Transcendence in Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex

Revisiting masculinist ontology Abstract A large number of feminist philosophers and social critics accept that Simone de Beauvoir’s conception of transcendence in The Second Sex relies on masculinist ontology. In contrast with feminist interpretations that see Beauvoir claiming the success of masculinist ontology, this article argues that transcendence as masculinist ontology does not succeed in The Second Sex because it requires a relation of domination, something contrary to its own definition of freedom-producing relations. The Second Sex obliquely reveals this failure, but Beauvoir does not ruminate upon it. Instead, Beauvoir turns to imagine freedom-producing gender relations in the future where the body and consciousness are already emancipated from constitu-tive domination. This is a future that resonates with G. W. F. Hegel’s ‘Stoic Consciousness’. The significance of this finding is that the location of free-dom neither resides in the intertwinement of the male body and conscious-ness previously argued to be the case, for Beauvoir, nor does it reside i