Gender as Lived Time: Reading The Second Sex for a Feminist Phenomenology of Temporality

Abstract

This article suggests that Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex offers an important contribution to a feminist phenomenology of temporality. In contrast to readings of The Second Sex that focus on the notion of "becoming" as the main claim about the relation between "woman" and time, this article suggests that Beauvoir's discussion of temporality in volume II of The Second Sex shows that Beauvoir understands the temporality of waiting, or a passive present, to be an underlying structure of women's existence and subordination. Accordingly, I argue that Beauvoir does not see "woman" as a mere becoming, as that which unfolds in time, but instead understands becoming a woman to be realized as lived time. As such, Beauvoir's account shows that gender and temporality are deeply entangled, and thus she challenges the classic phenomenological account of temporality as a general, given structure of human existence. More specifically, I argue that her account shows how a particular experience of time is an underlying structure of sexual objectification, a claim that expands on the feminist phenomenological claim that a particular relation to space becomes a way in which women take up and negotiate their own subordination and objectification.In this essay, I show that Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex offers a feminist phenomenology of temporality. I argue that by paying attention to temporality as a central theme in Beauvoir's descriptive account of becoming a woman, we see that gender and temporality are co-constitutive phenomena.

Waiting like a girl? The temporal constitution of femininity as a factor in gender inequality

“…This “rupture” from the more androgynous child's state of unitary consciousness constructs the category “woman” as a temporal being located in a condition of immanence, characterized by a passive, constrained temporal condition which is that of “waiting.” De Beauvoir meant, by the term “immanent,” and drawing on Hegel, a subjectivity embedded in the cyclic rhythms of care and domesticity, as compared with the masculine transcendent, operating in the world of creativity and freedom (Deutscher, ). De Beauvoir sees this dyad, or dialectic, as a general structure of human existence but while both men and women can experience both aspects there is a “significant difference in how they live these temporalities” (Burke, , p. 117).…”

“…Indeed, for women this involves an inhibition on agency seen as a projection towards the future. Burke, explicating de Beauvoir, notes: “waiting is temporal hiatus between the past and future… a distinct experience of the present as passive” (, p. 117), that is, without strong intentional links to past or future. It is, moreover, an experience in which woman is annexed “into the universe of men, the world that is for men… insofar as they come to create and solidify a woman's situation, as a relative existence” (Burke, , p. 118; original emphasis).…”

“…Burke, explicating de Beauvoir, notes: “waiting is temporal hiatus between the past and future… a distinct experience of the present as passive” (, p. 117), that is, without strong intentional links to past or future. It is, moreover, an experience in which woman is annexed “into the universe of men, the world that is for men… insofar as they come to create and solidify a woman's situation, as a relative existence” (Burke, , p. 118; original emphasis). Carmen Leccardi and Marita Rampazi describe this mode of gendered subjectivity as “expectation,” which is a “gendered representation of the future” (Leccardi & Rampazi, , p. 369) involving a hopeful, but essentially powerless, anticipation of personal events—romance, marriage, children—and, by contrast with planning, cannot be conjured into being through will and effort but rather, the antithesis of choice, relies on contingency, fate, and receptivity to the agentic choices of others.…”

“…While de Beauvoir was writing from the point of view of a middle‐class white European, and while clearly some women will have greater resources at hand to resist this subordination, or may, on the contrary, acquiesce in it, deriving a sense of power and value from it, de Beauvoir's point is that this temporal constitution, and thereby subjugation, applies to (all) women, in relation to men, in so far as women are disadvantaged in the terms of a hierarchical gender regime. Burke notes: “what is key for Beauvoir is that temporality is a central way the existential, political, and material differences between women and men are lived” (, p. 120) and further notes that: “The ways a woman is positioned in time through her relation to men… underscores that being anchored ‘in time’ is the temporal dimension of objectification and subordination” (, pp. 121–122).…”

“…In The Second Sex () de Beauvoir demonstrates how gender is a temporal structure, how femininity is constructed in such a way that temporality is a major feature of inequality in the gender regime and how sexual objectification involves and constitutes a particular and gendered experience of time (Burke, ). What is unique about de Beauvoir's contribution to gender performance can be highlighted by comparing it to Judith Butler's approach (Burke, ).…”