Toward a Phenomenology of Sexual Difference: Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Beauvoir

Simone de Beauvoir’s Le Deuxieme Sexe has been studied extensively since its appearance in 1949. Through the years, certain passages have come to be recognized as central; other as unimportant to understanding Beauvoir’s argument. In Toward a Phenomenology of Sexual Difference , Sara Heinamaa rediscovers those neglected passages in her quest to follow Beauvoir’s line of thinking. Heinamaa, like some other recent philosophers, finds that Le Deuxieme Sexe is a philosophical inquiry, not the empirical study that it is commonly thought to be. In making this argument, others have seen Beauvoir’s masterpiece as a criticism not only of Sartrean phenomenology, but of the phenomenological movement as a whole. Heinamaa thinks differently. She finds that Beauvoir’s starting points are in the Husserlian idea of the living body that she found developed in Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenologie de la perception . So when Beauvoir wrote Le Deuxieme Sexe , she was writing not as Sartre’s pupil, but as a scholar in the tradition of Husserl and Merleau-Ponty.