On ne naît pas femme: on le devient

The Life of a Sentence

Edited by Bonnie Mann and Martina Ferrari

The only book of its kind to focus singularly on Beauvoir's most famous sentence
Provides a case study for what happens to such an incendiary sentence across languages, cultures, and geographic contexts
Questions the theory of social construction as the accepted feminist position on sexual difference
Interdisciplinary in approach, it works along the borders of philosophy and translation studies, allowing new fields to speak to each other in a feminist context

On ne naît pas femme: on le devient

The Life of a Sentence

Edited by Bonnie Mann and Martina Ferrari

Description

This collection of essays takes up the most famous feminist sentence ever written, Simone de Beauvoir's "On ne naît pas femme: on le devient," finding in it a flashpoint that galvanizes feminist thinking and action in multiple dimensions. Since its publication, the sentence has inspired feminist thinking and action in many different cultural and linguistic contexts. Two entangled controversies emerge in the life of this sentence: a controversy over the practice of translation and a controversy over the nature and status of sexual difference. Variously translated into English as "One is not born, but rather becomes a woman" (Parshley, 1953), "one is not born but rather becomes woman" (Borde and Malovany-Chevallier, 2010), and "women are made, not born" (in popular parlance), the conflict over the translation crystallizes the feminist debate over the possibilities and limitations of social construction as a theory of sexual difference. When Sheila Malovany-Chevallier and Constance Borde (contributors to this volume), translated Le Deuxième Sexe into English in 2010, their decision to alter the translation of the famous sentence by omitting the "a" ignited debate that has not yet exhausted itself. The controversy over the English translation has opened a conversation about translation practices and their relation to meaning more generally, and broadens, in this volume, into an examination of the life of Beauvoir's key sentence in other languages and political and cultural contexts as well.
The philosophers, translators, literary scholars and historian who author these essays take decidedly different positions on the meaning of the sentence in French, and thus on its correct translation in a variety of languages—but also on the meaning and salience of the question of sexual difference as it travels between languages, cultures, and political worlds.

On ne naît pas femme: on le devient

The Life of a Sentence

Edited by Bonnie Mann and Martina Ferrari

Acknowledgments
Contributors
Introduction, Bonnie Mann
SECTION I: Intellectual History
1. Before Beauvoir, Before Butler: “Genre” and “Gender” in France and the Anglo-American World
Karen Offen
2. Beauvoir Against Objectivism:
The Operation of the Norm in Beauvoir and Butler
Bonnie Mann
SECTION II: History of a Scandal
3. The Silencing of Simone de Beauvoir:
Guess What's Missing from The Second Sex
Margaret A. Simons
4. While We Wait: The English Translation of The Second Sex
Toril Moi
5. The Adultress Wife
Toril Moi
6. Review of the New Translate of Simone De Beauvoir: The Second Sex
Nancy Bauer
7. The Grand Rectification
Meryl Altman
SECTION III: The Philosophers' Debate
8. The Floating “a”
Debra Bergoffen
9. Becoming A Woman:
Reading Beauvoir's Response to the Woman Question
Megan M. Burke
10. The Phenomenal Body is Not Born? It Comes to Be a Body Subject.
Interpreting The Second Sex
Carmen López Sáenz
11. Woman Does Not Become Her
Janine Jones
12. The Second Sex of Consciousness:
A New Temporality and Ontology for Beauvoir's “Becoming a Woman”
Jennifer McWeeny
SECTION IV: The Labor of Translation
13. The Life of a Sentence: Translation as a Lived Experience
Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier
14. Challenges in Translating Beauvoir
Marybeth Timmermann
15. French Women Become, German Women are Made?
Simone de Beauvoir, Alice Schwarzer, Translation and Quotation
Anna-Lisa Baumeister
16. Becoming Woman:
Simone de Beauvoir and Drugi pol in Socialist Yugoslavia
Anna Bogic
17. Retranslating The Second Sex into Finnish:
Choices, Practices, and Ideas
Erika Ruonakoski

On ne naît pas femme: on le devient

The Life of a Sentence

Edited by Bonnie Mann and Martina Ferrari

Author Information

Edited by Bonnie Mann, Head of Philosophy and Associate Professor, Department of Philosophy, University of Oregon, and Martina Ferrari, Graduate Student in Philosophy, University of Oregon

Bonnie Mann is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Oregon in Eugene, Oregon. She is the author of Women's Liberation and the Sublime: Feminism, Postmodernism, Environment (Oxford 2006), and Sovereign Masculinity: Gender Lessons from the War on Terror (Oxford 2014).

Martina Ferrari is a Ph.D. student in Philosophy at the University of Oregon specializing in 20th Century Continental Philosophy, French phenomenology, feminist philosophy, and critical race theory.

Contributors:

Bonnie Mann, Ph.D. Professor and Department Head in Philosophy at the University of Oregon in Eugene, Oregon.

Karen Offen, Ph.D. Historian and independent scholar affiliated as a Senior Scholar with the Michelle R. Clayman Institute for Gender Research at Stanford University in Stanford, California.

Margaret A. Simons, Ph.D. Distinguished Research Professor Emerita in the Department of Philosophy at the Southern Illinois University in Edwardsville, Illinois.

Toril Moi, Ph.D. James B. Duke Professor of Literature and Romance Studies, and Professor of English, and Theater Studies at Duke University, in Durham, North Carolina.

Nancy Bauer, Ph.D. Dean of Academic Affairs for Arts and Sciences andProfessor of Philosophy at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts.

Meryl Altman, Ph.D. Professor of English and Women's Studies at DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana.

Debra Bergoffen, Ph.D. Bishop Hamilton Philosopher in Residence at American University and Professor Emerita of Philosophy at George Mason University in Washington D.C.

Megan A. Burke, Ph.D. Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy and Program of Gender and Women's Studies at Oklahoma State University in Stillwater, Oklahoma.

Carmen López Sáenz, Ph.D. Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the Universidad Nacional de Educatión a Distancia in Madrid, Spain.

Janine Jones, Ph.D. Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of North Carolina in Greensboro, North Carolina.

Jennifer McWeeny, Ph.D. Associate Professor of Philosophy in the Humanities and Arts Department at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Worcester, Massachusetts.

Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier. Freelance translators of works in social science, art, and feminist literature, former faculty members at the Insitut d'Etudes Politiques, authors of many books in English and French on subjects ranging from grammar to cooking.

Marybeth Timmermann. Freelance translator.

Anna-Lisa Baumeister. Graduate Student in Comparative Literature at the University of Oregon in Eugene, Oregon.

Anna Bogic PhD candidate in the Institute of Feminist and Gender Studies at the University of Ottawa, Canada.

Erika Ruonakoski, Ph.D. University Researcher in the Department of Social Sciences and Philosophy at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland.