Abstract

This paper begins with a brief survey of recent attempts to identify the nature of Beauvoir’s contested relation to philosophy. It then discusses the transition from her early, more conventionally philosophical essays to her much more unconventional great work The Second Sex. It argues that the philosophical innovations of The Second Sex were dependent on Beauvoir’s relations to other disciplines and intellectual fields, such that Beauvoir’s philosophical originality has interdisciplinary conditions of possibility. The paper then argues that The Second Sex, like feminist and gender theory more generally, has more in common with the twentieth-century tradition of critical theory than with any ‘disciplinary’ conception of philosophy. The paper concludes that, as the meeting point of critical theory and feminism, The Second Sex can best be seen as an example of ‘philosophical transdisciplinarity’, paving the way for the late-twentieth and twenty-first traditions of gender theory.