Feminism In Beauvoir's The Second Sex
INTRODUCTION
Suleri maintains in Meatless Days that women are assigned different social roles in the third world. They live by those roles but still they are “others” as they do not belong to places, for they are not only different in their structures but also in their feelings, conduct, emotions and lives. Whereas men live in places women live in bodies and that differentiation is sufficient to mark their “otherness”
“I’ve lived many years as an otherness machine and had more than my fair share of being other” (p.158)
This statement reverberates the feminist theory of Kristeva (1981). She opines that to be named as woman means some kind of isolation .That name “woman “ in itself has that peculiar concept of otherness in it. Woman is “other” she lives no where but in her body. (Kristeva, Women’s Times: 223) In the same essay she maintains and questions the relativity of the term woman as this term is both symbolic and biological (225). While reading this line I asked myself what kind of otherness this possibly can be. The explanation for this I found in Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1953). Beauvoir, too, takes existentialist view on women. In her The Second Sex I found reiteration of the fact that men and women belong to probably the same world but with a difference, whereas men’s world is a self-defined and self-explained
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