In fact, in an echo of her earlier essay, Butlerʼs suggestion is that the sex/gender distinction, in to date as the second time period is the social construal of the first, calls itself into question. For some, it was the intercourse/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 historic significance. One is born sexed feminine, then, and one turns into a lady, one turns into feminine, et voilà, the sex/gender distinction. In the Second Sex one finds the phrases sexe (obviously), la femme or les femmes (lady, or ladies), la féminité (femininity, a noun), fémininʼ/féminine (an adjective) and la femelle, or les femelles (the feminine, or females), additionally femelle as an adjective, often with the word humaine – that is, in phrases similar to ʻthe human femaleʼ. It is a short step, then, to the questioning of these ʻfactsʼ themselves, as de Beauvoir herself seems to acknowledge at the end of The Second Sex in the chapter on ʻThe Independent Womanʼ.
This appears to be in line with de Beauvoirʼs extra normal assumption that biological givens are in themselves meaningless, and that ʻthe bodyʼ, therefore, is lived as all the time already culturally interpreted. ʻThe bodyʼ, she says (in inverted commas) is itself a construction: ʻBodies cannot be mentioned to have a signifiable existence prior to the mark of their gender.ʼ This can be a radicalized expression of the idea that there isn’t any ʻnatural bodyʼ. Furthermore, Butlerʼs notion of ʻthe bodyʼ is analytically indistinguishable from that of sex or gender. Both the concept of ʻfemininityʼ, then, and the thought of ʻwomanʼ would appear to consult with one thing like ʻgenderʼ, in contradistinction to ʻthe femaleʼ as ʻsexʼ. If we settle for the body as a cultural scenario, then the notion of a natural body and, certainly, a natural ʻsexʼ appear increasingly suspect. The natural physique or a pure sex would in fact be cultural inscriptions, and therefore not ʻnaturalʼ at all.
It is possible for you to lift the sexual libido in a lady through the application of assorted pure strategies. It’s completely attainable to have numerous casual intercourse and still be careful, accountable, and respectful of everyone involved. De Beauvoir appears to need to reveal each possible biological weakness within the female solely so she can then declare that these ʻfactsʼ, which can’t be denied, have in themselves no significance. It will seem, then, that each feminine human being isn’t necessarily a girl; to be so thought-about she should share in that mysterious and threatened actuality which is femininity. Becoming a woman, in 1949 at least, isnʼt something unconnected to being a feminine. And, one would possibly point out, that whereas Simone de Beauvoir ʻbecameʼ a lady, Jean-Paul Sartre didn’t; nor without surgical and/or chemical intervention was he prone to. The period of autonomy is one during which a toddler strives for independence; it represents the development of self-control and self-reliance. Even so, he was his personal most severe critic and he destroyed extra canvases than have survived of that interval. Moreover, ʻsexʼ is an effect of gender that becomes reified in such a fashion as to current itself precisely not as impact however as the cause of gender, because the kind of determining natural incontrovertible fact that works to stabilize, within the sense of justify and uphold, the very gender configurations from which it emerges.
To the extent that ʻthere is something proper in Beauvoirʼs claim that one just isn’t born, however reasonably turns into a womanʼ, Butler reads ʻwomanʼ as ʻa term in process, a becomingʼ; that she then instantly identifies with ʻgenderʼ, in keeping with the sense wherein she understands that phrase. However, if ʻOne will not be born, relatively one becomes, a womanʼ, it should carry the signification of gender. Effectively, Butler opposes ʻontologyʼ to ʻeffectʼ, in the sense that an ontological understanding of gender id is taken to be a falsely essentializing one, whereas a recognition of gender identification as impact is a recognition of its constructedness and of the potential of its openness to vary. Sex then seems, Butler contends, as a substance, in the standard philosophical sense of the phrase. Accordingly, de Beauvoirʼs concept, ostensibly premissed on a sex/gender distinction, would rather seem implicitly to ask, Butler says, ʻwhether sex was not gender all alongʼ. She speaks of ʻmenʼ and ʻwomenʼ as ʻostensible classes of ontologyʼ, and of the ʻvarious reifications of genderʼ that have constituted the ʻcontingent ontologiesʼ of (gender) identity.