Megan Burke

The author argues that the exclusion of the indefinite article in Borde and Malovany-Chevallier’s translation of “the famous sentence” in _The Second Sex_ obscures Beauvoir’s phenomenological account of feminine existence. While it is best to understand the recent translation as an informed, interpretative reading of Beauvoir, this essay suggests that reading the end of the sentence as “becoming a woman” undoes the common Anglo-American reading of Simone de Beauvoir as a social constructionist (for example, in the work of Judith Butler). This undoing is important for the way readers become oriented to Beauvoir’s phenomenological commitments. Thus the inclusion of the “a” gestures to a phenomenological sensibility. There is a sphere within the lived experience of femininity that the exclusion cannot capture.

This article accounts for a particular kind of politicised anonymity, namely ‘disobedient anonymity’, that operates as a liberatory response to the longue durée of gender violence. We examine the street performance Un violador en tu camino created by the Chilean feminist theatre collective LASTESIS, to show how disobedient anonymity is an embodied and collective disruption of colonial subjectification and state-sanctioned gender violence. Building on the insights of the Argentinian decolonial feminist scholar Rita Segato's analysis of high-intensity patriarchy as well as discussions of perverse anonymity in critical phenomenology, we examine how disobedient anonymity operates in Un violador as an embodied practice that makes possible a decolonising, feminist liberatory public. We argue that through the deployment of disobedient anonymity, Un violador re-territorialises and re-temporalises colonial fields of sens. In doing so, it institutes a new form of political subjectivity that upends colonial logics.

This highly engaging analysis of the contemporary global social and political landscape of trans antagonisms draws specific attention to gender-critical mobilizations of Simone de Beauvoir's account of becoming a woman in The Second Sex to advance and justify trans-exclusionary positions. Through a careful examination and application of Beauvoir's philosophical and political commitments, Becoming a Woman compellingly explores the significance of her notion of becoming not only as affirmative of trans women, but also as an ethical demand to affirm trans possibilities. More than a reply to gender-critical readings of Beauvoir, this book develops an original, Beauvoirian ethics of gender affirmation that shows why we ought to challenge trans exclusion and anti-trans movements. -- Provided by publisher.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Anonymous Temporality and Gender:Rereading Merleau-PontyMegan M. BurkeThis Essay Provides a Feminist reading of Merleau-Ponty’s notion of anonymity in order to show that it is a critical resource for a feminist account of gender. For Merleau-Ponty, anonymity is a structure of temporality that is prior to the cogito; it is a time that actualizes the reflective self. It gestures away from ontological commitments rooted in presence and calls attention to how senses inform and actualize one’s reflective experience, which illuminates how it is that certain habits become sedimented or deeply rooted into the structure of one’s lived experience. As such, anonymity provides a useful framework for understanding how and in what ways gender normativity is taken up and resisted in experience. Yet feminist readings of Merleau-Ponty and anonymity are divided. On the one hand, there is a strong criticism of his work in general and anonymity in particular and, on the other hand, there is an effort to recuperate aspects of his project, including anonymity. Four examples can help frame this disparate feminist reception of his work:1. Merleau-Ponty neglects sexual difference. For example, Elizabeth Grosz suggests, “Merleau-Ponty leaves out—indeed, is unable to address—the questions of sexual difference, the question of what kind of human body he is discussing, what kind of perceptual functions, and what kind of sexual desire result from the sexual morphology and particularity of the subject” (Grosz 1994, 10). [End Page 138]2. Anonymity neglects sexual difference. Shannon Sullivan is representative of this point, claiming, “Merleau-Ponty’s notion of the anonymous or impersonal body … leads one to overlook” difference; “Merleau-Ponty fails to realize” difference; “He is wrong” (Sullivan 2001, 71).3. Anonymity illuminates sexual difference. For Silvia Stoller “[W]ith the help of Merleau-Ponty … sexual difference presupposes an anonymous sexuality which underlies gender identifications,” making anonymity important to a phenomenological account of sexual difference (Stoller 2013).4. Merleau-Ponty’s account of embodied subjectivity provides insight into the lived experience of femininity. Feminist analyses of female body comportment, such as those of Iris Marion Young and Sandra Bartky, suggest that gender is a process of sedimentation (Young 1990; Bartky 1990). More specifically, they suggest gender becomes a lived experience through the repetition of particular behaviors and actions such that they become a deeply habituated part of one’s being in the world.While the feminist criticisms of Merleau-Ponty are important insofar as they caution against the acceptance of universal claims about existence, they also overlook anonymity’s relationship to time. Given that Merleau-Ponty’s characterization of anonymity is temporal through and through, this oversight is problematic. Without an account of anonymity as a kind of temporality, we miss the value of anonymity and the further insight that can be drawn from it in relation to gender. In what follows, then, I propose a solution to the disparate reception of his work. I suggest that reading anonymity as a structure of temporality illuminates how gender is taken up in lived experience. And, I suggest that anonymity can provide a strong account of gender normativity when one understands the parallels between sedimentation and anonymity with respect to temporality. By showing the strong connection between sedimentation and anonymous temporality, I suggest that it is ontologically and politically helpful to understand gender as a lived time.In the first section of this paper, I will address the main criticisms of anonymity provided by Shannon Sullivan and Luce Irigaray, while also paying attention to those from Elizabeth Grosz, Judith Butler, and Beata Stawarska. For Sullivan, Grosz, and Butler, Merleau-Ponty’s anonymous body is a neutral body, a body that fails to account for gender differences. Irigaray and Stawarska suggest that anonymity is the mark of patriarchy, making ethical and ontological solipsism fundamental to Merleau-Ponty’s work. In each of these cases, anonymity provides nothing useful for and is, in fact, a detriment to feminist projects.In the second section of this paper, I turn to Stoller’s positive reading of anonymity. For Stoller, anonymity is a political and ethical resource that challenges gender norms because it can allow for transformation in...

ABSTRACT This article offers an account of cis sense in order to draw attention to the relation between meaning-making and cisnormativity. By drawing on Merleau-Ponty’s notion of institution and phenomenological considerations of habit, it is argued that cis sense is a mode of perception that institutes and sediments an individual and social habit of the third-person conferral of gender that occludes gender variance and creates the social conditions necessary for transphobia. This consideration of cis sense challenges the mainstream conception of cis as an identity category, highlighting instead that it is a habitual disposition, and gestures to the significance of trans sense as an alternative institution of gendered meaning.

This paper considers Linda Martín Alcoff’s discussion of sexual agency and sexual violation in Rape and Resistance. It is argued that Alcoff’s move away from ‘sexual violence’ to ‘sexual violation’ to address the harms of rape and rape culture is significant with regard to conceiving of a feminist sexual ethic more generally and to understanding the harm of rape and sexual assault in particular. More specifically, this paper focuses on Alcoff’s norm of self-making and considers the way it can interrupt racialized heterosexist sex and sexuality and normative feminine subjectivity vis-à-vis temporality.

This article considers Beauvoir’s gesture towards fraternité at the end of The Second Sex (1949) by focusing on her fleeting characterisation of this future as ‘an androgynous world’. Generally, either Beauvoir’s call for fraternité is dismissed as an erasure of sexual difference and is thus seen to be politically bankrupt, or fraternité is understood to realise sexual difference. This latter reading suggests that androgyny plays no role in Beauvoir’s solution to women’s oppression, while the other view often sees it as one effect of fraternité. This article takes a different position by arguing that Beauvoir affirms sexual difference and commits to an androgynous future. The article argues that androgyny is an affective mood that is constitutive of an openness in the field of possibility for living sexual difference. Consequently, androgyny plays not only a central role in fraternité, but also gestures to a future beyond dimorphic sexual difference.

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.