Butler I: ``Gendering the Body" (Beauvoir's philosophical contribution)

Idea I. "Feminist account of bodily theory"

The body is important and it isn't important.

Beauvoir provided a theory of "Gender identity and gender acquisition"

``Gender is not passively received...[it is] a peculiar kind of achievement, the culturally mediated relationship of an embodied agency to itself." (255)

The possibility of bad faith: "Just as Sartre's famous waiter is a waiter, so we can be our gender in a similarly false way. Indeed we might well call such a being the bad faith of gender." (256)

"...it is necessary to substitute a vocabulary of action and effort for the reified vocabulary of self-identical nouns." (256)

Idea II.

"In the case of women, cultural norms constrain us to become, to choose, that which is the very opposite of choice. In other words, we are compelled to become the Other, the opposite of the Subject." (256)

"For Beauvoir, it seems, we must understand the gender of woman as that particular modality of choice that is culturally constrained to choose against itself." (257)

Idea III.

"...what if, in existentialist fashion, gender is nothing other than the acts that realize it, so that gendered behavior and desire are the modes through which gender is regularly constituted?...perhaps Beauvoir criticizes the notion of gender as a natural substance in much the same way that Sartre disputed the reality of the substantial self." (259)

Idea IV.

Are we getting rid of normative vocabulary? (by getting rid of a notion of naturalness or natural gender as determined by sex?)

"...it [would be] no longer possible to discriminate between right and wrong genders, right and wrong sexes, or right and wrong directionalities for sexual desire, for there would be no natural model against which to judge any of their myriad expressions." (260)

Idea V.

Butler ends by relating de Beauvoir's recollection of her (Beauvoir's) mother's death. She writes that death is unnatural: ``There is no such thing as a natural death: nothing that happens to a human being is ever natural, since a human presence calls the world into question. [Everyone] must die, but for [every person] [one's] death is an accident and, even if [one] knows it and consents to it, an unjustifiable violation." (qtd pg. 262).

I assume here that Beauvoir means to contrast two different notions of naturalness; she wants to highlight that some sort of "existential-ethical" notion of naturalness, the one she is interested in and the one that is amenable to speaking about self-understanding. This notion of naturalness is not (i) statistical naturalness (for then death would surely be natural), and (ii) not any kind of biological naturalness (for then death is also surely natural.) Since death is an affront to human projects, it may be a moral or existential tragedy all the same.