Is Femininity Solely Patriarchal? Revealing Some Tensions in The Second Sex
The Second Sex is commonly read as a critique of patriarchal femininity, understood as mystification. Yet Beauvoir’s text contains a more complex and unresolved relationship to femininity than this reading suggests. In this article, I argue that The Second Sex is structured by...
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| Format: | Article ou chapitre numérique |
| Jezik: | Français |
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2026
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| Online pristup: | Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM |
| Sažetak: | The Second Sex is commonly read as a critique of patriarchal femininity, understood as mystification. Yet Beauvoir’s text contains a more complex and unresolved relationship to femininity than this reading suggests. In this article, I argue that The Second Sex is structured by a fundamental ambiguity: while Beauvoir systematically deconstructs femininity as a normative imposition, she also describes certain feminine figures with unmistakable admiration, without ever clarifying whether she admires their femininity or their accession to an authentic humanity achieved despite or beyond feminine constraints. The argument proceeds in three moves. First, I examine the conceptual distinction between femininity (a set of patriarchal norms and myths) and womanhood (the lived situation of being a woman) to show that Beauvoir’s critique targets the former while acknowledging the latter as a productive standpoint. Next, I analyze Beauvoir’s admiring descriptions of literary heroines to reveal the structural ambiguity of her argument: are these figures admirable as feminine women, or do they embody a transcendence of both patriarchal femininity and its masculine counterpart? I argue that Beauvoir glimpses but does not articulate a mode of being irreducible to either pole of the binary. This reveals an underlying philosophical problem in the triangular relationship between femininity, humanity, and neutrality, in which the supposedly neutral ground of humanity covertly aligns with the masculine. Finally, I show how Luce Irigaray identifies precisely this impasse as the symptom of a deeper philosophical limitation and attempts to open a conceptual space in which femininity might be thought as an irreducible, non-subordinate modality of being.
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