WMST 2000 Lecture Notes - Lecture 1: Simone De Beauvoir, The Second Sex, Immanence
12 Apr 2016
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Week 1: women representation: image culture and myths of femininity: a history. Indoctrinated learning to look at things without questioning it. Wrote the second sex her philosophy is debatable, however, her feminist theory never has been questioned. The second sex is a critique of patriarchy. Phenomenology: the world is understood as a combo of natural world and human relationships. In the second sex, she examines the interaction between the gendered self and the gendered world. Looks at how social ideas of femininity shape women"s experiences of self. Patriarchal ideology exploits sexual difference to create systems of inequality. De beauvoir rejects the view that sees sexual activity sexual differentiation as axiomatic (self-evident); as something necessary to our humanness. We could imagine a society that reproduces itself using parthenogenesis or one that is composed of intersex people. Beauvoir: one is not born but becomes a woman society establishes a sense of what our identity should be (our gender).
