Abjection and Ambiguity: Simone de Beauvoir's Legacy

A retrospective article published in Le Monde Diplomatique reminds us of how radical Beauvoir was for her time (Chaperon 1999). A "huge stir" was caused by The Second Sex "from the moment it was first published in 1949"--over 20,000 copies were sold within a week of its publication. Beauvoir, we are told, "took a stand against the sacred conventions of her time." We are reminded that Beauvoir "[i]n her chapter on 'The mother' argued for abortion on demand, denied the existence of the maternal instinct and strongly criticised motherhood as a source of women's alienation. The chapters on 'Sexual initiation' and 'The lesbian' incensed a puritan society which had not yet come to terms with the notion of sex education." While, from the point of view of her contemporaries, Beauvoir might well have seemed shocking and unconventional, a more contemporary point of view might fault her on many fronts. It is worth bearing in mind that, although Beauvoir has been criticized by feminist theorists in myriad ways for not being radical enough--and rightly so, in my view--The Second Sex must be credited with opening up the debate that has ensued, even as that debate has evolved beyond the perspective of existentialist ethics that Beauvoir embraced, in ways that have required many of us to challenge some of Beauvoir's fundamental assumptions (Beauvoir 1974, 1949). As the reassessment of Beauvoir's legacy continues, we should not forget that the territory mapped out by The Second Sex for feminist inquiry is formidable at a number of points. If the sheer breadth and scope of the book is impressive, its formative influence can also be felt in the uncanny knack that Beauvoir displays for identifying what have indeed become primary areas of investigation for feminist theory. Within the broad sweep of her inquiry, she includes history, anthropology, literature, psychology, and philosophy, thus reflecting the interdisciplinarity that has become the hallmark of programs in women's studies and gender studies. The areas of investigation that served as her focus paved the way for the themes of feminist inquiry that have been dominant for some time now: the need to avoid essentialist definitions; the need to think through the category of gender in relation to, rather than in abstraction from, other axes of oppression, such as sexual preference, class, race, and ethnic background (even if she could have explored these other axes further than she did); and the importance, at least for some us, of assessing the validity, usefulness, and shortcomings of psychoanalytic theory for feminist inquiry. There is certainly room for a continued interrogation of the adequacy of her theoretical and political judgments in these areas.

My focus here, while not innocent of any of these concerns, will be formulated in terms that are not restricted to the particular terms of the debates indicated above. What interests me is the extreme ambivalence exhibited by responses to Beauvoir's work. Time and again, critics have been drawn to Beauvoir, fascinated and compelled by her, while at very same time often the very same critics have apparently felt the need to put her down in the most hyperbolic terms. Although the terms around which debates over Beauvoir's continuing relevance may have shifted, as feminist theory has developed an increasingly sophisticated vocabulary, inflected around attempts to explore the dynamics between race, ethnicity, ableism, ageism, class, sexuality, and gender, in ways that resist reductively conflating one of these axes to another, what remains constant, I shall suggest, is an apparent need to oscillate between denigration and idolatry when it comes to testifying to Beauvoir's contribution, role, and function.

Feminist theorists have become alert to the need to see race, class, and gender as "constitutive" of one another, resisting the additive model that Elizabeth Spelman (1988), Nancy Tuana (1990), and others have effectively criticized. Even if there is a genuine attempt to work out what...