Beauvoir and the Women’s Situation: Between Subjectivity And Facticity

Abstract

In this article, we will show that the notion of situation - understood as a tension between subjectivity and facticity - allows Beauvoir to get out from conceptualism and its essentialization of what is historical, and at the same time to get out of nominalism, which refuses the notion of gender, adopting abstract and universal expressions. Against these two aspects, the French philosopher points out the need to think about the gender issue by concrete situations of the formation of children and young people, in order to find the difficulties that women encounter in affirming themselves as "we", but, as well, to seek there the possibilities of struggle and modification of the historical conditions, without to negate the role of these subjectivities in the world.

Based mainly on the Introduction of the First Volume and the last part of the Second Volume of the book The second sex, we will try to understand that the affirmation that "there are women", present in the text, does not result from a thought that essentialises the situations, but on the contrary, results from an adoption of existentialist ethics, which presupposes as a starting point the description of human concreteness.