Simone De Beauvoir's Relation To Gender And Sexity
IN RELATION TO GENDER AND SEXUALITY
Just as language is not what one is born with, gender purely unnatural; it is an aspect of one’s identity which is slowly attained.
“One is not born a woman, but rather, becomes a woman” (Simone de Beauvoir, 1984, p.160)
Beauvoir suggested that the difference between sex and gender is a long-lasting feminist effort to discredit the notion that anatomy is destiny. Simply put, sex stems from nature. It is the physically obvious difference of the female body whereas gender stems from culture. Gender is the cultural meaning a sexed body assumes. It is not something fixed by nature.
“All gender is, by definition, unnatural” (Simone de Beauvoir, 1984, p.160)
However in my understanding what Beauvoir means by this is that the roles we associate with women are not directly given to them during birth, but instead are socially constructed. Furthermore, the construction of gender refers to how cultures take the framework set up by biology (sex) and adds meaning to it. Judith Butler on the other hand suggested that both are socially constructed.
If the immutable character of sex is contested, perhaps this construct called ‘sex’ is as culturally constructed as gender; indeed, perhaps it was always already gender, with the consequence that the distinction between sex and gender turns out to be no distinction at all. (Butler, 1999)
Gender is performatively constructed in culture. (Gender and Sexuality, p.161) It is not fixed. It is socially
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