Gender as Lived Time: Reading The Second Sex for a Feminist Phenomenology of Temporality

Hypatia 33 (1):111-127 (2018)
  Copy   BIBTEX

Abstract

This article suggests that Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex offers an important contribution to a feminist phenomenology of temporality. In contrast to readings of The Second Sex that focus on the notion of “becoming” as the main claim about the relation between “woman” and time, this article suggests that Beauvoir's discussion of temporality in volume II of The Second Sex shows that Beauvoir understands the temporality of waiting, or a passive present, to be an underlying structure of women's existence and subordination. Accordingly, I argue that Beauvoir does not see “woman” as a mere becoming, as that which unfolds in time, but instead understands becoming a woman to be realized as lived time. As such, Beauvoir's account shows that gender and temporality are deeply entangled, and thus she challenges the classic phenomenological account of temporality as a general, given structure of human existence. More specifically, I argue that her account shows how a particular experience of time is an underlying structure of sexual objectification, a claim that expands on the feminist phenomenological claim that a particular relation to space becomes a way in which women take up and negotiate their own subordination and objectification.

Links

PhilArchive



    Upload a copy of this work     Papers currently archived: 90,593

External links

Setup an account with your affiliations in order to access resources via your University's proxy server

Through your library

Similar books and articles

The time of the self and the time of the other.Charles Bambach - 2011 - History and Theory 50 (2):254-269.
The Temporal Dimension of Addiction.Ryan Kemp - 2009 - Journal of Phenomenological Psychology 40 (1):1-18.
Gender and Anonymous temporality.Silvia Stoller - 2011 - In Christina Schües, Dorothea Olkowski & Helen Fielding (eds.), Time in Feminist Phenomenology. Indiana University Press. pp. 79.
Time and temporality: A buddhist approach.Kenneth K. Inada - 1974 - Philosophy East and West 24 (2):171-179.

Analytics

Added to PP
2017-11-18

Downloads
61 (#237,812)

6 months
6 (#202,901)

Historical graph of downloads
How can I increase my downloads?

Author's Profile

Megan Burke
Sonoma State University

Citations of this work

On becoming a hag: gender, ageing and abjection.Susan Pickard - 2020 - Feminist Theory 21 (2):157-173.

Add more citations

References found in this work

Phenomenology of Perception.Aron Gurwitsch, M. Merleau-Ponty & Colin Smith - 1964 - Philosophical Review 73 (3):417.
Being and Time.Ronald W. Hepburn - 1964 - Philosophical Quarterly 14 (56):276.
Phenomenology of Perception.Mary Warnock - 1964 - Philosophical Quarterly 14 (57):372-375.

View all 17 references / Add more references