Simone’s de Beauvoir’s assertion that, “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman” is a foundational formulation from which postmodern feminist theory has developed. Today I would like to sketch the implications of the notion of becoming, the body and (dis)embodiment via Judith Butler, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Simone’s de Beauvoir. The Second Sex marks the naissance as well as the nexus of the notion of “becoming-woman.” Beauvoir puts forth the crucial distinction between sex and gender that changes the discourse around the female, the feminine, and womanhood. Sex—the (mostly) invariant anatomy—is no longer destiny; biological necessity no longer absolutely dictates social values and functions. Gender is simultaneously the body’s variable modes of cultural articulation as well as the site or surface upon which cultural forms are imposed or written. It is a continual modality of bodily interpretation within or partially outside the shifting paradigms of normality. “With this distinction intact,” Butler notes “…all gender is by definition, unnatural” (1986, 35). The presumption of a mimetic relation between sex and gender is thoroughly destabilized. “At its limit,” Butler proposes, “…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” (35). Although it is true that to be a woman is to become a woman, Beauvoir’s notion of “becoming” includes a consequential ambiguity that places gender as both a social construction imposed from without as well as a self-construction articulated from within. Butler subsequently proposes that, contrary to the usually oppositional relation between sex and gender, Beauvoir’s account of “becoming” traces the “internal ambiguity of gender…as a corporal locus of cultural possibilities both received and innovated” (37).
This ‘innovation’ or ‘taking on’ of gender implies a situation that must somehow be external to gender. Occupying a position outside of gender from which we may choose our genders might seem impossible (1986, 37). It might seem to postulate the Cartesian notion of a “choosing agent” prior to a choosing gender. However, Simone de Beauvoir’s “becoming” connotes something “other” than the “unsituated Cartesian act” (37). Personal agency does not predicate disembodied agency, as it is that we become a gender and do not become a body. The Cartesian view of the ego, which entails an “ontological distance” from language and culture, precludes the possibility of its corporal verification. Sartre attempts to remedy this situation in Being and Nothingness by understanding the disembodied or transcendent feature of the self as paradoxically, yet indispensably related to embodiment. He posits that although the body is coextensive with personal identity, consciousness is simultaneously outside the body, “My body is a point of departure which I am and which at the same time I surpass…” (Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 329. quoted in Butler 1986, 38). According to Butler’s reading of Sartre, the body is “a mode of intentionality, a directional force and mode of desire.” The body is “a condition of access to the world” and as such, it is “a being comported beyond itself.” Thus beings are beyond themselves only to the extent that the body is the lived medium or experiential context for being which implies a perpetual striving for possibilities not yet realized or are in principle unrealizable (the being-for-itself). Butler notes that, “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” (38). Sartre states that we are in fact a choice and “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” (Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 328. quoted in Butler 1986, 38).
Sartre’s comments on the “natural body” as “inapprehensible” are found transcribed in Simone de Beauvoir’s denial of gender as immanent and natural. She claims that we can never experience ourselves purely as a body or sex because we never know our sex outside of its expression as gender. Lived sex is always already gendered. “Becoming” does not entail movement from “disembodied freedom to cultural embodiment” but rather a movement from one kind of embodiment to another. One is always a body but that body can and will “become” acculturated. Simone de Beauvoir postulates sex as a “fictional heuristic” to demonstrate to us that “gender is non-natural i.e. a culturally contingent aspect of existence” (Butler 1986, 39). The origin and method of becoming a gender thus cannot be defined or linearly mapped because it is itself an originating activity continually occurring.
In The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir explicates the claim that to be a gender, to be a woman, is to become. But to become-woman also implies to become-object, the Other—“and the Other nevertheless remains subject in the midst of her resignation.” Thus, “The true problem for woman is to reject these flights from reality and seek self-fulfillment in transcendence” (Beauvoir 1989, 51). Judith Butler highlights this passage in her analysis of Beauvoir’s use of the language of “transcendence.” Butler asserts that Beauvoir’s discussion of the Other lends itself to a strong critique of “the masculine project of disembodiment” as “…self-deluding and, finally, unsatisfactory” (Butler 1986, 43). She asserts that the “Other” with whom the self-asserting man hierarchically contrasts himself is in fact his own embodied alienation. Beauvoir appropriates this Hegelian truth through a Sartrian filter, thus establishing “the essential interdependence of the disembodied ‘man’ and the corporeally determined ‘woman’”(Butler 1986, 43).
Man’s disembodiment is contingent on the condition of women occupying their bodies as their absolute and fundamental identities. If women are their bodies, i.e. if women are only their bodies, this implies that they are not “existing” or living their bodies as a “project and bearer of created meanings.” Women subsequently “monopolize the bodily sphere” as their freedom and consciousness are merely permutations of bodily need. By defining women as such, as “Other,” men thus dispose of their bodies. Butler asserts that “through the shortcut of definition…” men are able to “make themselves other than their bodies, and to make their bodies other than themselves” (44). Man’s embodied existence is thus not his own; he is “beyond sex.” The projection of the body as “Other” requires that the disembodied self or “I” identifies with a noncorporeal reality of transcendence thus placing the body as immanently “Other” (44). Judith Butler’s analysis of the implications of masculine noncorporality deserves to be quoted in full:
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 becomes their essence, and existence as a woman becomes what Hegel termed “a motionless tautology.
Simone de Beauvoir’s formulation of gender as becoming illustrates how the Hegelian dialectical notion of the self and Other purports the failure or at least the limit of Cartesian disembodied freedom. Through Butler’s reading of The Second Sex we have derived an understanding of embodiment that implicitly criticizes the models of noncorporeal transcendence and autonomy characteristic of masculine gender norms. The normatively masculine pursuit of disembodiment is self-deceiving because the body can never truly be denied, thus disembodiment is a becoming of the body into a mode of denial. And as Butler concludes, “the denial of the body…reveals itself as nothing other than the embodiment of denial” (44).
References:
Butler, Judith. 1986. “Sex and Gender in Simone de Beauvoir's Second Sex” in Yale French Studies, No. 72, Simone de Beauvoir: Witness to a Century: 35- 49
Beauvoir, Simone de. 1989. The Second Sex. New York: Vintage Books.
Tuesday, November 11, 2008
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