Abstract

The canonical texts of the existentialist tradition were written and published before it became common to differentiate between sex and gender. Nonetheless, it has long been recognized that the work of thinkers associated with existentialism – especially, of course, Simone de Beauvoir – provides us with a useful framework for thinking through the complex terrain of gender identity, and indeed for interrogating and problematizing the sex/gender distinction itself.1 The relevance of existentialism to these issues more broadly, even beyond Beauvoir’s more explicit engagement with them, becomes readily apparent when we consider the existentialists’ emphasis on the dynamic friction between freedom and constraint. For the figures explored in the present volume, the human condition is characterized by a simultaneous recognition of ourselves as, on the one hand, self-reflective agents burdened with choice and responsibility and, on the other, ineluctably social and inescapably vulnerable, factical creatures. These complicated dialectics, especially the ways in which they play out in our relation to our own bodies and projects, are only too clearly applicable to a set of phenomena that themselves involve such multifaceted interrelations between self and society, choice and normativity, and embodiment and culture that even defining ‘gender’ is a contested endeavour, arguably even more so today.2 In this context, gender – however defined – can be seen as a manifestation of what Beauvoir, even before she turned to the question of what it means to become ‘woman’, called our fundamental ambiguity (2018 [1947]). The aim of this chapter is to give an overview of those existentialist analyses that are most clearly relevant to discourses about gender. These are Sartre’s account of the body and his brief remarks about sexual differentiation, Beauvoir’s investigation of how one becomes ‘woman’ and Fanon’s explorations of the ways in which racialization and colonization shape how individuals experience and enact masculinity and femininity.