TransBeauvoir or Beauvoir in Transit: A Note
Kyoo Lee
« On ne naît pas femme: on le devient»: “One is not born but becomes (a) woman,” thus spake Simone de Beauvoir in Le deuxième sexe (1949), The Second Sex (1953, 2009).
Given that this is not just about the difference between “biological” sex and “sociological” gender .... Assuming most of us are on board with that ... indeed, oddly enough, the meaning of this classical slogan of (French) feminism remains rather complex, even more so today, when natal sex is no longer final; also, a rigorously translingual analysis of the line reveals that its propositional potential is yet to be unleashed. What interests me is the enduring, philosophical genius of Beauvoirean gender thinking and its contemporary manifestations.
“One is not born but becomes woman (On ne naît pas femme: on le devient)” ... as in “the free woman just being born (La femme libre [...] seulement en train de naître)”? Recalling Simone de Beauvoir folding her into herself this way in The Second Sex, with one (on) that remains ambiguous, singularly double or doubly singular, I find myself re-circling that mantra, this motto, the matter that cannot be one or even undone.
So, to begin with: which one? And how, in what language(s), would one read that line today in the age of gender variance and trans-revolution? Why The Second Sex again?
By second languaging or translingualizing this proto-feminist line without slighting the archival site-specificity and linguistic indigeneity (so-called ‘nativity’) of each and every strand of coded thought, we can start to see its trans-discursive pressure points recalibrated and its genre-specific perspicuity philopoetically recontemporized. So in my current work on Beauvoir, I stage such interpretative and literal translations of this (trans-)generative “line” while paying intersectional attention to the ordinal, self-distancing complexity of its ‘second line’ already in there.
Showcased in that vein is the translingual simplexity of the Beauvoirean lifeline, its conceptual genius and generic complexity that appears second to none, whether in French, English (two different versions, the first one appearing in 1953 with “a” woman and the other/second one in 2009 without the indefinite article), or German or Korean or Chinese ... for instance, where, from the start, the question of how to translate “one” (on) discloses differential subjectivities and tonal positionalities, gendered (French/English/German issues) or grammatical (Korean/Chinese issues); neutral (or “Man,” the proto-android Germanic “one”) or absent (there is no such a “on/one” per se in the Korean or Chinese grammar, neutral or gendered, unless one uses the word, “a person,” there, which would be very awkward and potentially misleading ... so just a “woman” has to be placed in the subject position as in “A woman is not born but made,” which is how the standard Korean translation of the line is done, which is already a linear interpretation.)
In short, my question concerns TransBeauvoir or Beauvoir in Transit: how does Beauvoir get not only transgendered or –nationalized but translingualized, -cultured, -historicized, etc?
Kyoo Lee
John Jay College, City University of New York
Note: This presentation was read by the moderator, as the author was unable to attend due to illness. For more on the topic, see Kyoo Lee, “Second Languaging The Second Sex, Its Conceptual Genius: A Translingual Contemporization of « On ne naît pas femme: on le devient»” in Blackwell’s Companion to Simone de Beauvoir, edited by Laura Hengehold and Nancy Bauer. Wiley Blackwell, 2017.