Subjects and Constructs

By and large, society and its institutions teach us that “male” and “female” are essential, intrinsic categories that are firmly rooted in biology. The by-products of these categories, “masculinity” and “femininity,” each possess a set of specific, fixed traits that are also said to be inherent. However, as scientific and social theories advance, it becomes clear that the “male/female” and “masculine/feminine” dichotomies are not natural or biological; rather, they are politicized constructs that originate from the earliest annals of history. When Simone de Beauvoir states that “One is not born, but rather, becomes a woman,” she refers to the idea that women are socialized and created with the influence of men, who wish to establish themselves as the Self by permanently relegating women to the position of the Other. Through the writings of Simone de Beauvoir, Judith Butler, Rosi Braidotti, Bell Hooks, and the Milan Women’s Bookstore Collective, I hope to more thoroughly explore the process of becoming a woman, while also examining the Enlightenment idea of the individual subject as a crucial concern of feminist politics.

In her “Introduction” to The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir sets up the “process of becoming” as a cycle where the produced, artificially constructed results (“woman”) are then heralded as natural and intrinsic by creators that have their own interests on the line – that is, men that want to maintain their own positions of superiority and power. She quotes George Bernard Shaw, who writes, “The American white relegates the black to the rank of shoeshine boy; and he concludes from this that the black is good for nothing but shining shoes” (Beauvoir xxx). This is an apt parallel to the situation of American women, who are subjugated and socialized to be inferior by society, and then are somehow implicated with the blame. From birth, women are told that they are physically weak and bad at mathematics – and then, when the statistics show that there are lower percentages of women in football and engineering, men conclude that such a trend is natural, that women are born that way. Such is the dilemma of modern woman. “We are exhorted to be women, remain women, become women” (Beauvoir xix), and when we perform this spectacle, this act, we are heralded as its creator.

Beauvoir also addresses the construction of the One and the Other in relation to establishing a female subjectivity; she argues that without a “female” subjectivity, women cannot hope to cast off their position as the Other. “No group ever sets itself up as the One without at once setting up the Other over against itself” (Beauvoir xxiii), and in this case, men have successfully established themselves as the One for thousands of years, while relegating women to the inferior position of the Other. For other groups, this binary opposition has been overturned through the establishment of subjectivity. The proletariats, the African-Americans, and the Jewish all managed to challenge (and, to some extent, overcome) their roles as the Other through the creation of a group subjectivity that defined the bourgeois, the Whites, and the non-Jewish as the Other. However, women have failed to accomplish this, due largely to the fact that “They have no past, no history, no religion of their own…they live dispersed among the males, attached through residence, housework, economic condition, and social standing to certain men – fathers or husbands – more firmly than they are to other women” (Beauvoir xxv). Indeed, the two sexes are so inextricably interwoven that women cannot even hope of waging a war against men. They are, in essence, condemned to their role. Their only hope, according to Beauvoir, is to generate solidarity and assume the role of the Subject. Only then can they become the One, the default, rather than the marginalized Other.

Judith Butler refutes this idea in Gender Trouble, arguing that a more complex view of the Subject must be taken – a view where the Subject is a product of the very system that feminists wish to emancipate themselves from. Since “juridical systems of power produce the subjects they subsequently come to represent” (Butler 3), the Subject cannot be trusted as a reliable basis for feminist politics. It, too, is tainted by the skewed nature of gender relations. Essentially, Butler believes that we must look outside of the existing system, which was founded on misogyny and oppression, in order to generate any sort of meaningful change. Any changes that are sought within the framework are still unavoidably influenced by that framework. Although the “foundationalist fable constitutive of the juridical structures of classical liberalism… guarantees a presocial ontology of persons who freely consent to be governed, and, thereby, constitute the legitimacy of the social contract” (Butler 3), it is just that – a fable. The Subject was not founded on principles of equality; it was founded on the idea that men are the rational, autonomous Subject to which women are forever the opposite of. Therefore, operating within its confines can detract from true liberation.

Butler also challenges the validity of the Subject as a feminist tool by pointing out that “woman” spans too diverse a region to be accurately represented under one umbrella. Since “Gender is not always constituted coherently or consistently in different historical contexts, and…intersects with racial, class, ethnic, sexual, and regional modalities” (Butler 3), it is sometimes difficult to determine what a woman really is. There are hundreds of different femininities and versions of “what it is to be a woman” that differ from culture to culture and person to person. Therefore, it becomes impossible for feminists to construct a Subject that represents all women without misrepresenting a great many of them. In fact, this idea of a stable category of women tends to push aside the very relevant issue of intersectionality – i.e., the way that gender interacts with race, class, sexuality, etc. It ignores the way that these interactions can influence and change the production of gender, creating a plethora of femininities that are different and, in some cases, in opposition to each other.

This is exemplified in Bell Hooks’ “Postmodern Blackness,” which analyzes the state of postmodern feminism in relation to race. She speaks of a “radical black subjectivity,” which must be formed alongside a feminist subjectivity. The two tend to intersect in a way that is not additive – that is, they are not just slapped together and combined in an accumulative fashion. Rather, they form new experiences and identities that are unique to black women. Hooks’ creative writing is constantly rejected by publishers because “It does not conform to the type of writing