Toward a Phenomenology of Sexual Difference

Simone de Beauvoir's Le Deuxieme Sexe has been studied extensively since its appearance in 1949. Through the years, certain passages have taken on prestige; others are seen as unimportant to understanding Beauvoir's argument. In Toward a Phenomenology of Sexual Difference, Sara Heinamaa rediscovers those neglected passages in her quest to follow Beauvoir's line of thinking. Heinamaa, like some other recent philosophers, finds that Le Duexieme Sexe is a philosophical inquiry, not the empirical study it is commonly thought to be. Others who view Beauvoir's masterpiece as a work of philosophy argue it is a criticism not only of Sartrean phenomenology, but of phenomenology as a whole. Heinamaa thinks differently. She finds that Beauvoir's starting point is the Husserlian idea of the living body that she found developed in Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenologie de la perception. So when Beavoir wrote Le Duexieme Sexe, she was writing not as Sartre's pupil, but as a scholar in the tradition of Husserl and Merleau-Ponty.