Because of Beauvoir: Christianity and the Cultivation of Female Genius

Conclusion

151 a Conclusion God gave us intelligence to force us to seek knowledge of things. —Gabrielle Suchon, Traité de la morale et de la politique In 2009 Ramita Naval reported in a Channel 4 program in the Unreported World series—“Turkey: Killing for Honour”—that in order to evade the consequences of what was then new Turkish legislation against so-called “honor killings,” Kurdish communities were forcing women and girls to take their own lives or, in some cases, commissioning younger men to kill them in order to avoid the longer sentences that would be meted out to their fathers and uncles.1 This kind of incident—systematic rape, domestic violence, trafficking , and sex slavery—could unfortunately be duplicated in the media on a more or less weekly basis. It draws attention to gendered violence in the twenty-first century and points to the continuing relevance of feminist analysis that identifies forms of violence and injustice based on polarized gender discourse. However, there is always a danger when writers—academics, theorists, journalists—from liberal Western perspectives publish stories like these about the brutal oppression of women in “other” parts of the world. Whatever their intentions, the risk remains of reducing the reported gendered violence 1 Ramita Navai (reporter) and Matt Haan (producer), “Turkey: Killing for Honour,” Unreported World, accessed June 9, 2011, http://www.channel4.com/programmes/unreported -world/episode-guide/series-2009/episode-3. 152 Because of Beauvoir or gendered inequality as characteristic of these “other” contexts. Crucially, there is a danger of perpetuating unfounded Western liberal myths about the barbarism outside its borders in ways that serve actually to increase polarizations2 while veiling the problems of gendered violence and inequality that continue to exist much closer to home. One of the most persistent of these myths claims to measure the degree of civilization in any society by the way it treats and respects women. In the cultural theorist Slavoj Žižek’s words, commenting on French legislation that bans the full-body veil from French streets and other public places, “one cannot but note how the allegedly universalist attack on the burqua on behalf of human rights and women’s dignity ends up as a defense of the particular French way of life.”3 In this context, too, Simone de Beauvoir’s analysis of how relationships between men and women are determined by the values and perspectives of the normative male is very often smoothed away in the assumption that the “sinister nature of gender”4 has now been dispelled, for example in the context of recent legal codifications of equal rights. Beauvoir’s actual analysis and her own revealing uncertainties in relation to it are ignored, and we slip into the black-and-white view that the revolution is over, and it simply needs to be implemented more consistently to succeed completely. In this brave new world, the values of modern Western-style democracy, law, and international relations are elevated to a state of near final certainty. Meanwhile, the voices and stories of women, when they are actually listened to, tell a different and always much more complicated story. Therefore, the argument that women—female geniuses—can be said to achieve subjectivity in circumstances characterized by a normative male perspective should not be seen as an attempt to challenge continuing feminist efforts to dismantle limitations imposed on women wherever they exist. It is rather—to use Kristeva’s term—a modest attempt to suggest that Beauvoir was perhaps too pessimistic about the capability of women—including those who identified themselves as Christians—to exceed those limitations. Nevertheless , though we may need to supplement her account of how women 2 This is a topic that has, of course, been widely discussed, particularly in the years since the publication of Edward Said’s influential book, Orientalism (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978). 3 Slavoj Žižek, Living in the End Times (London: Verso, 2011), 1. 4 Pamela Sue Anderson, “The Lived Body, Gender and Confidence,” in New Topics in Feminist Philosophy of Religion: Contestations and Transcendence Incarnate, ed. Pamela Sue Anderson (Dordrecht, Netherlands: Springer, 2010), 177. Conclusion 153 have been unable to achieve subjectivity in the past with Kristeva’s claim that female geniuses predate and may even have contributed to the transformations of women’s lives we have seen over the last century, Beauvoir’s philosophical work continues to be significant. It remains important in particular in the...