Husserl, Beauvoir, and the Problem of the Sexes

Abstract

Abstract The article links Simone de Beauvoir’s phenomenology and Catherine A. MacKinnon’s feminist, Marxist, standpoint epistemology in virtue of their shared recognition that objectivity is sexed and gendered. This connection is supported by Beauvoir’s close alignment with Edmund Husserl, for whom the question of embodied difference was vital for generating an account of intersubjectivity and locating sex in the historical subject. The article concludes that a consideration of both the transcendental and immanence are central to Beauvoir’s feminist phenomenology and feminist politics alike.