Varoluşçu Özgürlük Bağlamında Kadın: Simone de Beauvoir ve İkinci Cinsiyet

Abstract

Simone de Beauvoir, the writer of The Second Sex, as an activist, philosopher and feminist who profoundly influenced cultural and literary studies in the twentieth century, is a crucial committed and intellectual writer. The Second Sex, written during the Second World War in France, forced the intellectuals, not only in France but also those from all over the world, to reconsider the question of woman in details. In “The Second Sex”, Beauvoir examines the positioning of woman as the “other” against the man who is the “absolute “. In her oeuvre, she not only scrutinises in detail the cultural, social and historical layers of this positioning of woman as “Other” against man who is the “Absolute”, but also, she explores the lack of self-consciousness of woman and the imposition of this “otherness” by men. In this study, the Woman/Man dialectics will be read from immanence/transcendence, freedom/responsibility dichotomies in the context of the existentialist philosophy. The aim is to demonstrate the degradation of woman in a secondary position in patriarchal societies, the social and cultural conceptualisation of woman’s position. In this context, man defined the existence of woman freed from essential existential mechanisms. Nevertheless, in the existentialist philosophy, existence precedes essence. Beauvoir deciphers the reasons of woman to not reject the hegemony of man by revealing the status of the woman myth. The main objective is to search for the possibilities of woman existence founded on responsibility and freedom, and to retrace the reflections of these possibilities in today’s world.