A. Antonopoulos

My premise is that a transmasculine experience of embodiment haunts the subject of The Second Sex. In light of her early philosophical essay on Claude Bernard, Beauvoir's account of sex difference may be read as the biological experience of “error” that foils what biopolitics and early twentieth‐century knowledge in the life sciences wanted to make of her. I argue that from this perspective the crucial discussion of the endocrine system of the human female in the Biology chapter adds a new twist to the medical and scientific discourses for understanding transsexual identification.

With the rise of academic interest in objects of inquiry such as 'space', 'the family', 'woman', and 'the child', the discursive circulation of 'home' has seen an equal boom in the production and reproduction of academic texts. However, while the theoretical autonomy of such related concepts as gender, the family, and the household has been challenged, the 'home' as that space within which gendered subjectivity, the family, and the household unfold, remains a kind of unitary vat, an undifferentiated container of problematics, rather than a problematic category in itself. ;It is, therefore, my aim in this dissertation to engage with 'home' as an object of academic knowledge and inquiry in itself; an object to be directly investigated and placed squarely on the theoretical agenda. ;As a preliminary step in that direction, this work examines how 'home', both as a lived and a constructed space, is the effect of historical and ideological relations of power and gender and looks at how these relations of power and gender are represented, neutralized, contested, and inverted in critical discourses ranging from philosophy and history, to feminism, cultural studies, media studies and postmodernism