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WHAT IS A
WOMAN?
Toril Moi
‘an exemplary feminist voice’ Elizabeth Fallaize, TLS
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What is a Woman ?
And Other Essays
TORIL MOI
OXPORD
UNIVERSITY PRESS
OXPORD
UNIVERSITY PRESS
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford 0X2 6dp
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© Toril Moi 1999
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Database right Oxford University Press (maker)
First published 1999
First published in paperback 2001
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British Library Cataloguing in Publicadon Data
Data available
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Moi, Toril.
What is a woman?: and other essays/Toril Moi.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
I. Feminist theory. 2. Feminism and literature. 3. Women and
literature. I. Title.
HQiigo .M64 1999 305.42’oi—dc2i 99-16111
ISBN 0-19-812242-X (hbk)
ISBN 0-19-818675-4 (pbk)
13579 10 8642
Typeset in Baskerville by
Cambrian Typesetters, Frimley, Surrey
Printed in Great Britain
on acid-free paper by
Bookcraft Ltd, Midsomer Norton, Somerset
{
For
David
*
1-I-
Preface
By a happy coincidence this book will be published in 1999, in
time to mark the 50th anniversary of The Second Sex. The Second Sex
is both a major philosophical text and the deepest and most orig¬
inal work of feminist thought to have been produced in this
century. In Part 11 set out to show that feminist thought can bene¬
fit immensely from serious reconsideration of The Second Sex, not
as a historical document illustrating a long past moment in femi¬
nist thought, but as a source of new philosophical insights.
Although it would be wrong to say that it has been forgotten,
The Second Sex has yet to be properly inherited by contemporary
feminist theorists. By this I mean that it is still not generally drawn
upon in contemporary theoretical discussions; that teachers of
feminist theory and women’s studies often tell me that they
haven’t read it since they were 18, or that they never finished it;
that it is not usually taken seriously in seminars on feminist
theory; that it tends to be either quickly dismissed or rapidly
genuflected to in prefaces and introductions; and that when it is
engaged with, the text is usually read from a stance of critical
impatience and superiority. Where theorists turning to, say. Luce
Irigaray assume as a matter of course that they have to be patient
and attentive in their reading, and that the difficulties they
encounter arise because of the challenging complexity of
Irigaray’s thought, critics of Beauvoir far too often demonstrate
that they don’t believe that The Second Sex deserves careful atten¬
tion. Far from eliciting patience and thought, difficulties in the
text are instantly assumed to be evidence of some particularly
shallow and uninteresting contradiction of Beauvoir’s. (I want to
say here that I know of no critic or philosopher who has done a
better job of showing what it means to approach Beauvoir atten¬
tively, patiently, and without self-defensiveness than Nancy Bauer,
whose forthcoming book will be published by Columbia
University Press.) Boundless intellectual possibilities open when I
think of all the brilliant women who do feminist theory today, the
viii Preface
depths of philosophical and theoretical experience they could
bring to a reconsideration of Beauvoir, and the creative uses they
could put her to, if only they were willing to approach the text
with the care and patience it deserves. It has to be said, though,
that the task of English-language critics is not helped by the philo¬
sophically deplorable English translation.’ The best way to cele¬
brate the fiftieth anniversary of The Second Sex would be to set up
a well-funded project for a full-scale scholarly edition and retrans¬
lation of the text.
Making up roughly half of this volume. Part I is a book in its
own right. It consists of two new essays, both concerned, in one
way or another, with the way Simone de Beauvoir’s thought illu¬
minates contemporary theoretical problems. I have called this
part ‘A Eeminism of Ereedom’ because I want to stress that free¬
dom—not identity, difference, or equality—is the fundamental
concept in Beauvoir’s feminism. Contemporary feminist theory
has yet to attempt the radical task of rethinking feminism from a
vantage point outside the exhausted categories of identity and
difference.^ In these new essays I begin this task. It is a beginning
that, at least to me, has made theory feel like fun again.
The new essays (Chapters 1-2 and Chapter 8) in this book are
a continuation of my two previous books: Sexual/Textual Politics:
Feminist Literary Theory (1985) and Simone de Beauvoir: The Making
of an Intellectual Woman (1993). In Simone de Beauvoir I set out to
produce a historically and socially grounded understanding of
the factors that contributed to making Beauvoir the intellectual
woman she became, and of the works she then wrote. I under¬
stood the book above all as a study of subjectivity, considered as a
concrete, social and psychological phenomenon. Any theory of
’ See Simons, ‘Silencing’ for a pioneering (1983) account of the problems
with the Parshley translation. In this book I have provided an ample amount of
footnotes showing exactly why the published English translation is a philosoph¬
ical disgrace.
^ Equality, on the other hand, is by no means an exhausted concept. It tends
to be far too qtiickly dismissed, as if we all knew what it means to claim that
women should be men’s social equals. In another new essay included in this
volume, ‘Is Anatomy Destiny?: Freud and Biological Determinism’ (Chapter 8),
I try to show that the distinction between a feminism of equality and a feminism
of difference is positively unhelpful to an understanding of Beauvoir.
