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Home , Gayle Rubin, Judith Butler, The Second Sex

Leboeuf, Céline. "‘One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman’: The Sex- Distinction and ’s Account of Woman: ." Feminist Moments: Reading Feminist Texts. Ed. Katherine Smits and Susan Bruce. : Bloomsbury Academic, 2016. 139–146. Bloomsbury Collections. Web. 4 Oct. 2021. .

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Copyright © Susan Bruce, Katherine Smits and the Contributors 2016. You may share this work for non-commercial purposes only, provided you give attribution to the copyright holder and the publisher, and provide a link to the Creative Commons licence. 17

‘One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman’: The Sex-Gender Distinction and Simone de Beauvoir’s Account of Woman: The Second Sex Céline Leboeuf

One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman. No biological, psychic, or economic destiny defines the figure that the human female takes on in ; it is civilization as a whole that elaborates this intermediary product between the male and the eunuch that is called feminine. Only the mediation of another can constitute an individual as an . Inasmuch as he exists for himself, the child would not grasp himself as sexually differentiated. For girls and boys, the body is first the radiation of a subjectivity, the instrument that brings about the comprehension of the world: they apprehend the universe through their eyes and hands, and not through their sexual parts.1

It would be hard to imagine a sentence in more often cited than Simone de Beauvoir’s ‘One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.’ To borrow an image from Beauvoir scholar Nancy Bauer, to intone this sentence at the beginning of a work of feminist theory is tantamount to genuflecting at the family pew.2 And yet, despite the reverential intonations of Beauvoir’s iconic sentence, it has typically been misunderstood. Some feminist theorists the sex-gender distinction that would be made in later decades to originate in this claim. On such readings, Beauvoir might be said to describe the transition between two states: the state of the newborn who has a biological sex but no yet (‘who is not a woman’) and that of the grown person who, having been socialized, has both a sex and a gender identity (‘who has become a woman’). I will dispute such readings on two grounds. First, they typically imply that Beauvoir is a social determinist and fail to recognize the place she accords to human freedom. Second, when they do not make this mistake, they nevertheless misinterpret her conception of the human body. 140 Feminist Moments

The Second Sex is devoted to a single question: What is a woman? The answer Beauvoir seeks is not a definition of woman, a list of the conditions according to which a person counts as a woman. Instead, she wishes to introduce a new problem into our philosophical consciousness. When ask ‘What is a man?’, one of the problems they have in mind is the nature of our rational faculties, and this is captured in such definitions as ‘man is a rational animal’. Now, the philosophical tradition has often assumed that only men can live up to the norms of rationality it discovers, and the implicit standard for a is male. Indeed, Beauvoir notes that no one would accuse a man of thinking the way he does because he is a man: a man’s body is not a particularity, while a woman’s body is an ‘obstacle’ for philosophizing (5). Therefore, when Beauvoir introduces the question ‘What is a woman?’, her aim is to challenge the exclusion of women from philosophy; it is a bold rejoinder to the perennial question ‘What is a man?’ At the same time, her question invites us to think more generally about sexual : Why has being a woman been cast as a particularity? The sentence ‘One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman’ is situated at an important juncture in The Second Sex. In the first part of her work (‘Facts and Myths’), Beauvoir criticizes biological, psychological and economic accounts of the social status of women. She finds them all deficient because they only offer deterministic explanations of the place of women. They fail to consider the significance for women of the factors they cite in their explanations. For example, Freudian invokes the castration complex to explain women’s subordination. This explanation, however, misunderstands the significance of the penis to little girls. The sight of a brother’s penis would not itself breed a sense of inferiority were it not for the prior privilege of her brother. By ignoring the experiences of girls and women, biological, psychological and economic theories ultimately misunderstand their subordinate status. The remainder of the first part presents a history of and an account of the myths that have perpetuated this subjection. The second part of the work (‘Lived Experience’) responds to the deterministic explanations of the first part. In this part, Beauvoir describes the experiences of girls and women at different stages in life and the attitudes they adopt to cope with their situation. She concludes with reflections on changes which might offer new possibilities for women. Beauvoir’s sentence opens the first chapter of ‘Lived Experience’, which is devoted to descriptions of childhood experience. According to these descriptions, Simone de Beauvoir and the Sex-Gender Distinction 141 infants at first do not experience themselves as sexually differentiated. Infant girls and boys apprehend the world similar ways, through their senses – not their sexual organs. There is no difference in the manner in which young girls and boys react to being separated from their caregiver or to the birth of a younger sibling. Yet, they quickly come to behave in different ways and to be perceived as sexually differentiated. Adults are more likely to indulge the tears of girls than those of boys. At the same time, the expectation that boys should behave in a more grownup fashion than girls privileges them. Boys are raised in a manner that favours their maturation into independent adults. Telling a boy ‘be a man’ might curtail his childhood, but it also signifies that he can eventually live up to the standards that characterize adult men; in particular, he can become independent. In contrast, little girls are allowed to behave in a childlike manner for a longer time, and this expresses the idea that they are destined to be more dependent on others than men are. These differences in treatment and expectations grow throughout childhood and increase sharply at . Now, one might wonder whether Beauvoir’s descriptions support making a distinction between sex and gender. Do they offer an account of the stages through which naturally sexed newborns become gendered? Before addressing this question, let me introduce the sex-gender distinction as it emerged in the 1960s. While the phrase ‘’ began to circulate in the 1950s, the work of psychoanalyst Robert Stoller in the 1960s first caught the attention of feminists. In his 1968 book Sex and Gender: On the Development of and , Stoller restricted ‘the term sex to a biological connotation’ and broke gender, which he referred to as having ‘psychological or cultural rather than biological connotations’, into two components: gender identity and gender role.3 On the one hand, sex includes those anatomical, hormonal and chromosomal features in virtue of which one is female or male. On the other hand, gender encompasses the identity and the behaviours acquired on the basis of social expectations about what is appropriate for females and males; this identity and these behaviours make one a woman or a man. One of the purposes of the distinction was to make sense of the experience of transsexuals, whose gender identity does not align with that expected on the basis of their sex. Thus, a person with a male sexual anatomy might identify as a woman. In that case, this person would have a different gender than that presumed on the basis of her sex features. The sex-gender distinction was appropriated by feminists, most notably by in her 1975 essay ‘The Traffic in Women: Notes on the “Political Economy” of Sex’.4 The sex-gender distinction was useful to feminists eager to 142 Feminist Moments challenge biological determinism regarding sex, which is the view that the place of women and men is determined by their biology, because it suggested that the psychological traits in virtue of which women were deemed inferior were nothing more than the result of social forces. Any social change that transformed gender traits would challenge gender hierarchies. This, in turn, would affect the social status of women. While sex might lie beyond the reach of social change, gender did not. In short, decoupling sex from gender allowed feminists to argue that biology does not dictate social arrangements. Although initially attractive, the sex-gender distinction was later challenged by feminists. One of the concerns they expressed was that the distinction presupposes a neat segregation between natural and cultural properties. Sex belongs on the side of nature, gender on the side of culture. But it was not clear that sex was really beyond the reach of culture. What if our scientific understanding of sex, the understanding in virtue of which humans are classified as male or female, was influenced by social norms, and in particular by ideas about femininity and masculinity? Would the condition of being female or male itself be merely natural or would it be cultural?5 Another worry, raised by , was that sex is a category that is used in order to legitimate certain sexual desires: the norm of heterosexuality produces a binary division between (the division between men and women), and the category of sex is invoked to legitimate this binary.6 Therefore, the claim that genders are constructed from natural sexes merely serves to normalize heterosexuality. In the wake of these criticisms and others, feminists began to question the nature/ culture divide implicit in the sex-gender distinction. Beauvoir would have sympathized with them. Let me consider a first interpretation of The Second Sex in terms of the sex-gender distinction: about sex and gender. According to a social constructionist about sex and gender, every person has natural characteristics which form his or her sex, and on the basis of these characteristics, he or she is socialized into acquiring certain behaviours and identities, that is, into becoming of a certain gender. To become gendered is, then, to be determined by social forces to acquire the identity and behaviours characteristic of one sex or another. There is a line in our excerpt that lends itself to interpreting Beauvoir as this type of social constructionist: ‘it is civilization as a whole that elaborates this intermediary product between the male and the eunuch that is called feminine’ (283). Beauvoir’s language here indicates that social forces act on a newborn in order to develop a product: woman. This suggests that her aim is to reconstruct the process by which a genderless but Simone de Beauvoir and the Sex-Gender Distinction 143 sexed newborn becomes a woman, that is, an individual of a certain gender. Moreover, the expression ‘elaborating a product’ seems to imply a form of . By ‘social determinism’ I have in mind the view that social forces act in a deterministic fashion to turn a natural entity into a socially constructed entity. If this is what Beauvoir’s language implies, then her account of becoming a woman would erase the possibility of agency in shaping the way in which one becomes a woman. Becoming a woman would amount to being moulded by social forces. Despite this language, interpreting Beauvoir as the type of social constructionist I have described here would conflict with her understanding of what it is to be human. How does Beauvoir characterize humans? In ‘Biological Data’, Beauvoir notes that human beings are distinct from other animals in that we make ourselves who we are; some aspects of our selves are shaped by our own actions and not by natural causes. Beauvoir has this characteristic of human beings in mind when she describes us as ‘historical’ beings (45): unlike other animals, we interpret ourselves in light of our past. Furthermore, human beings can be described in a way that differs from that of the natural sciences, which, according to Beauvoir, only offer deterministic theories. She argues that any attempt to explain the condition of women by relying solely on biological concepts would only admit a deterministic understanding of women, one which runs contrary to the possibility of interpreting women as self-making beings. Therefore, Beauvoir rejects biology as a science that could give a full account of the condition of women. But this is not to say that biological facts about women are irrelevant to understanding their condition. An adequate account of woman would characterize the way in which women experience the givens biology describes. Consider, for example, the experience of , which Beauvoir also discusses in ‘Biological Data’. In a society which provides and accommodations for pregnant women, pregnancy might not be experienced to be as burdensome as in a society which does not. These differences would affect how a woman lives her body. For Beauvoir, what determines how biology matters is how women live their bodies, and this is inflected by social norms and by women’s choices. The place Beauvoir gives to human agency conflicts with a social constructionist reading of The Second Sex, if by ‘social constructionism’ one has in mind the social determinist version I just sketched. Therefore, I think that the deterministic ring to the lines immediately following ‘One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman’ ought to be downplayed. That said, my argument so far has not completely ruled out interpreting Beauvoir as advocating a distinction between sex and gender. In 144 Feminist Moments what follows, I will consider whether a non-determinist reading of Beauvoir’s sentence in terms of the sex-gender distinction is still acceptable.7 A non-determinist reading of Beauvoir would need to recognize not only that our bodies are interpreted in terms of the norms of a culture, but also that the we, or better yet our bodies, have the capacity to interpret and reinvent ourselves in light of these cultural interpretations. Such a reading would make sense of Beauvoir’s claim in ‘Biological Data’ that the body is a ‘situation’ (46). The concept of a situation, as Beauvoir understood it, concerns the way in which one’s freedom is exercised in light of one’s circumstances. As a result, to claim that the body is a situation is to acknowledge the body’s role in its transformations and its responsiveness to cultural interpretations. At the same time, this claim precludes interpreting Beauvoir in terms of the sex-gender distinction. The circumstances that characterize the body as a situation include the body’s past and place in society. Therefore, part of what it is to say that the body is a situation is to say that the body bears a history of its socialization, and this socialization begins from birth – indeed, from the moment that a baby is declared to be a boy or a girl. The interpretations adults give of a child’s body set the stage for her own interpretations of her body. Thus, to make a distinction between a woman’s natural, or bodily, features (her sex), on the one hand, and her identity and psychological traits (her gender), on the other hand, would belie Beauvoir’s thesis that the body is a situation. For Beauvoir, the human body is not a natural entity, but the repository of a social history. Beauvoir’s remarks in ‘Biological Data’ indicate that becoming a woman does not mark the transition from a biological state to a cultural state. Instead, from the moment of birth, the newborn’s body bears a social significance. The second part of The Second Sex should be read as a description of the unfolding of this significance, as a narrative about the way in which children come to understand the social significance of their bodies and act on this significance. Thus, we should interpret Beauvoir’s line about the fact that ‘civilization develops this product [the human female]’ not as a statement about the construction of gender from sex, but as a reference to the role civilization plays in the child’s understanding of himself or herself as sexually differentiated. Civilization mediates the development of this self-understanding from the moment that the child is identified as a boy or a girl (or as having ambiguous genitalia) and continues to influence this development through its differential treatment of boys and girls. Therefore, there is no ‘sex’ unmediated by culture and no ground for interpreting Beauvoir in terms of the sex-gender distinction. Simone de Beauvoir and the Sex-Gender Distinction 145

Civilization, for Beauvoir, encompasses the customs and laws that govern our conceptions of masculinity and femininity. But customs and laws are contingent. Civilizations can be transformed, as can our conceptions of masculinity and femininity. The Second Sex invites us to envision changes in women’s condition, to imagine what would constitute women’s liberation and to reflect on the solidarity women and men can cultivate as they work towards this liberation.