Woman As The Other: Feminist Praxis Of Simone De Beauvoir

This thesis explores the feminist praxis of Simone de Beauvoir's groundbreaking work with a particular focus on the notion of Woman as the Other. It first locates Simone de Beauvoir's praxis in the history of feminism by drawing a brief line of the three waves of feminist development and emphasizing the wide influences of the seminal idea of substituting the socially constructed gender for the biological sex from the epochal work The Second Sex on the second and even the third wave feminists. It then traces the idea of the Other to Hegel's phenomenological study of the master-slave relationship, since the abstract generalization of the relationship between self and other is concretized and outlined by Hegel in his formulation of the philosophically influential master-slave dialectic. It then analyzes Beauvoir's appropriation of Hegel's dialectic in explaining the origin of women's oppression and inequality with her assertion that the human subject can only assert himself by meeting an Other who"limits and denies him". As nature is not enough in the process of recognition, only women can provide the assertion of men's consciousness and fulfill men's hope to escape the harsh human condition. She regards women as absolute Other who do not need reciprocity and meanwhile stresses the importance for women to enter the master-slave dialectic to achieve liberation, although it is not easy and against social convention. She acknowledges women as socially constructed and resists the historical materialistic view as basis for women's struggle for equality. It then proceeds to discuss Beauvoir's notion of Woman as the absolute Other from the biological, historical and mythical perspectives in the first volume of The Second Sex. Biological facts cannot establish women a fixed destiny and fail to explain women's situation of being oppressed. The position of women as object is historically created, culturally constructed and socially maintained. The situation of women in society can also be traced according to different ideologies that have influenced women's self-consciousness. The paper goes on to discuss how Beauvoir, in the second volume of the book, explores life experiences to elaborate how little girls are brought up to become women, objects and the Other and the opposing view that Beauvoir holds towards a Freudian explanation for sexual difference. It finally dwells on what Beauvoir tried to achieve in The Second Sex, the struggle for self and the human dignity in regard to the relationship between the male and the female. On the whole, the thesis argues that The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir is a wide-ranging critique of the cultural identification of woman as merely the negative object, or the Other to men as dominating Subject who is assumed to represent humanity in general. In the end, the paper states the foundational impact of The Second Sex, especially the seminal notion of women as the Other on modern feminist theory and gender studies and restates its historical value and significance.