Chapter 4 - Conversions of Alterity: Race, Sex, Age

Summary

A troubling characteristic of much contemporary feminist theory is its failure to take seriously the intertwining of sexism with other forms of oppression.… [I]n de Beauvoir's work, we have all the essential elements of a feminist account of “women's lives” that would not conflate “woman” with a small group of women – namely white middle-class heterosexual Christian women in Western countries. Yet Beauvoir ends up producing an account which does just that.

Elizabeth Spelman, Inessential Woman

In Chapter 2, we saw that American race relations and the race theorists with whom Beauvoir was acquainted provided an instigation for some of the more novel aspects of the methodology she would bring to sex and gender relations. While one might therefore have expected that in analyzing sex and gender Beauvoir would not be forgetful of the differentials of race, they are occluded in The Second Sex, notwithstanding the parallels and comparisons explicitly proposed by the author with respect to sex and race subordination. However, I also proposed a reading, in Chapter 1, willing to consider not only Beauvoir's imaginative role in converting a body of theorists in her day, but also, in a productive sense, the possibility of an ongoing resistance of some theorists to her conversions. Such resistance can again be imagined with respect to her treatment of race. Moreover, an auto-resistance implicit in Beauvoir's work can also be suggested through the lens of her late writing, particularly in its treatment of a further form of subordination concerning aging.