and seek self-fulfillment in transcendence. [571
The language of "transcendence" suggests, on the one hand, that Simone
de Beauvoir accepts a gender-free model of freedom as the normative
ideal for women's aspirations. It seems that Beauvoir prescribes
the overcoming of gender altogether, especially for women, for whom
becoming one's gender implies the sacrifice of autonomy and the capacity
for transcendence. On the other hand, insofar as transcendence appears
a particularly masculine project, her prescription seems to urge
women to assume the model of freedom currently embodied by the
masculine gender. In other words, because women have been identified
with their anatomy, and this identification has served the purposes of
their oppression, they ought now to identify with 'consciousness', that
transcending activity unrestrained by the body. If this were her view,
she would be offering women a chance to be men, and promoting the
prescription that the model of freedom currently regulating masculine
behavior ought to become the model after which women fashion
themselves.
And yet, Simone de Beauvoir seems to be saying much more than
either of the above alternatives suggest. Not only is it questionable
whether she accepts a view of consciousness or freedom which is in any
sense beyond the body (she applauds psychoanalysis for showing finally
that "the existent is a body"), (10, 38) but her discussion of the Other
permits a reading which is highly critical of the masculine project of
disembodiment. In the following analysis, I would like to read her discussion
of Self and Other as a reworking of Hegel's dialectic of master
and slave in order to show that, for Simone de Beauvoir, the masculine
project of disembodiment is self-deluding and, finally, unsatisfactory
The self-asserting 'man' whose self-definition requires a hierarchical
contrast with an "Other" does not provide a model of true
autonomy, for she points out the bad faith of his designs, i.e. that the
"Other" is, in every case, his own alienated self. This Hegelian truth,
which she appropriates through a Sartrian filter, establishes the essential
interdependence of the disembodied 'man' and the corporeally determined
'woman'. His disembodiment is only possible on the condition
that women occupy their bodies as their essential and enslaving
identities. If women are their bodies (which is not the same as 'existing'
their bodies which implies living one's body as a project and bearer of
created meanings), if women are only their bodies, if their consciousness
and freedom are only so many disguised permutations of bodily
This content downloaded from
86.49.251.249 on Mon, 21 Oct 2024 09:53:01 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
44 Yale French Studies
need and necessity, then women have, in effect, exclusively monopolized
the bodily sphere. By defining women as "Other," 'men' are able
through the shortcut of definition to dispose of their bodies, to make
themselves other than their bodies, and to make their bodies other than
themselves. This Cartesian 'man' is not the same as the man with
distinct anatomical traits, and insofar as a 'man' is his anatomical traits,
he seems to be participating in a distinctively feminine sphere. The
embodied aspect of his existence is not really his own, and hence he is
not really a sex, but beyond sex. This sex which is beyond sex must
initiate a splitting and social projection in order not to know his own
contradictory identity.
The projection of the body as "Other" proceeds according to a peculiar
rationality which relies more on associative beliefs and conclusions
which defy the laws of commutativity than on sound reasoning. The
disembodied 'I' identifies himself with a noncorporeal reality (the soul,
consciousness, transcendence), and from this point on his body becomes
Other. Insofar as he inhabits that body, convinced all the while
that he is not the body which he inhabits, his body must appear to him
as strange, as alien, as an alienated body, a body that is not his. From this
belief that the body is Other, it is not a far leap to the conclusion that
others are their bodies, while the masculine 'I' is a noncorporeal phenomenon.
The body rendered as Other-the body repressed or denied
and, then, projected-reemerges for this 'I' as the view of Others as
essentially body. Hence, women become the Other; they come to embody
corporeality itself. This redundancy becomes their essence, and
existence as a woman becomes what Hegel termed "a motionless
tautology."
Simone de Beauvoir's use of the Hegelian dialectic of self and Other
argues the limits of a Cartesian version of disembodied freedom and
implicitly criticizes the model of autonomy upheld by masculine gender
norms. The masculine pursuit of disembodiment is necessarily deceived
because the body can never really be denied; its denial becomes
the condition for its reemergence in alien form. Disembodiment becomes
a way of living or 'existing' the body in the mode of denial. And
the denial of the body, as in Hegel's dialectic of master and slave, reveals
itself as nothing other than the embodiment of denial.
THE BODY AS SITUATION
Despite Simone de Beauvoir's occasional references to anatomy as transcendence,
her comments on the body as an insurpassable "perspecThis
content downloaded from
86.49.251.249 on Mon, 21 Oct 2024 09:53:01 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
JUDITH BUTLER 45
tive" and "situation" (38) indicate that, as for Sartre, transcendence
must be understood within corporeal terms. In clarifying the notion of
the body as "situation," she suggests an alternative to the gender polarity
of masculine disembodiment and feminine enslavement to the body.
The body as situation has at least a twofold meaning. As a locus of
cultural interpretations, the body is a material reality which has already
been located and defined within a social context. The body is also the
situation of having to take up and interpret that set of received interpretations.
No longer understood in its traditional philosophical
senses of 'limit' or 'essence', the body is a field of interpretive possibilities,
the locus of a dialectical process of interpreting anew a historical
set of interpretations which have become imprinted in the flesh.
The body becomes a peculiar nexus of culture and choice, and 'existing'
one's body becomes a personal way of taking up and reinterpreting
received gender norms. To the extent that gender norms function under
the aegis of social constraints, the reinterpretation of those norms
through the proliferation and variation of corporeal styles becomes a
very concrete and accessible way of politicizing personal life.
If we understand the body as a cultural situation, then the notion of
a natural body and, indeed, a natural 'sex' seems increasingly suspect.
The limits to gender, the range of possibilities for a lived interpretation
of a sexually differentiated anatomy, seem less restricted by anatomy
itself than by the weight of the cultural institutions which have conventionally
interpreted anatomy. Indeed, it becomes unclear when one
takes Simone de Beauvoir's formulation to its unstated consequences,
whether gender need be in any way linked with sex, or whether this
conventional linkage is itself culturally bound. If gender is a way of
'existing' one's body, and one's body is a "situation," a field of cultural
possibilities both received and reinterpreted, then gender seems to be a
thoroughly cultural affair. That one becomes one's gender seems now to
imply more than the distinction between sex and gender. Not only is
gender no longer dictated by anatomy, but anatomy does not seem to
pose any necessary limits to the possibilities of gender.
Although Simone de Beauvoir occasionally ascribes ontological
meanings to anatomical sexual differentiation, her comments just as
often suggest that anatomy alone has no inherent significance. In "The
Data of Biology" she distinguishes between natural facts and their significance,
and argues that natural facts gain significance only through
their subjection to non-natural systems of interpretation. She writes:
"As Merleau-Ponty very justly puts it, man is not a natural species; he is
a historical idea. Woman is not a completed reality, but rather a becomThis
content downloaded from
86.49.251.249 on Mon, 21 Oct 2024 09:53:01 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
46 Yale French Studies
ing, and it is in her becoming that she should be compared with men;
that is to say, her possibilities should be defined (40).
The body as a natural fact never really exists within human experience,
but only has meaning as a state which has been overcome. The
body is an occasion for meaning, a constant and significant absence
which is only known through its significations: "in truth a society is
not a species, for it is in a society that the species attains the status of
existence-transcending itself toward the world and toward the future.
Individuals ... are subject rather to that second nature which is custom
and in which are reflected the desires and fears that express their
essential nature" (40).
The body is never a self-identical phenomenon (except in death, in
the mythic transfiguration of women as Other, and in other forms of
epistemic prejudice). Any effort to ascertain the 'natural' body before its
entrance into culture is definitionally impossible, not only because the
observer who seeks this phenomenon is him/herself entrenched in a
specific cultural language, but because the body is as well. The body is,
in effect, never a natural phenomenon: "it is not merely as a body, but
rather as a body subject to taboos, to laws, that the subject is conscious
of himself and attains fulfillment-it is with reference to certain values
that he evaluates himself. And, once again, it is not upon physiology
that values can be based; rather, the facts of biology take on the values
that the existent bestows upon them" (40).
The conceptualization of the body as non-natural not only asserts
the absolute difference between sex and gender, but implicitly questions
whether gender ought to be linked with sex at all. Gender seems
less a function of anatomy than one of its possible uses: ". . . the body of
woman is one of the essential elements of her situation in the world. But
that body is not enough to define her as woman; there is no true living
reality except as manifested by the conscious individual through activities
and in the bosom of a society" (41).
THE BODY POLITIC
If the pure body cannot be found, if what can be found is the situated
body, a locus of cultural interpretations, then Simone de Beauvoir's
theory seems implicitly to ask whether sex was not gender all along.
Simone de Beauvoir herself does not follow through with the consequences
of this view of the body, but we can see the radicalization of her
view in the work of Monique Wittig and Michel Foucault: the former
self-consciously extends Simone de Beauvoir's doctrine in "One is Not
This content downloaded from
86.49.251.249 on Mon, 21 Oct 2024 09:53:01 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
JUDITH BUTLER 47
Born a Woman";9 the latter is not indebted to Simone de Beauvoir
(although he was a student of Merleau-Ponty) and yet promotes in fuller
terms the historicity of the body and the mythic status of natural
'sex'.'0 Although writing in very different discursive contexts, Wittig
and Foucault both challenge the notion of natural sex and expose the
political uses of biological discriminations in establishing a compulsory
binary gender system. For both theorists, the very discrimination of
/sex' takes place within a cultural context which requires that 'sex'
remain dyadic. The demarcation of anatomical difference does not precede
the cultural interpretation of that difference, but is itself an interpretive
act laden with normative assumptions. That infants are divided
into sexes at birth, Wittig points out, serves the social ends of
reproduction, but they might just as well be differentiated on the basis
of ear lobe formation or, better still, not be differentiated on the basis of
anatomy at all. In demarcating 'sex' as sex, we construct certain norms
of differentiation. And in the interest which fuels this demarcation
resides already a political program. In questioning the binary restrictions
on gender definition, Wittig and Foucault release gender from sex
in ways which Simone de Beauvoir probably did not imagine. And yet,
her view of the body as a "situation" certainly lays the groundwork for
such theories.
If 'existing' one's gender means that one is tacitly accepting or
reworking cultural norms governing the interpretation of one's body,
then gender can also be a place in which the binary system restricting
gender is itself subverted. Through new formulations of gender, new
ways of amalgamating and subverting the oppositions of 'masculine'
and 'feminine', the established ways of polarizing genders becomes increasingly
confused, and binary opposition comes to oppose itself.
Through the purposeful embodiment of ambiguity binary oppositions
lose clarity and force, and 'masculine' and 'feminine' as descriptive
terms lose their usefulness. Inasmuch as gender ambiguity can take
many forms, gender itself thus promises to proliferate into a multiple
phenomenon for which new terms must be found.
Simone de Beauvoir does not suggest the possibility of other genders
besides 'man' and 'woman', yet her insistence that these are histor-
9. Monique Wittig, "One is Not Born a Woman," Feminist Issues, 1, no. 2 (198 1) and
Wittig, "The Category of Sex," Feminist Issues, 2, no. 2 (1982).
10. See Foucault's introduction to the volume he edited, Herculine Barbin, Being
Recently Discovered Memoirs of a Nineteenth Century Hermaphrodite, trans. Richard
McDougall (New York: Pantheon, 1980). Also, Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1,
(New York: Bantam, 1979).
This content downloaded from
86.49.251.249 on Mon, 21 Oct 2024 09:53:01 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
48 Yale French Studies
ical constructs which must in every case be appropriated by individuals
suggests that a binary gender system has no ontological necessity. One
could respond that there are merely various ways of being a 'man' or a
'woman', but this view ascribes an ontology of substance to gender
which misses her point: 'man' and 'woman' are already ways of being,
modalities of corporeal existence, and only emerge as substantial entities
to a mystified perspective. One might wonder as well whether
there is something about the dymorphic structure of human anatomy
that necessitates binary gender arrangements cross-culturally. Anthropological
findings of third genders and multiple gender systems
suggest, however, that dymorphism itself becomes significant only
when cultural interests require, and that gender is more often based
upon kinship requirements than on anatomical exigencies.
Simone de Beauvoir's own existential framework may seem anthropologically
naive, relevant only to a postmodern few who essay to
trespass the boundaries of sanctioned sex. But the strength of her vision
lies less in its appeal to common sense than in the radical challenge she
delivers to the cultural status quo. The possibilities of gender transformation
are not for that reason accessible only to those initiated into the
more abstruse regions of existential Hegelianism, but reside in the daily
rituals of corporeal life. Her conceptualization of the body as a nexus of
interpretations, as both "perspective" and "situation," reveals gender
as a scene of culturally sedimented meanings and a modality of inventiveness.
To become a gender means both to submit to a cultural
situation and to create one, and this view of gender as a dialectic of
recovery and invention grants the possibility of autonomy within corporeal
life that has few if any parallels in gender theory.
In making the body into an interpretive modality, Beauvoir has
extended the doctrines of embodiment and prereflective choice that
characterized Sartre's work from Being and Nothingness, through Saint
Genet: Actor and Martyr and his final biographical study of Flaubert.
Just as Sartre in that last major work revised his existential assumptions
to take account of the material realities constitutive of identity, so
Simone de Beauvoir, much earlier on and with greater consequence,
sought to exorcise Sartre's doctrine of its Cartesian ghost. She gives
Sartrian choice an embodied form and places it in a world thick with
tradition. To 'choose' a gender in this context is not to move in upon
gender from a disembodied locale, but to reinterpret the cultural history
which the body already wears. The body becomes a choice, a mode of
enacting and reenacting received gender norms which surface as so
many styles of the flesh.
This content downloaded from
86.49.251.249 on Mon, 21 Oct 2024 09:53:01 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
JUDITH BUTLER 49
The incorporation of the cultural world is a task performed incessantly
and actively, a project enacted so easily and constantly it seems a
natural fact. Revealing the natural body as already clothed, and nature's
surface as cultural invention, Simone de Beauvoir gives us a potentially
radical understanding of gender. Her vision of the body as a field of
cultural possibilities makes some of the work of refashioning culture as
mundane as our bodily selves.
This content downloaded from
86.49.251.249 on Mon, 21 Oct 2024 09:53:01 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms