Jennifer McWeeny
Professor
Emerson College
Sex in The Second Sex: Beauvoir’s Phenomenological Concept of “Female”
Simone de Beauvoir poses two questions in the first paragraph of the first chapter in The Second Sex: “What does the female represent in the animal kingdom? And what unique kind of female is realized in woman?” This paper makes use of recent and past archives in Beauvoir scholarship written by feminists who have opened phenomenological and intersectional readings of the text to suggest that the guiding question of The Second Sex is not “What is a woman?” but rather “What is a female?” Contrary to those who would read The Second Sex in terms of the sex/gender distinction, Beauvoir insists on the identity of woman and female; a woman is a particular kind of female among the many kinds that exist across biological species. For Beauvoir, being female is a phenomenological or experiential category, not an ontological or empirical one. Sex is, after all, neither fixed nor necessary, but expressly contingent. The paper concludes by considering the relevance of Beauvoir’s phenomenological notion of “female” to a variety of activisms in the twenty-first century. Excavating this lost or buried thread in The Second Sex allows us to weave liberatory and pluralistic feminist futures.