Rev_II_edits_Feminine_Becomings_Australian_Feminist_Studies_Journal.pdf (278.14 kB)
The girl and Simone de Beauvoir's The second sex: Feminine becomings
journal contribution
posted on 2019-02-07, 15:03 authored by Elspeth MitchellThis article traces the girl in The Second Sex (1949) as a necessary figure for understanding what it means to become woman. I argue that Simone de Beauvoir’s overall significance and philosophical contribution is intimately connected to what she discovered by asking about this moment of feminine becoming. My central contention is that we cannot understand how one ‘becomes’ woman without first/also undertaking the task of understanding the situation of the girl. Drawing on the new translation of The Second Sex by Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier (2010), I offer a close reading of the chapter entitled ‘The Girl’ with attention to embodiment and temporality. In so doing, I seek to expand and refine our understanding of Beauvoir’s philosophical project in The Second Sex; a project which launched a fundamental challenge to the meaning of being and gave rise to the possibility of a feminist philosophy.
History
School
- The Arts, English and Drama
Department
- Arts
Published in
AUSTRALIAN FEMINIST STUDIESVolume
32Issue
93Pages
259 - 275Citation
MITCHELL, E., 2017. The girl and Simone de Beauvoir's The second sex: Feminine becomings. Australian Feminist Studies, 32(93), pp. 259 - 275.Publisher
© Taylor and FrancisVersion
- AM (Accepted Manuscript)
Publisher statement
This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/Acceptance date
2017-06-16Publication date
2017Notes
This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Australian Feminist Studies on 18 Dec 2017, available online: https://doi.org/10.1080/08164649.2017.1407640ISSN
0816-4649eISSN
1465-3303Publisher version
Language
- en