However, they are additionally partially bonding phrases. However, if ʻOne isn’t born, slightly one turns into, a womanʼ, it should carry the signification of gender. It will seem, then, that each female human being shouldn’t be essentially a girl; to be so considered she must share in that mysterious and threatened reality which is femininity. The first part of The Second Sex offers critically with biologism, psychoanalysis and historic materialism exactly because every attempts to grasp the human being, or the human female particularly, from a limited perspective. Furthermore, Butlerʼs notion of ʻthe bodyʼ is analytically indistinguishable from that of intercourse or gender. Both the concept of ʻfemininityʼ, then, and the idea of ʻwomanʼ would seem to check with one thing like ʻgenderʼ, in contradistinction to ʻthe femaleʼ as ʻsexʼ. It seems plausible, then, to interpret this sex difference, the very fact of the division of human beings (and other animals) into mâle et femelle, because the ʻsexʼ of the intercourse/gender distinction. Because the wording of those final remarks reveals, it is, in line with Butler, not simply ʻsexʼ which turns into falsely ontologized, reified, substantialized, but ʻgenderʼ or ʻgender identityʼ too.
Furthermore, its spectral presence in Butlerʼs textual content – even if solely in the mode of its being disavowed – exerts a significant effect on what’s, I would argue, the extra necessary distinction in Gender Trouble between the ontological and the performative. Butler argues, recall, that ʻsexʼ, when posited as a prediscursive given, is to be understood as ʻthe effect of the apparatus of cultural building designated by genderʼ. This sex difference in need variability was partly explained by childbirth, whereby girls who gave birth showed steeper declines in want, and this impact was not current for men. Within the Second Sex one finds the words sexe (clearly), la femme or les femmes (woman, or women), la féminité (femininity, a noun), fémininʼ/féminine (an adjective) and la femelle, or les femelles (the feminine, or females), also femelle as an adjective, usually with the word humaine – that’s, in phrases corresponding to ʻthe human femaleʼ.
One is born sexed female, then, and one turns into a girl, one becomes feminine, et voilà, the sex/gender distinction. There is no such thing as a substantive content material to any good definition of the human being, either masculine or feminine, as a result of the human being isn’t defined by any essence. For the most basic existential assumption, which is the basis of the total perspective, is that any good definition of the human being is most significantly a purely formal statement of a situation or a construction that in reality resists all definitions which would be determined or closed: ʻwhen we need to do with a being whose nature is transcendent actionʼ, de Beauvoir says, ʻwe can by no means shut the booksʼ. More specifically, it’s the ʻtotal situationʼ which defines what it is to be a lady and, be aware, which appears to exclude sure human females from this definition. De Beauvoir will also usually check with the irreducible duality of intercourse difference, the undeniable undeniable fact that there are two sexes (although, notice, she shouldn’t be unaware of the phenomenon of intersex21). Reading an Anglophone intercourse/gender distinction into The Second Sex, nevertheless, Butler interprets de Beauvoirʼs persevering with to speak of ʻthe information of biologyʼ as the residue of a Cartesian dualism, during which discuss of the ʻfactʼ of sex distinction translates into the (illegitimate) positing of the metaphysical substance of ʻsexʼ, a positing which is contradicted or undermined by what is theoretically necessitated elsewhere.
To the extent that ʻthere is one thing proper in Beauvoirʼs declare that one will not be born, however relatively becomes a womanʼ, Butler reads ʻwomanʼ as ʻa term in process, a becomingʼ; that she then instantly identifies with ʻgenderʼ, in keeping with the sense by which she understands that word. Within the Anglophone world The Second Sex suffers from its discount to 1 sentence: ʻOne is just not born, but rather becomes, a womanʼ. When, then again, The Second Sex is read as based mostly on or otherwise dedicated to some model of that distinction, Butler distances herself theoretically from it. In ʻVariations on Sex and Genderʼ Butler credits de Beauvoir with a idea by which sex was already gender, but solely as a result of she makes de Beauvoir already a Butlerian thinker. When de Beauvoir is seen as having overcome the distinction – as recognizing that sex was gender all along – Butler approves. By the point of Bodies That Matter, nevertheless, de Beauvoir has turn into for Butler not simply any previous sex/gender feminist, but the eponymous sex/gender feminist, in as far as she offers her name to a model of feminism – Beauvoirian feminism – that’s roughly defined by its dependency on the distinction.