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Simone De Beauvoir

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One is not born a woman, or a man. One is born a boy or girl, but these are just labels set in place to differentiate between the two sexes biologically. Although, these labels ultimately decide the future role of girl as a woman and boy as a man. A girl is born and then becomes a woman, but she becomes a woman because of the role society plays in creating her into such. Simone de Beauvoir tackles the idea of women “becoming” women in The Second Sex as Judith Butler interprets Beauvoir’s idea of “becoming women” in her essay “Sex and Gender”. “One is not born but rather becomes woman” (283). According to Beauvoir biology is not what makes a woman a woman, instead it is society and social roles and cultural norms, that makes woman a woman. …show more content…

She menstruates for the first time, signaling the start of her climb into motherhood, but society scrutinizes her for this development, forcing her to be embarrassed about her period, making her want to hide the change from those around her. She starts to see herself differently and she is now aware of her body and its changes. There is attention directed towards her, and she is scrutinized of her changes. Her caring for a doll during childhood, has readied her for this new position she has been given. She is shown what she is going to become, a mother, wife, domestic duties, this is what is expected of her. Society is constantly reminding her of her place as a woman, creating barriers for her to see herself as anything otherwise and discouraging her from activities that boys and men might …show more content…

While Beauvoir differentiates women and femininity, Butler adopts the idea of sex and gender. Butler agrees with Beauvoir’s idea of becoming a woman as “a purposive and appropriative set of acts, the acquisition of a skill...” (36), and to “be a woman is to become a woman... an active process of appropriating, interpreting and reinterpreting received cultural possibilities” (36). Butler argues that these appropriations form an identity to a specific gender. In her essay Performative Acts and Gender Constitution she explains this identity “tenuously constituted in time - an identiy, instituted though a stylized repetition of acts” (1). These acts are once again created by society, house duties, child rearing etc. and thus form a societally formed view of gender. Butler claims that is is our genders we become and not our

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She has just turned fifteen, but in her culture she is now a woman. She must put away her childish things and except that she will contribute to the family as an adult. In her mind she is still a child who plays with dolls and has little and now she must accept the changes

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During this period, many women authors came about. Therefore we see many works that include the struggles of gender roles in society. According to Stereotypes and Gender Roles, “Gender roles refer to the role or behaviors learned by a person as appropriate to their gender and are determined by the dominant cultural norms”(Worthy et al.). At this time women took on the expectation of early marriage and motherhood while men took on the expectation of working and providing for the family.

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Dorothy Roberts ' Killing the Black Body confronts racial injustice in America by tackling the historical and ever-present assault on Black women 's procreative freedom and reproductive autonomy. It emphasizes the significance of including Black women 's experience with issues such as perceived promiscuity and eugenics, and the struggle to control their own bodies in the study of the birth control and reproductive liberty movement. Roberts centralizes her arguments on four central themes, which include how "Regulating Black women 's reproductive decisions has been a central aspect of racial oppression in America,… how the control of their reproduction has shaped the meaning of reproductive liberty in America,… that we need to reconsider the meaning of reproductive liberty to take into account its relationship to racial oppression,… and that reproductive freedom is a matter of social justice, not individual choice" (Roberts, 6). Simone de Beauvoir wrote in her feminist philosophy, The Second Sex, that "It was as a Mother that woman was fearsome: it is in maternity that she must be transfigured and enslaved". She appropriately described how in Motherhood, a woman 's identity can be devalued.

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Though O'Brien's use of juxtaposition and shifts in point of view, he is able to not only show the “crazy powers of war”, but also conveys how war stories aren't true unless they are unbelievable. O’Brien talks about how believable war stories are made up as well as how “a true war story is never moral [and]... if [it]... seems moral, do not believe it” (O’Brien 65). The Vietnam war was a dark and horrific place for a lot of people, and O’Brien helps share those emotions through his “non-moral stories”. In one of the stories O’Brien describes a story where they are in middle of the jungle they heard “chamber music “ and “all these different voices…[then a] cocktail party” (O’Brien 71).

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Judith Butler’s Gender Troubles emphasizes gender as the constant repetition of non-existent ideals to uphold a masculine-dominant culture. Likewise, “Body Politics” highlights this belief within the overtly feminine qualities of city women. As a whole, the poem contrasts idealized feminine “city women” with a “real woman” who possesses both feminine and masculine qualities. The mother figure challenges both the gender binary and the patriarchal order by rejecting the feminine gender norms of the society. This feminist reading of the poem makes many valuable and probable claims, however the feminist approach contains some weaknesses.

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Simone de Beauvoir was not only a philosopher but a women’s rights activist, journalist, and academic that lived from 1908- 1986. She was born in Paris, France and was raised catholic to later become a nun. She later thought of herself as an atheist at 14 years old due to the curiosity of faith. When she turned 18 she began studying philosophy at the prestigious Sorbonne. De Beauvoir quotes in her second book “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.”

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Summary of Evidence: Simone de Beauvoir was born in Paris in 1908 to Georges de Beauvoir and Francoise Brasseur.1 Her father was born and raised in a rich family with that drew him to the extreme right on the political scale.1 He was a strong atheist, and pushed his proclivities on Beauvoir and her sister.1 Her mother on the other hand was a devout Catholic, and that along with her meek and submissive personality, something that manifests itself in the fact that she grew up in a time before first wave feminism, really polarized her and Beauvoir. Her father fed her intellectual side, providing her with many works of literature and encouraging her to read and write from an early age. Beauvoir was a deeply religious child as a result of her education and her mother 's training; however, at the age of 14 she had a crisis of faith and decided that there was definitely no God.1 This followed the end of WW

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In today’s society, our bodies describe essential pieces of our identity. This social construct surfaced because of the many speculations people make that are connected with parts of our appearance i.e. genitalia, hair &skin color, and clothing we wear. Betsy Lucal uses her biography to examine the social construction of gender, she both illustrates and expands abstract work in this area.

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Gender Norms of Society In the both essays, Ariel Levy’s Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture, and Jayme Poisson’s “Parents Keep Child’s Gender Secret”, the authors have a common theme that centralizes the argument of their work. The pinnacle of their writing consist of an idea known as identity. This idea is spread across their works when they both talk about gender norms and how they should be or are being broken in current times. Both authors seem to stand for idea of a genderless society whether figuratively through Levy’s works or literally through Poisson’s essay.

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Endeavoring to explain how this categorization has occurred, Simone de Beauvoir elucidates an evident duality in society: man represents

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Women of the Renaissance were looked at in mediocre ways to men Women of all ages were negated of political rights and were pondered strictly subjective to their husbands and must obey them under all measures. Women of today are more objective then they were in the past and they plea more from their lives and decide the way in which they want to live their life. The role of women has justifiably changed over issues that took place within the time of the Renaissance and till the 21st century. In this research paper I will argue that the powers and roles of women have changed because of the hundreds of protests that took place in order for women to get a political vote, the need for women in a workplace during the Second World War due to their

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“Doing Gender” by West and Zimmerman is similar to Butler’s “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution.” However, West and Zimmerman build upon the ideas that Butler puts forth. Butler focuses on gender as performance and how gender is made up by specific actions. While West and Zimmerman take the concept of performance and constitution and applies it to a new concept, the sex category and how sex categories and gender are intertwined in society. Sex categories and gender, according to West and Zimmerman, are different and interconnected.

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Thus, in doing gender, one does not move beyond this context, but instead gender identity is “performatively constituted by the very “expressions” that are said to be its result” (55). Gender, for Butler, is “the repeated stylization of the body, a set of repeated acts within a highly rigid regulatory frame,” it is something fluid that congeals over time “to produce the appearance of substance, of a natural sort of being” (63). In this sense, one can never become woman because there is no ontological ‘woman’; it is a “substantive appearance” (64). Butler uses the example of drag to illustrate how it disrupts the “very distinctions between the natural and the artificial, depth and surface, inner and outer through which discourse about genders almost always operates” (27). Drag is not an imitation of true gender, but an act that exposes foundational categories that create the notion of gender as an effect of a “specific formation of power” (27).

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The most prominent point of The Second Sex is to illustrate how women are segregated from society by men, something which happens a lot in Heart of Darkness. De Beauvoir explains to the audience that men and women often do not understand one other and because men hold a higher social status in a patriarchal society, they have made women the ‘Other’ group in society. This is made evident by De Beauvoir’s following quote: “To pose Woman is to pose the absolute Other, without reciprocity, denying against all experience that she is a subject, a fellow human being.” (De Beauvoir 1266). As a consequence of not understanding women, De Beauvoir explains, men use this false sense of mystery as an excuse not to understand women or their problems.

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This novel is also autobiographical. Throughout history, women have been locked in a struggle to free themselves from the borderline that separates and differentiate themselves from men. In many circles, it is agreed that the battleground for this struggle and fight exists in literature. In a

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