Gender as Lived Time: Reading The Second Sex for a Feminist Phenomenology of Temporality

Hypatia 33 (1):111-127 (2018)
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Abstract

This article suggests that Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex offers an important contribution to a feminist phenomenology of temporality. In contrast to readings of The Second Sex that focus on the notion of “becoming” as the main claim about the relation between “woman” and time, this article suggests that Beauvoir's discussion of temporality in volume II of The Second Sex shows that Beauvoir understands the temporality of waiting, or a passive present, to be an underlying structure of women's existence and subordination. Accordingly, I argue that Beauvoir does not see “woman” as a mere becoming, as that which unfolds in time, but instead understands becoming a woman to be realized as lived time. As such, Beauvoir's account shows that gender and temporality are deeply entangled, and thus she challenges the classic phenomenological account of temporality as a general, given structure of human existence. More specifically, I argue that her account shows how a particular experience of time is an underlying structure of sexual objectification, a claim that expands on the feminist phenomenological claim that a particular relation to space becomes a way in which women take up and negotiate their own subordination and objectification.

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Megan Burke
Sonoma State University

Citations of this work

On becoming a hag: gender, ageing and abjection.Susan Pickard - 2020 - Feminist Theory 21 (2):157-173.

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References found in this work

Being and time.Martin Heidegger - 1962 - New York,: Harper.
Phenomenology of Perception.Aron Gurwitsch, M. Merleau-Ponty & Colin Smith - 1964 - Philosophical Review 73 (3):417.
Being and Time.Ronald W. Hepburn - 1964 - Philosophical Quarterly 14 (56):276.
Phenomenology of Perception.Mary Warnock - 1964 - Philosophical Quarterly 14 (57):372-375.

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