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She argued that gender is not what you are but what you do, and that doing it differently is where freedom begins.
She asked what it means to be a woman: and showed that the answer was not biology but history, not nature but construction.
Connection
Simone de Beauvoir radicalized the insight Judith Butler — Butler took de Beauvoir's claim that 'one is not born but becomes a woman' further than de Beauvoir intended: not just gender roles but the categories of sex themselves are culturally constituted and performatively maintained.
Ideas
Words
“Gender is not something that one is, it is something one does, an act in the most theatrical sense.”
“Precarity is a shared condition, and politics is what we do in response to it.”
“One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.”
“To will oneself free is also to will others free.”
Key Moments
1990
Gender Trouble published
1929
Meets Sartre at the agrégation
1949
The Second Sex published
Works
Gender Trouble
The Second Sex