This article argues that Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex continues to teach academic feminism why difference feminism holds productive and generative potential for feminists and why equality feminism has been consistently subject to criticism since the second wave of feminism. Using Hegel's master—slave dialectic as a lens to interpret subjectivity in The Second Sex, this text reveals an aspect of equality feminism that relies upon masculine subjectivity, a subjectivity that inherently constitutes otherness. This reliance on masculine subjectivity is anathema (...) to difference feminism because the otherness inherently constituted by such subjectivity simultaneously and paradoxically constitutes women's ongoing subordination. In assuming equality with men by adopting masculine subjectivity, women are not immune to constituting women as other. Difference feminisms, on the other hand, start from where women are as they choose to see themselves socially, economically, racially, sexually. The Second Sex reveals that difference feminisms imagine freedom in order to identify the difference that would empower women, not strictly towards sex equality with a stable referent, but towards emancipatory projects that make a difference for women themselves. The Second Sex portends that such imagined freedom has not been actualized, thus the present remains circumscribed by power that subordinates the difference in question. When read alongside The Second Sex, the tension between equality and difference feminisms can still be read as feminisms that coexist with one another, each with their limitations, each with productive potential and cautionary rejoinders. (shrink)

A large number of feminist philosophers and social critics accept that Simone de Beauvoir's conception of transcendence in The Second Sex relies on masculinist ontology. In contrast with feminist interpretations that see Beauvoir claiming the success of masculinist ontology, this article argues that transcendence as masculinist ontology does not succeed in The Second Sex because it requires a relation of domination, something contrary to its own definition of freedom-producing relations. The Second Sex obliquely reveals this failure, but Beauvoir does not (...) ruminate upon it. Instead, Beauvoir turns to imagine freedom-producing gender relations in the future where the body and consciousness are already emancipated from constitutive domination. This is a future that resonates with G. W. F. Hegel's `Stoic Consciousness'. The significance of this finding is that the location of freedom neither resides in the intertwinement of the male body and consciousness previously argued to be the case, for Beauvoir, nor does it reside in the intertwinement of the female body and consciousness. Rather, freedom resides in the intertwinement of male and female bodies and consciousness where domination is already absent, that is, a place outside of history. Thus, the conclusion of The Second Sex can be read as a consolation and an escape from the inescapable limits of the present. (shrink)

In this re-reading of The Second Sex, the author argues that Beauvoir transgressively employs Sartre’s universal binary categories of Being and Nothingnessin her effort to account for the economic, political, cultural and psychological conditions of women’s situation. In doing so, she challenges Sartre’s theory of radical ontological freedom and concretizes his abstract philosophic voice, thereby avoiding their rationalist and voluntarist implications. Contesting Beauvoir’s feminist critics, who saw her as emotionally and philosophically dependent on Sartre and her work as an amalgam (...) of Sartrean existentialism and feminist insights, the author maintains that Beauvoir had her own independent project – to transform Sartrean existentialism to make it contextually sensitive. Distancing herself from Sartre’s theory of freedom and its valorization of masculine experience and disembodied consciousnesses, Beauvoir’s theory of situational freedom and embodied subjectivity draws her closer to the existentialism of Merleau-Ponty. (shrink)