Beauvoir holds that sexual difference gains meaning only within the social realm

Evidence

It is crucial for her to distinguish between the biological body and the social body. While it is impossible to deny that there are sexual diff erences among human beings, she argues, these diff erences take on meaning only in the social realm. Biologically, they determine the human being in that it makes the individual a sexed being, but in themselves, these sexual categories do not carry any meaning. In her Ethics of Ambiguity, Beauvoir said as much when she claimed that “the body itself is not a brute fact. It expresses our relationship to the world, and that is why it is an object of sympathy or repulsion. And on the other hand, it determines no behavior” (EA, 41). — Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb (eds.), Beauvoir and Sartre, 109

Categorization

• DEFINE: Clarifies Beauvoir’s distinction between the biological body and the social/meaning-bearing body.
• XREF: Foreshadows the nature/culture distinction that later structures second-wave feminist theory on gender vs. sex. — connects to: Beauvoir argued womanhood is socially constructed, not innate — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 669; Beauvoir argued women become Other through history, not by nature — Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb (eds.), Beauvoir and Sartre: The Riddle of…, 265

Broader Connections

• Beauvoir argued women become Other through history, not by nature #expands (0.88) — Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb (eds.), Beauvoir and Sartre, 265