Simone de Beauvoir
Existentialist feminism · France, 1908–1986
The lens
The Beauvoirian lens reads an event by asking how a group is constituted as the Other—defined, in the formulation from The Second Sex, relative to a norm it is denied the standing to set. Its vocabulary is immanence and transcendence, situation, reciprocity, and the claim that one is not born but rather becomes a woman, gender being made in a situation rather than fixed by nature. This lens asks who is confined to immanence—repetition, maintenance, the tending of others' projects—while another party is granted transcendence, the freedom to undertake projects of their own. It reads the naturalization of such arrangements as mystification, the presentation of a historical situation as destiny. From The Ethics of Ambiguity it insists that freedom is bound up with others' freedom, judging conduct by whether it opens or forecloses possibility for those it affects. It attends to how oppression works partly by inducing the oppressed to internalize their assigned limits. Where other lenses treat social roles as given data, the Beauvoirian lens asks how a situation was made and whose freedom it serves. It notices the alibi of nature, the asymmetry hidden inside claims of complementarity, and the difference between a limit chosen and a limit imposed.
Takes
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