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Simone de Beauovir’s Challenge to Cultural Feminism and Post-Structuralism
By: Tamela Ice

I

Cultural feminists claim that the way men have defined women has resulted in a “distortion and devaluation of feminine characteristics.” Cultural feminists do not object to the notion of “defining” woman, but suggest “a more accurate feminist description and appraisal, [understanding] woman’s passivity as her peacefulness, her sentimentality as her proclivity to nurture, her subjectiveness as her advanced self-awareness…” Thus, cultural feminists respond in the affirmative to Simone de Beauvoir’s question, ‘Are there women?’ Moreover, on this view, women are to be defined “by their activities and attributes in the present culture.”

The poststructuralists deny gender, treating the terms “gender” and “sex” synonymously. These theorists “reject the possibility of defining woman at all.” The poststructuralist’s tactic deconstruct all concepts of woman and “argue that both feminist and misogynist attempts to define woman are politically reactionary and ontologically mistaken.” In order to offer a definition or characterization of woman, and even to speak for women, “gender politics (sexual difference) must be replaced by a plurality of difference where gender loses its position of significance.” For the poststructuralists, we cannot define woman as “human” without denying the oppression of women. Using psychoanalysis (Lacan), grammar (Derrida), and the history of discourses (Foucault), poststructuralists “’deconstruct’ our concept of the subject as having an essential identity and an authentic core that has been repressed by society. “There is no essential core ‘natural’ to us, and so there is no repression in the humanist sense.” Moreover, post-structuralists deny “the efficacy … the ontological autonomy, and even the existence of intentionality.” The post-structuralists give a negative response to Beauvoir’s question – ‘Are there women?’

The “essentialism” of cultural feminism appears to “create homogeneous and ahistorical ideas about what it means to be a woman, ” and it reinforces the sexist idea of a naturalized womanhood.” The poststructuralist theory “eliminates the possibility of any positive conceptions upon which to base a politics.” Moreover, the critique of the subject seems to “deny the idea of agents capable of making change … poststructuralism appears to leave nothing to struggle for and no one left to make the struggle.” The concept of ‘woman,’ with regard to identity politics, is caught between ‘Scylla and Charybdis.’

It is my contention that Beauvoir’s The Second Sex and her notions of freedom and bad faith in The Ethics of Ambiguity offer the possibility of a way through the political and theoretical dead ends of one type of essentialism (cultural feminism) and poststructuralism.

In this paper, I explicate Beauvoir’s ideas of freedom and bad faith in The Ethics of Ambiguity. This will reveal that Beauvoir’s political project is radically different from the identity politics, which presupposes some form of essentialism (cultural feminism) or difference (poststructuralism) as the basis for a feminist politics. For Beauvoir, the problem is one of power rather than identity or difference. Women will create their own individual identities through their actions and choices in the world. I will note important passages from The Second Sex that will show a relationship between cultural feminism, poststructuralism, bad faith, and a particular form of oppression, namely, psychological oppression. I will illustrate Beauvoir’s challenge to cultural feminism and poststructuralism, as well as how these views are related to bad faith and psychological oppression by evaluating Beauvoir’s novelette, “The Woman Destroyed.”

II

At the end of her introduction to The Second Sex, Beauvoir says:
The perspective that we are adopting is that of existentialist ethics. Every subject asserts itself concretely as transcendence through its projects. It only achieves freedom [my italics] through a continual reaching out for other freedoms [my italics]. There is no other justification for its present existence except as expansion towards an indefinite open future.

There are two important issues in this passage. First, in the English translation of The Second Sex, the terms “freedom” and “liberty” are used interchangeably. Beauvoir uses the term “liberty” (liberté) consistently throughout the French version. It is not uncommon to think of “freedom” in terms of political independence, civil rights, or unrestricted use of or access to public facilities. Liberty refers to freedom from restriction or control, the right, or power, of the individual to act or believe as one chooses. In what follows, it will be clear that Beauvoir is talking about liberty. Insofar as English readers of Beauvoir are more familiar with the term “freedom,” I will continue to use it here. However, it is important to bear in mind that “freedom” in this context means “liberty.”

The second important issue concerns the perspective Beauvoir is adopting – that of existentialist ethics. The significance of this passage is often overlooked or misunderstood by many of Beauvoir’s readers who are unaware that she developed an existentialist ethics. The tendency is to suggest that Beauvoir means Sartrean ethics. The problem with this notion is that Sartre did not develop an existentialist ethics. In order to understand Beauvoir’s orientation, we need to look at her distinctive notion of freedom as developed in her existentialist ethics.

I take Beauvoir’s main thesis in The Ethics of Ambiguity to be that the fundamental principle of an existentialist ethics is freedom, and moral freedom requires interacting with others who are also working to develop their own moral freedom.

In Section I of The Ethics of Ambiguity, Beauvoir resolves problems Sartre had in attempting to work out an existentialist ethics. Beauvoir distinguishes between ontological freedom and moral freedom – a distinction Sartre does not make. For Sartre, there is only one kind of freedom, ontological freedom. Moreover, ontologically, everyone is equally free. That is, the slave is as free as the master. In other words, the oppressed is as free as the oppressor. This is problematic for many reasons, particularly because Sartre could not explain the existence of oppression, or what motivation there is for fighting against oppression. Beauvoir also posits a third kind of freedom – freedom from social or material constraints. This freedom is also referred to as “power.”

Eleanore Holveck points out an additional theme in The Ethics of Ambiguity that is relevant to the present topic. For Beauvoir, the only absolute value is the choice to recognize, or not, one’s own ontological freedom and to take responsibility for one’s own life (moral freedom) or the choice to work toward (or not) social/material freedom.

The important level of freedom with regard to cultural feminism and poststructuralism (and The Second Sex) is the social/material level. Social/material oppression (restriction on freedom) occurs in every domain: politically, interpersonally, and unconsciously by others, and psychologically by themselves. When an individual is psychologically oppressed, she restricts her freedom (power) by living in falsehood, creating myths to justify her life, and attempting to escape the truth of her situation. To be psychologically oppressed is to live in “bad faith” (mauvaise foi)

Bad faith, roughly synonymous to “self-deception,” refers to a mode of living. Bad faith involves three types of conduct. First, bad faith always involves a shift between the two meanings of the verb “etre” (to be). The two meanings of “to be” in existentialism are “Being-in-itself” and “Being-for-itself.”
Bad faith involves a metaphysical play on words. That is, simultaneously using both meanings of Being in a way that is advantageous. The advantage may be such that it reinforces or encourages restraints on one’s freedom. For example, in The Second Sex, Beauvoir, says that

To decline to be the Other … would be for women to renounce all the advantage conferred upon them by their alliance with the superior caste. Man-the-sovereign will provide woman-the-liege with material power and will undertake the moral justification for her life; thus she can evade both economic risk and the metaphysical risk of a liberty in which ends and aims must be contrived without assistance.”

In this example, a woman may renounce her moral and social/material freedom in order to avoid taking responsibly for her own life. The advantage is economic as well as metaphysical security.

The second type of bad faith conduct involves a pursuit of sincerity, which is actually insincere. Sincerity is “the determination to be for oneself and for others whatever one actually is.” Beauvoir says, “If woman seems to be the inessential which never becomes the essential, it is because she herself fails to bring about this change.”
Thus, insincerity is denying oneself, a lie (a myth), and an excuse for continuing to live in bad faith (to acquiesce to one’s oppression).

Finally, bad faith involves an inauthentic attitude toward faith. The person living in bad faith makes no distinction between beliefs. It is as acceptable to believe the irrational as the rational. In bad faith, the individual moves from the position that everything is equally certain to the stance that a particular belief is absolutely sure.

For Beauvoir, the most widespread attitude of bad faith is attributed to the person she identifies as the “serious” individual. For this person, certain values are eternal and absolute. The serious individual prefers objects or people other than herself. What is important is not the nature of the object, or the person, but the “fact of being able to lose [oneself]” in that object or person. The serious person denies her ontological freedom, and chooses to live in an “infantile world … [and] masking the movement by which he [sic] gives [values] to himself, like the mythomaniac who while reading a love-letter pretends to forget that she [sic] has sent it to herself.” The serious person gives “absolute meaning to the epithet useful.” I take it the similarity with cultural feminism (essentialism) is clear. If “useful” has absolute meaning, then objects and people are defined in terms of usefulness, function, and their “activities in the present culture.”

In The Second Sex Beauvoir makes two claims:
1) … it is not a mysterious essence that compels men and women to act in good or bad faith, it is there situation that inclines them more or less toward the search for truth.

2) … there is also the tendency to forgo liberty and become henceforth a thing … passive, lost, ruined … deprived of every value.

The first claim is a direct rejection all forms of essentialism, including cultural feminism. The second passage, in context, refers to the advantages of living in bad faith. What I want to emphasize is the tendency to become passive and deprived of all value. For Beauvoir, pacifism is a failure to realize or pursue one’s freedom. It is to relinquish responsibility (and control) of one’s life to others. Recall that for Beauvoir, the only value is choice. In relinquishing power, one relinquishes all choice. This is living in bad faith – willfully acting as one’s own oppressor.

The cultural feminists want to change the words we use with regard to women’s attributes. Instead of saying women are passive, we should say women are peaceful. The difficulty is, women’s behavior does not change. The American Heritage Dictionary defines passive as “receiving or subjected to an action without acting in return; accepting or submitting without resistance; compliant; inactive.” For Beauvoir, power requires an active commitment to realizing the human good – freedom. Thus, a passive attitude limits one’s own freedom. Changing the term to “peaceful” does nothing as far as working to end the oppression of women. In fact, it encourages the continuation of oppression at all levels.
Cultural feminists want to call “sentimentality” the “proclivity to nurture.” To be sentimental is to be swayed by emotions. For an overly emotional person, the irrational is as believable as the rational. This is acting in bad faith. There is no truth-seeking, thus the attitude is one of insincerity. The individual will create myths and excuses to avoid freedom and responsibility. If women are not particularly nurturing, the risk is metaphysical – pretending to be what one is not. This assumes that women are controlled by emotions and “mothering” by nature. The possibilities open to women are thus limited. Again, changing behavior is not encouraged – merely a new word.

Finally, “subjectiveness” should be called “advanced self-awareness.” Again, I refer to the dictionary. Subjectiveness is defined as “dependence; a disposition; subjugated.” If subjected women do have “advanced self-awareness,” then continuing to be subjective is nothing more than a wilful acquiescence to oppression.

For Beauvoir, whatever term is used to define woman, the result is relinquishment of power. Without power, the only freedom possible is ontological. In that case, women are factually oppressed – there is no choice.

The post-structuralists want to deny that we can define woman as “human.” An important passage in The Second Sex will show Beauvoir’s position on this issue. According to the English translation of The Second Sex, one of Beauvoir’s fundamental questions is, “How can a human being in woman’s situation attain fulfilment?” In the French version, the question Beauvoir wants to shed light on is, “Within the feminist condition, how is it possible to realize oneself as a human being?”

These are two very different questions. With the first question, the challenge to poststructuralism is unclear. Moreover, this question asks how oppressed people – not just women, but those in women’s situation (i.e., oppressed) can bring an end to their situation. In other words, the question is “how do we end oppression?” This implies that Beauvoir’s interest in The Second Sex is social.

Beauvoir says she is “interested in the possibilities (chances) of the individual, defining these possibilities (chances) not in terms of happiness (good luck, fortune) but in terms of liberty.” In the English translation “chances” is translated as “fortune.” The French term for “fortune” is “hasard.” Fortune is also understood in French as “destiny” or “fate.” “Chances” is used to wish someone good luck at a game, competition, or exam. Beauvoir is not interested in the “good luck” of individuals in this sense. In The Second Sex, it is the possibilities, or opportunities of individuals, in terms of her notion of freedom in The Ethics of Ambiguity, in response to essentialism and sexual difference theories that is Beauvoir’s concern.

The above discussion can be illustrated, and brought together, in Beauvoir’s novelette, “The Woman Destroyed.” I will now turn to that work.

III

The main themes for Beauvoir, in “The Woman Destroyed” are isolation and failure. This story is told entirely from the point of view of one woman. The protagonist, Monique Lacombe, forty-four years old, has been married to Maurice for twenty-two years. Her story, in the form of a diary, covers roughly six months. Monique starts the diary after her youngest daughter has left home and before she learns that Maurice is having an affair with Noellie Guérard, a well-known lawyer, six years younger than Monique. The diary traces the stages by which Monique’s situation gradually becomes worse.

Monique’s diary reveals the manner in which she slips from concession to concession. Monique questions why she did not insist that Maurice choose between her and Noellie. However, before she speaks, she concedes. She writes, “I must understand others and learn to adjust myself to them … I am defenseless because I never supposed I had any rights … I do not know how to insist.” She records her vain attempts to gain help from family, friends, a psychologist, a graphologist, and an advice column in the newspaper. At the encouragement of friends and family, Monique adopts an “understanding” and “kindly” attitude.
Monique’s diary records the disastrous disintegration of her identity. Monique writes, “I have lived only for him.” She wonders if she would rather Maurice had died. Then, she would know whom she had lost and who she was.” Along with her self-image, Monique’s view of the past is also shattered. “The whole of my past life has collapsed behind me, as the land does in those earthquakes where the ground consumes and destroys itself.” The ending of the story is bleak in the extreme. “The door will open slowly … I am afraid. And I cannot call to anyone for help. I am afraid.”

Beauvoir uses Monique’s private diary to show how she tries to escape the truth – to reveal Monique’s myths. The myths are revealed through Monique’s contradictory claims in the diary entries. She obscures the truth through omissions and new falsehoods; she “weaves the darkness in which she sinks far down, so far that she loses her own image … The truth is never confessed: but if only one looks close enough, it gives itself away.”

Monique manifests self-deception in her resolution for solving the problem. She gives in after deciding to adopt a hard line with Maurice time after time. She has emotional outbursts (her proclivity to nurture?) after she decides to be “peaceful” and understanding. Although she finds reasons for rejecting interpretations and advice she has sought, she continues to believe someone (other than herself) like her youngest daughter, Lucienne, holds the key – she can tell Monique who she is – only to disregard the views in the end.

Many readers and critics oversimplify “The Woman Destroyed” and fail to understand Monique’s part in her own tragedy. This does not diminish the reality or intensity of her suffering. Monique suffers, to a greater or lesser extent, from the situations and pressures that have grown up over the years in a male dominated society. In relation to the previous discussion, the novel speaks for itself and further illustrates Beauvoir’s challenges to cultural feminism and poststructuralism. Monique has no power. Without that, she cannot develop an identity separate from Maurice.

IV

In this paper I have explained how Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, along with her concepts of freedom and bad faith offer an alternative to identity politics and difference theory. I have illustrated this in Beauvoir’s novelette, “The Woman Destroyed.”

I have shown how Beauvoir’s The Second Sex offers a challenge to one type of essentialism, namely, cultural feminism, and to poststructuralism. There is room for further investigation of Beauvoir’s work and its relevance for contemporary feminist theories.

Article Source: http://journal.ilovephilosophy.com

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