Feminist Studies Research Guide

Sonia, Kruks. “Simone De Beauvoir: Engaging Discrepant Materialisms.” New Materialisms : Ontology, Agency, and Politics, Duke University Press, 2010, pp. 258–280.

The larger theoretical trend that Kruks draws our attention to is Simone de Beauvoir working in and across both phenomenology and a Marxist-inflected culturally oriented structuralist materialism. While Beauvoir is often read as phenomenology, she clearly has “early” Marxist influences. Beauvoir is a Marxist feminist. This can be seen in her work, one example being her commentary ‘‘One could not state it better, ’after quoting Marx (260). Kruks states that Beauvoir’s “self-proclaimed affinity with Marx should make us pause” because “it should remind us that volume 1 of The Second Sex (‘‘Facts and Myths’’) focuses on the ‘‘production’’ of woman as man’s inferiorized other” (260). The reason why Kruks claim that Beauvoir’s work has both phenomenology and Marxist influences is troubling is because the beginning of phenomenology is the reassertion of subjectivity while the beginning of Marxism is the attack upon subjectivity. However, Marxism and phenomenology are not completely opposed, as there are phenomenological themes in the origins of Marxism. For example, the concept of “Reification”, which is the materialization of human activity, is influenced by Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology and reification of consciousness. We have seen the relationship between phenomenology, Marxism and rhetoric. Phenomenology is the study of structures of consciousness as experienced from the first-person point of view. The central structure of an experience is its intentionality, its being directed toward something, as it is an experience of or about some object (phenomenology). The concept phenomenologyand the relationship to rhetoric can be seen through object-oriented ontology (OOO). We saw this in previous works we read, including Vealey and Layne (2018), who leverage Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO) to “seek to reinstate a sense of “thingness” to many objects that litter and make up the world, particularly in a way that is not exclusively tethered to human modes of access, use or meaning” (55). Barad (2008) discusses “thingification”, which is turning relations into “things” and “entities” thereby affecting how we understand our relationship to the world (130). To answer the question, “Would rhetoric benefit from engaging this trend?” consider how Jacqueline Jones Royster and Gesa E. Kirsch (2012) call on feminist rhetorics scholars to be “deliberate about developing and sustaining throughout the analytical process a more conscious and explicit habit of thinking about our work as part of, rather than disconnected from, other rhetorical enterprises around the world” (53). In this manner, feminist rhetorics could greatly benefit from both phenological and Marxist influences.

 

Engaging Discrepant Materialisms

 

Another genre of ‘‘materialist’’ theory, one broadly informed

by poststructuralism, focuses on the production

of ‘‘material’’ bodies, or their ‘‘materialization,’’ through

discourse and discursively constituted performance.

What both of these

genres have in common, however, is that they proceed (to borrow the

terms from Elizabeth Grosz) ‘‘from the outside in’’ rather than ‘‘from the

inside out.’’≥ That is, they emphasize the ways in which subjectivity arises

as the reflex or expression of social practices, or as the e√ect of discourses.

 

Debates about ‘‘biological essentialism’’

versus ‘‘social constructionism,’’ about ‘‘sex’’ versus ‘‘gender,’’ or about

whether to ‘‘displace’’ one of these terms by the other or to ‘‘destabilize’’

both have waxed furious. In this essay I propose, through returning to the

EBSCOhost – work of Simone de Beauvoir, that these discrepant genres of materialist

theorizing may be brought into a more fruitful relationship than their

respective proponents are apt to pursue.

 

Simone de Beauvoir – phenomenology,

 

Beauvoir does not work exclusively in this tradition. Rather,

she works in and across the interstices between phenomenology and a

Marxist-inflected and also a culturally oriented structuralist materialism

 

‘‘Physiological facts,’’ Beauvoir

insists, have significance only within specific social contexts so that, for

example, the relative ‘‘weakness’’ of women’s muscles ‘‘is revealed as such

only in the light of the ends man proposes, the instruments he has available,

and the laws he establishes.’’∞∫ Similarly, Beauvoir argues, menstruation

is an involuntary bodily function (an ‘‘alien vitality’’) to which most

women must attend in one way or another, but the disgust and shame that generally accompany its onset in young girls is integral to their realization

of their subordinate social status (315).

 

For Beauvoir, the particular problem of ‘‘becoming a woman’’ is that

one is always engaged in a project in which one’s potentialities as a free,

agentic human being can never escape the facticities of one’s organic body

and other life-attributes, including a discursive and social regime through

which one is subjected to systematically inferiorized otherness.

 

However, working from a perspective more inflected by Marxism than is

Moi’s, Young argues that we need to think more systematically about the

‘‘structures of constraint’’ that operate independently of the individual

intentions of either men or women (21). Without

 

The Second Sex is not only a

phenomenology of the lived experience of women’s oppression, for Beauvoir

is also concerned with questions about how that oppression is perpetuated

through social structures, institutions, and practices that women

must engage with as the ‘‘givens’’ of their lives. ‘‘Yes,’’ she writes, ‘‘women

on the whole are today inferior to men, that is,

 

In a for-profit economy

those who are no longer economically productive cease to be valued, and a

prior life of alienated labor produces old people who have no existential

resources to enjoy the enforced ‘‘leisure’’ of retirement. Indeed, with

strong echoes of Marx’s notion of the proletariat as a universal class,

Beauvoir ends Old Age by suggesting that the treatment of the aged ‘‘exposes

the failure of our entire civilization.’’ More generous pensions and

so forth—although she demands them—would not be su≈cient to make

old age meaningful for most: ‘‘It is the whole system that is at issue and

our claim cannot be otherwise than radical—change life itself ’’ (543

 

Beauvoir’s self-proclaimed a≈nity with Marx should make us pause.

 

Beauvoir’s self-proclaimed a≈nity with Marx should make us pause.

It should remind us that volume 1 of The Second Sex (‘‘Facts and Myths’’)

focuses on the ‘‘production’’ of woman as man’s inferiorized other. It

explores the social production of woman’s otherness across the history of

human practices and institutions, as well as in more discursive arenas such

as myth and literature.

 

Beauvoir’s attention to Marx also invites a reading of The Second Sex as a precursor to the Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960), the neo-Marxist

magnum opus of Sartre’s later yearsΩ—a reading I develop below.

 

Indeed, this is where she explicitly locates herself in The Second Sex and her project, especially in the second volume, is to present a phenomenology of the ‘‘lived experience’’ through which, as she famously puts it, ‘‘one is not born but becomes a woman.’’ Furthermore, qua existentialist, she is concerned with exploring the constraints on and possibilities for freedom that accompany such a ‘‘becoming.’’

 

In qualitative phenomenological research, lived experience refers to a representation of the experiences and choices of a given person, and the knowledge that they gain from these experiences and choices.

 

 

Phenomenology as a methodological framework has evolved into a process that seeks reality in individuals’ narratives of their lived experiences of phenomena