RETHINKING GENDER, RETHINKING EXISTENCE:

One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman

Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986) is considered one of the mothers of Feminist Theory.

Her eminent work The second sex (1949) postulates the foundational principle for

subsequent emblematic feminist theorists, the rejection of femininity as an essence,

insofar as feminine gender is a social construct. Hence, when de Beauvoir argues that

‘One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman’ (de Beauvoir, 2010/1949: 330), she

stablishes the vast difference between biological sex and gender, deconstructing the idea

of the biological basis that lies on being a woman. Therefore, ‘woman’ is not a

permanent category but the female subject is culturally constructed. At that point, this

essay examines Beauvoir’s assertion, as a point of convergence the anthropologist Judith

Butler’s theory about gender with her premise that sex, like gender, is a social

construction; and, hereby, gender identity is an ongoing performative process. To

illustrate my argument, I will first focus on the denial of gender binary structures

understood as a portray of the heterosexual repressive system. Thereupon I will

introduce Butler’s statement that both, sex and gender, are cultural constructions of

institutional power, leading to Butler’s notion of ‘performativity’ and how the possibility

of non-binary gender that can be assumed in Beauvoir’s theory.

As I said above, Simone de Beauvoir lays the foundations of the Feminist Theory and

dismantles the scientism based on the androcentric perspective, maintaining that

‘femininity’, the feminine essence, like the Jewish or the Negro’s one, have never existed

as an unchangeably entity. Simone states that there are not fixed biological

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characteristics of being a woman, since there are, for instance, ‘subjects’ provided with

wombs who declare not to be women: ‘certain women […] are not women, even though

they have a uterus like the others’ (de Beauvoir, 2010/1949: 23). For this reason, Butler,

in her essay ‘Sex and Gender in Simone de Beauvoir's “Second Sex”’ (1986) is more

precise and she specifies that ‘being' female and 'being' a woman are two very different

sorts of being’ (35). Thereby, Simone’s struggle for gender equality faces the patriarchal

schemes which regards men as the ‘essential’, the ‘objectivity’, the ‘Absolute’; whereas

women are the ‘unessential’, the ‘peculiarity’, the ‘Other’ (2010/1949: 13). Thereby

Beauvoir is portraying how women are ‘shove’ to passiveness in order to claim

masculine domination. In light of this, in her landmark essay ‘The laugh of Medusa’

(1995), Hélène Cixous writes further about masculine dread to demolish his mythical

conception of inferior woman, to feel momentarily 'woman’ and lose his virility (20).

Likewise, De Beauvoir approach suggests that questioning the binary system of opposed

sexes, involves questioning -as well as femininity- masculinity and thus, questioning

patriarchal hierarchy. This dualism of opposites is culturally traditional -highlighting the

Cartesian dualism impact (Cixous, 1995. Irigaray 1997)-, since ancient times, as de

Beauvoir states: ‘Otherness is a fundamental category of human thought’ (2010/1949:

14). In addition to this, Cixous baptises that binary system as ‘phallogocentric’ linking

the concepts ‘phallocentric’ and ‘logocentric’, since the philosophical, in order to do not

feel afraid, is constructed from the subjection of women (1995: 16). Equally, Bourdieu’s

study The masculine domination (2000) confirms that ‘the androcentric unconscious that

is capable of objectifying the categories of that unconscious’, then he proposes ‘the

historical labour of dehistoricization’ (82) in the same way that as Beauvoir rejects the

(anti-feminist) scientism and Cixous rejects ‘phallogocentrism’. All these formulations

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anticipate Butler’s depiction of gender inequality caused by the imposition of a norm,

rather than biological constraints (1990: 12). Butler unfolds the possibility of different

gender identities aside from ‘man’ and ‘woman’, so the binary gender system has no

‘ontological necessity’: non-normative sexual practices call into question the stability of

[binary] gender’ (1990: xviii). Hence, beyond dismantling the inequality within binary

structures, Butler denies the existence itself of the binary system inasmuch as there are

other possible beings apart from feminine/masculine, as she argues in Gender Trouble

(1990):

That heterosexual, heterosexist culture establishes the coherence of those

categories [male/female] in order to perpetuate and maintain what the

feminist poet and critique Adrienne Rich called ‘compulsory

heterosexuality’ (22)

Besides, in her essay ‘Variations on sex and gender’ (1985) she coincides with Monique

Witting and Michael Foucault’s postulations which reject the ‘natural sex’ affirming that

a ‘compulsory binary system’ embraces biological boundaries with a political function,

in this case, to deny different possibilities of men and women and to reinforce the

hegemony of men towards women. Accurately, Witting argues that a lesbian, in the

heterosexist system, is not a ‘woman’ since her existence exceeds the male symbolic

order (Brook, 1990: 13). Additionally, Luce Irigaray (Cited in Torrejón, 2012: 176)

states that women constitute a paradox within the identity system -as Beauvoir says,

women are the ‘Other’-, to the extent that binary oppositions have been prescribed out

of the rejection of other fields of possibilities.

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Thus, Beauvoir’s formulation ‘One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman’ which

describes femininity as a social construction, consequently underlines, according to

Butler, ‘the presumption of a causal or mimetic relation between sex and gender’ (1986:

35). She particularly highlights that, apart from the ‘natural sex’, there are many other

biological and corporeal differences which do not fit into gender identity. To enlighten

this, Butler gives the example of Herculine Barbin (Cited in Salih, 2002: 45), a

nineteenth-century intersexual individual, who was not biologically classifiable neither

as woman nor man. Hence, sex is a social construction as far as both sex and gender are

not ‘abiding substances’ (2002: 49), since the biological differences that determines a

sex are established ‘under discursive and institutional conditions’ (Butler, 1994). At this

point, she defines sex and gender as the ‘effects’, rather than the causes, of institutions,

discourses and practises along history (1986: 42). Considering Foucault’s notion of

discourse as ‘large groups of statements governing the way we speak about and perceive

a specific historical moment of moments’ (Cited in Salih, 2002: 47); I sustain that sex is

discursively defined in a specific context. Both Beauvoir and Butler maintain that the

identity of a subject is formed and determined by current powers, structures and cultural

norms, as a process with no end and no beginning, a continual ‘becoming’ instead of a

permanent ‘being’. Precisely, Butler focuses on a socially constructed identity through

the concepts of sex, gender and sexuality: ‘Does this system unilaterally inscribe gender

upon the body, in which case the body would be a purely passive medium and so the

subject, utterly subjected?’ (1986: 36). On this account, Butler defends that ‘becoming’

a gender means a purposive choice, which furthermore implies ‘the embodiment of

possibilities within a network of deeply entrenched cultural norms’ (38). Butler affirms

that gender identity is ‘accepted’ at the very beginning of our lives, because it is

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impossible to reject gender as itself, the existence is ‘gendered’. It is impossible to exist

without gender norms, but it is possible to question them provoking a ‘radical dislocation

that can assume a metaphysical meaning’ (41): if gender is put into question and the

existence is compulsory gendered, to ‘rethink’ gender means to ‘rethink’ existence.

Although choosing and trespassing gender binarism is considered subversive since it

demolishes gender current norms, being subversive supposes the acceptance of already

established corporeal styles. Furthermore, even the practice of ‘congeal’ gender -without

trying to subvert it- supposes the resignification of ‘congealed gender’ according to

determined norms, as she says in Gender Trouble: ‘It is for Beauvoir, never possible

finally to become a woman, as if there were a ‘telos’ that governs the process of

acculturation and construction (1990: 22). This ongoing process of ‘becoming’ a gender,

is also treated by Foucault, who asserts that ‘through regulatory practices are produced

coherent identities’ (Salih, 2002: 46). Thus, rather than a freely movement, to choose is

to interpret the received gender norms, as Butler remarks: ‘less a radical act of creation,

gender is a tacit project to renew one’s cultural history in one’s own terms’ (1985: 133).

This subversion takes place within a process of producing and reproducing gender norms

which Butler describes as ‘reiterating and repeating the norms through which one is

constituted’ (1990: 37). All in all, Butler calls this phenomenon ‘performativity’,

following the Sartrean presumption that existence precedes essence. The anthropologist

considers that ‘performance pre-exist the performer’, in other words, metaphysical

subjecthood exists before the subject, and then the subject is a discursively and socially

construction in an endless process of becoming. Then subjecthood, as well as gender,

consists of constantly reassuring or repeating in different manners, as Butler synthetizes

‘gender is a sequence of acts that construct the identity’(reference). Hence, it is related

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to Beauvoir’s assertion that one is not born a self, one creates and becomes a self within

social structures; as I have mentioned before, ‘woman’ is something that they -

continually- ‘do’, rather than they ‘are’ (1990: 43). In the same vein, Butler takes into

consideration ‘Queer theory’ as a continuum that characterizes the true instable nature

of all gendered and sexed identities’ (1990: xii), that entirely accepts ‘performativity’.

Then, it can be argued that being a ‘man’ or a ‘woman’ is not an internal reality, nobody

is gendered from the start, it is a self-reflexive process. Besides, ‘performativity’ is also

implied in the way of ‘speaking’ according to the Foucauldian notion of discourse as

‘repeatable events connected by their historical context’ (Salih, 2002: 47); rather than

just communicating something, speaking also constitutes an act, and therefore, an

identity. This is clearly evidenced in Beauvoir’s consideration that the word ‘men’ is

used to refer to ‘human being’, then she is criticising the patriarchal discourse insofar as

the word ‘men’ represents the absolute. Similarly, performative acts of gender function

as a construction of identity through repetition of institutional powers: ‘It offers the

possibility of a repetition of the law which is not its consolidation, but its displacement

(1990: 40). Then, to subvert does not mean to inherently refuse the power structures, but

to transmute them: from the Foucauldian assertion that sexuality was ‘produced’ in the

law (Salih, 2002: 59), Butler proves that it is impossible to separate its oppressive and

productive function, agreeing with the fact that, paradoxically, subversion must take

place within current discursive structures. As Torrejón explains in ‘Heterosexuality as a

politic strategy of control’ (2012), a truly democratic society entangles sexual freedom

as a central axis, freedom is not possible without a sexual revolution. She suggests a

revolutionary political strategy to construct multiple o varied identities, in other words,

to consent a more liberated ‘performativity’, playing with ‘gender plasticity’ and

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breaking the spell of “body” destiny is a must when it comes to build and settle sexual

identity.

To sum up, in this essay I show the significance of Simone de Beauvoir’s renowned

theory and more precisely her presumption ‘One is not born, but rather becomes, a

woman’, questioning the implications between women and femininity, and proving that

gender is a social construction. In terms of gender, it supposes the rejection of sex

dualities between men and women, from which several theorists later undermine the

dichotomy of heterosexist binary system. Once the notion of patriarchal binarism is

clear, I highlight Judith Butler’s approach against biological constraints, arguing that sex

is gender, since both are social or -in Foucauldian terms- discursive constructions; then

she takes a step further by breaking the sex/gender distinction. Gender is unstable

because people’s identities are an ongoing process, then gender is ‘performative’, it

produces and reproduces gender norms in different ways within power structures. In

sum, starting from Simone de Beauvoir’s assertion, Judith Butler creates a beautiful and

a breakthrough theory that also implies subjecthood, redefinitions and political

implications within gender. Hence, I have presented different revealing figures that have

marked a before and an after on the sexual revolution, from Simone de Beauvoir to Judith

Butler.

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 REFERENCES

Brook, Barbara. 1999. ‘Bodies of feminist knowledge’, Feminist Perspectives on the Body.
New York: Longman

Bourdieu, Michael. 2002. Masculine Domination. London: Stanford University Press

Butler, Judith. 1990. Gender Trouble. London: Routledge.

Butler, Judith. 1986. ‘Sex and Gender in Simone de Beauvoir's Second Sex’, Yale French
Studies 72. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2930225 (accessed 7 December 2018)

Butler, Judith. 1985. ‘Variations on Sex and Gender: Behaviour Wittig, and Foucault’, PRAXIS
International 4. https://www.ceeol.com/search/article-detail?id=262237 (accessed 7 December
2018)

De Beauvoir, Simone. 1949/2010. The Second Sex. New York: Vintage Books.
https://uberty.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/1949_simone-de-beauvoir-the-second-sex.pdf
(accessed 8 December 2018)

Josh, Jones. 2018. ‘Theorist Judith Butler Explains How Behavior Creates Gender: A Short
Introduction to “Gender Performativity”, Open Culture.
http://www.openculture.com/2018/02/judith-butler-on-gender-performativity.html (accessed
12 December 2018)

L. Pardina, Teresa. 2011. ‘De Simone de Beauvoir a Judith Butler: el género y el sujeto’,
Pasajes, 37. https://www.jstor.org/stable/pasajes.37.101?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents
(accessed 8 December 2018)

Lennon, Kathleen. 2017. ‘Judith Butler and the Sartrean Imaginary’, Sartre Studies
International 23. https://www.berghahnjournals.com/view/journals/sartre-
studies/23/1/ssi230103.xml (accessed 8 December 2018)

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Radical Philosophy. ‘Judith Butler: Gender as Performance’ Interviewed by Peter Osborne and
Lynne Segal. https://www.radicalphilosophy.com/interview/judith-butler

Salih, Sarah. 2002. Judith Butler. London: Routledge

S. Torrejón, María Begoña. 2012. ‘La heterosexualidad como categoría política de control:
desde Simone de Beauvoir hasta Judith Butler’, Revista Educación y Humanismo, 15(24).
http://portal.unisimonbolivar.edu.co:82/rdigital/educacion/index.php/educacion (accessed 8
December 2018)