le Deviant

NATO Paris Conference, 1954 (American Embassy, Paris, France)

Crumbs

Cornwall Speculative Theory, de Beauvoir, Feminism

Tuesday, 4 March 2025

Writing from post war France

Speculative Theory

Pelynt, Cornwall

de Beauvoir – le Deviant

Humanity is something other than a species: it is an historical becoming; it is defined by the way it assumes natural facticity¹.

In the wake of the Second World War, as (western) Europe amped up their decolonial projects, Simone de Beauvoir, a 30-something writing from France, reflected on the state of women. Her book, Le Deuxième Sexe (The Second Sex), became revered and modelled upon – a kind of literary matriarch of second-wave feminism. It is a (pro)creative source in structure and content, drawing on outside forces to explode the irreducible life of women into something that is unified yet highly individual and contingent. She speculates on the origins and effects of oppression present in the lives and behaviours of women, with particular emphasis on the interface between material (external) origins and their exchange with biology². As one person amongst her intellectual partners – existentialists, structuralists, and phenomenologists – de Beauvoir presented a reality where the human form (body, sex) and social practice (culture, day-to-day lives, gender) consolidate into identities that are, in fact, tensions between a historical idea and a becoming of something specific³. Collectively, their research generated a framework to understand how we come to know ourselves and Others – birthed in a moment when a cohesive social order and morality were unimaginable in the wake of devastation produced by war, revolution, and economic collapse. Via a critique and analysis of lives lived, identities were forged and named as one was measured against another. The Second Sex has no one succinct message – only questions about futurity when the past has only produced an ongoing project of tearing apart.

Chaque nouvelle initiée

On ne naît pas femme: on le devient.⁴.
We/You are not born woman: we/you become it.⁵
One is not born, but rather becomes, woman.⁶
One is not born, but rather becomes a woman⁷

Le Duexème Sexe has been translated into over 40 languages, with two highly circulated English editions amongst innumerable translations produced by individual critics and analysts. This line above, on ne naît pas femme: on le deviant’ has become common parlance to prompt a discussion on gender as biology and/or construct. In the mid-1980s, Judith Butler took on de Beauvoir’s questions of ‘le deviant’ as one of the foundations of her gender-as-performance projects⁸. Butler extrapolates from de Beauvoir that unconventional gender practices are themselves active reinterpretations of cultural history. There is a direct link between how culture is produced by and itself produces the actualisation of gender⁹. In this interpretation, the line ‘On ne naît pas femme: on le deviant’ is not a confrontation of biology and femininity. It is a question regarding the correlation between gender and sex. In the thirty-plus years since Butler reached out with this concept, questions regarding this separation of sex and gender have bombarded public discourse to the point of debates on commercial news sources and public legislatures. It is no longer entirely out of reach to recognise that this separation is inalienable for some, regardless of whether you agree with it.

To recognise how gender and sex, in practice, is a re/interpretation of culture and its history, it is necessary to explore how she differentiates ‘to become someone (le devenir)’ from thinking-with (rather than about) someone (gender and sex). Thinking about becoming something, in this case, a sex-gender (a woman), requires measuring against another. De Beauvoir enumerates on the plights in what Butler called ‘the phenomenology of victimisation’. When done in detail and with awareness of positionality, this can lead to recognising the intersectional characteristics of individuals and communities, the historical origins of marginalisation, and the maintenance of properties that sustain these inequalities. Thinking about how one becomes is distinct because it requires, at some level, distinction. One has power over another because it is and can be separated. Thinking-with becoming-as-process and then assigning ‘process’ as the necessary distinction to identify woman allows a thinking pattern that simultaneously embraces and rejects alterity. While debates begin to border on speaking in circles and meaning loses purpose, an embodied experience emerges where your own process of be/coming-to-know something is recognised as the very act of reading and writing it.

This advances Butler’s prospectus is both liberatory, polarising and diffusive. Gender as performance, gender as a lens to view and subvert cultural history, generates a sense that there are futures, outside gender norms, that may be strived for if we situate ourselves in becoming rather than became. However, in thinking-with, rather than about gender, can also marginalise the realities of day-to-day life, including oppressions felt by some and not others (gender-related or otherwise). This implies that re/constructing gender based on characteristics and/or biology is fated to push some aside for others, even if the best-intentioned say no to this. How we define bodies into gender categories will directly relate to how those specific bodies are affected by social orders and, by extensions, legal realities. What is felt as given, taken away, entitled, and protected remains destabilised by a practice that attempts to subvert past harms and liberties gained¹⁰.

Il measure mal les sentiments

Every argument has its opposite, and both are often misleading. To see clearly, one needs to get out of these ruts; these vague notions of superiority, inferiority, and equality that have distorted all discussions must be discarded in order to start anew¹¹

To enable an understanding of this distinction requires first that we allow gender-related empowerment and oppression to be understood as something that has shared characteristics and realities yet is distinct between individuals. For example, it is impossible to ‘feel’ the same way as someone else, though we are experiencing the same circumstances. To assume gender-sex have irrefutable shared characteristics requires that we identify which ‘measures’ are marked for evaluation: for example, what the uterus is more-or-less capable of, how hormones influence body shape and personality and how both these factors will determine an individual’s capacity to participate in society. In this age, few will commit to a position that dictates these factors alone, which will influence self-determination – or that these factors are similar between individuals. Women may be more emotional, but sometimes they are not. Men may be more muscular and physically daring, but some are not. Where we draw the line precisely between who falls where and how they are affected by sexual-gender differences is increasingly blurry. These factors may affect our desires and solidarities around emancipation, even if they are not always standing on solid ground.

The practice of de Beauvoir in The Second Sex is a process of laying out what Butler named ‘phenomenologies of victimisation’¹². There is no one state of victimisation, nor are the effects felt at all times. Though she is quite explicit and thorough in providing examples (the vast majority of the book does this), she is equally critical of the contradictions of what is and is not being said publicly, mythologically, in literature, and in the legislature. de Beauvoir points out that the measures we take to identify victimisation are relative to the contradictions and conflicts that frame women’s lives. The more contradictions, the more likely women will remain in a ‘second’ state, lacking fraternitè with and as human equals¹³. In this manner, the contemporary debates about gender-sex separation directly affect how gender is felt and experienced by both sexes. de Beauvoir states that her renderings do not stem from a ‘historical event’. These contradictions and the consequences of an unending project and process itself. Suppose we were to reduce women to a ‘natural’ biological category. Can we identify which event launched the oppression, or at least one aspect of oppression?

If we overcome that oppression, would we find ‘equality’ and ‘fraternity’? These are two measures de Beauvoir presents as measures of ‘transcendence’ over oppression. She offers examples of the distinction between women, whose situation has no single moment or event to point to, and those of colonised and/or enslaved subjects, as well as Jewish otherness (both highly relevant in the late 1940s in Europe). She points to European post-feudal expansions of the 15^th-19^th century as a ‘moment’ where we can identify what circumstances were set in place that would marginalise, oppress and outright obliterate those on the far side of the (cartesian) distinction between human and Other¹⁴. In turn, if we recognise what was lost by these events and what circumstances came before, we have the information that leads to liberation, a measure to meet and overcome. However, de Beauvoir emphasises that women have no such recorded moment in history where they lived in an emancipated state. Therefore, ‘history’ as a phenomenon and our interpretation of past events highly influences imperatives that require prohibition and/or implementation to gain the freedom of self-actualisation implied in her prospectus.

there have always been women; they are women by their physiological structure; as far back as history can be traced, they have always been subordinate to men; their dependence is not the consequence of an event or a becoming, it did not happen. Alterity here appears to be an absolute, partly because it falls outside the accidental nature of historical fact. A situation created over time can come undone at another time … In truth, nature is not more an immutable given than is historical reality¹⁵.

Here, she lays out a distinction that conflates one set of oppressed people separate from women as category. This may be read as an outstanding example of white feminism or to some extent, trans-exclusionary radical feminism. Returning to the moment in time and her reflection on a world unfolding around her, in context and as an example of tempol specificity, she is stating the opposite: women, as a category, is not the issue and cause of these contradictions and subsequent oppressions. When we naturalise phenomena and bodies as immutable, we position them as incapable of change. Pointing to a historical moment offers false opportunity as it is also something ‘immutable’ – a focus on conflated oppression is merely a means to extol the existential questions plaguing her and many of her friends, colleagues, and compatriots at that moment: despite a collective agreement on the science behind the constructs of reality and the unity of species, there is little evidence that life is valued universally. What is our human potential when existence has shown itself as self-destructive and utterly lacking a sense that we have shared aspirations? Why do we gravitate to immutability and truth when self-determination implies mobility and transformation? These statements may imply some of the more nihilistic aspects of humanity – however, facing them and feeling them, in actual fact, reflects an ability to embrace the wholeness that is very much desired.

In her focus on alterity, the body, and thinking with gender, de Beauvoir speaks for herself despite never stating this. She identified a problem, but it was also a problem for her¹⁶. Her particular points of comparison with colonialism and antisemitism have barely diffused since publication – today, both issues are in one of their most devisive moments. By being both participant and critic, she exhibits how one can, in their work, re/produce various kinds of oppression while simultaneously being critical of its origins and existence. This cautions readers to the validity of other messages – relying on the master’s tools to rebuild a house on the master’s grounds merits contestation. However, dismissing a work on these grounds outright – one that is so influential and forged when these issues were at the heart of transforming society – is not only neglectful. Here, we can feel the full spectrum of our reactionsto de Beauvoir’s reality. Coming to know her and her subjects through her own words, translations, and re/readings requires holding space for these conflicts – notably, a conflict regarding the applicability of early second-wave feminism on the realities of today.

Le monde n’apparaît pas à la femme

The dialectic of the master and slave has its most concrete application here: in oppressing, one becomes oppressed¹⁷.

Reading her work against the grain of time demonstrates that when ‘woman’ is identified as a category and point of distinction, there is an underlying implication of immutability while simultaneously implying transformative possibility. This conflict is what creates desires for change and motivates actions towards it. When we think-with other more intersectional groupings, there is a sense that we can undo the harms that have, and will continue to, motivate our restructurings of society. Carefully attending to the nuance between the two and understanding that subverting gender norms has a role in reshaping how we ‘read’ cultural history assists in coming to new positions that recognise harms and alterity without reproducing them. Reading-feeling Le deuxième Sexe with post Butlerian, post Anzaldua, post Lorde eyes builds skills to read-with the problems in reach and in sight. We experience the readings with knowledge of our positionalities and shortcomings – we come to know the work with the agency to meet it on our own terms, in our own time.

In speaking to the stereotypical behaviour, many can either relate to or have witnessed. de Beauvoir is able to write out, in great detail, how neurotic behaviours link to lived realities while maintaining that these behaviours shape how we come to understand our cultural histories. One oppresses because one is oppressed. One is oppressed because one oppresses. She does not blame women for their oppression nor outright condemn the institutions of society for oppressing women. She simply presents a case showing how becoming itself is the act from which gender and history are produced. And not ergo sum, sex is biologically independent of gender, all oppression is equal, except in the case of women, and we are never free of ourselves while always being free to strive to change.

Citations

de Beauvoir, Simone. Le Deuxième Sexe. Électronique. 1949. Reprint, Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 2011.

———. The Second Sex. Translated by H. M. Parshley. France: Librarie Galliard, 1949. Reprint, London, England: Jonathan Cape, 1954.

———. The Second Sex. Edited by Judith Thurman. Translated by Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier. Kindle. Éditions Gallimard, Paris, 1949. Reprint, New York: Random House, 2014.

Belle, Kathryn Sophia. Beauvoir and Belle: A Black Feminist Critique of the Second Sex. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2024.

Braidotti, Rosi. Metamorphoses: Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming (Short Introductions). Kindle. John Wiley & Sons, 2013.

Butler, Judith. ‘Sex and Gender in Simone de Beauvoir’s Second Sex’. Yale French Studies, no. 72 (1986): 35–49.

Fischer, Molly. ‘Think Gender Is Performance? You Have Judith Butler to Thank for That’. The Cut, 21 June 2016.
http://www.thecut.com/2016/06/judith-butler-c-v-r.html.

Lloyd, Genevieve. The Man of Reason: ‘Male’ and ‘Female’ in Western Philosophy. Routledge, 2002.

Simons, Margaret A. ‘Beauvoir and the Problem of Racism’. In Philosophers on Race, 260–84. Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishers Ltd, 2007.

Wittig, Monique. The Straight Mind: And Other Essays. Beacon Press, 1992.

Other Speculative Theory

Spiritual Activism

Practice is Persuasion (PQI)

Consciousness Raising I

40 Years in the Desert

Compassionate Interpretation

Compulsory Heterosexuality, 1980

Situated Movement or, naming in stereoscopic vision

Consciousness Raising II

Intimacy

Citations

1
Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, ed. Judith Thurman, trans. Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier, Kindle (Éditions Gallimard, Paris, 1949; New York: Random House, 2014), 15207.
2
Judith Butler, ‘Sex and Gender in Simone de Beauvoir’s Second Sex’, Yale French Studies, no. 72 (1986): 41.
3
For example, her relationships, intellectual and otherwise with Jean-Paul Sarte, Claude Levi-Strauss, Merleau-Ponty and Simone Wiel.
4
Simone de Beauvoir, Le Deuxième Sexe, électronique (1949; repr., Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 2011).
5
My translation.
6
de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 2014, 17–18.
7
Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. H. M. Parshley (France: Librarie Galliard, 1949; London, England: Jonathan Cape, 1954).
8
Butler, ‘Sex and Gender in Simone de Beauvoir’s Second Sex’, 35.⁸Butler, ‘Sex and Gender in Simone de Beauvoir’s Second Sex’, 35.
9
Molly Fischer, ‘Think Gender Is Performance? You Have Judith Butler to Thank for That’, The Cut, 21 June 2016, http://www.thecut.com/2016/06/judith-butler-c-v-r.html; Butler is not the only person to invoke this conversation, though her name is perhaps the best known reguarding the subject. See also Monique Wittig, The Straight Mind: And Other Essays (Beacon Press, 1992) and; Rosi Braidotti, Metamorphoses: Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming (Short Introductions), Kindle (John Wiley & Sons, 2013).
10
The bathroom debate is a good example of how gendered bathrooms have protected sexual difference, offering a relatively safe space from male dominance and predatory behaviour. By making a more inclusive space to gender variance a sense of continuity is lost and a threat is introduced – even if you disagree, the damage to its reputation has been done. The sanctity of the ‘ladies’ has been lost.
11
de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 2014, 35.
12
Butler, ‘Sex and Gender in Simone de Beauvoir’s Second Sex’, 41.
13
She concludes the book with a statement of affirming brotherhood, fraternite as a measure of making ‘the reign of freedom triumph’.
14
She brings up Kant, Rousseau and other philosophers of rationality and enlightenment to situate this relationship between nature-culture and the ‘human’ male in opposition to the ‘female’ other. It is beyond the scope here to go into further detail on this, however it is important to note that this distinction proposed by Kant and expanded on for a generation is fundamental to most theory-and-practice feminist projects. See Genevieve Lloyd, The Man of Reason: ‘Male’ and ‘Female’ in Western Philosophy (Routledge, 2002).
15
de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 2014, 28.
16
There is a subdivision of research on de Beauvoir and race that is beyond the scope of the paper here. See Margaret A. Simons, ‘Beauvoir and the Problem of Racism’, in Philosophers on Race (Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishers Ltd, 2007), 260–84; Kathryn Sophia Belle, Beauvoir and Belle: A Black Feminist Critique of the Second Sex (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2024).
17
de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 2014, 590.

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