La Quête Queer II: As a lesbian, I can no longer trust Simone de Beauvoir

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Columnist Miruna Tiberiu explores in her column ‘La Quête Queer’ queer life and culture in France. In her second article for the column, she writes on her re-evaluation of Simone de Beauvoir as a queer figure, looking into the often overlooked passages on lesbians in her seminal work, ‘Le Deuxième Sexe’.

Simone de Beauvoir was for me a mother-figure within feminism. I trailed my well-loved copy of Le Deuxième Sexe after me everywhere for about a year of my life; through 27-hour train journeys on the Trans-Siberian railway, in my Sixth Form common room, during the minutes before my Cambridge interview. She was a force during my formative years, and I would erupt in a frenzy of fangirling at the slightest chance of talking about her, and about how much she meant to me. Now, for the first time, I sit down and talk about how much more she could have meant for me. Coming out before the start of my first year at university has handed me a new, queer lens with which to examine the world. I discovered that Simone, my heroine, bisexual feminist sex-positive trailblazer, could no longer shout for my liberation. This is why, as a lesbian, I can no longer trust her.

With the fall of the German Occupation in France, queer communities, in urban areas at least, could finally breathe freely once again. Intellectual circles had been peopled with queer characters like Jean Genet, James Baldwin and Gertrude Stein, since the turn of the century. It is within this environment that Beauvoir penned Le Deuxième Sexe. She attempts to tap into this queer discourse in her chapter ‘La Lesbienne’. It is seldom remembered, or re-examined– it reads almost like an afterthought. The feminist battle of ‘la lesbienne’,to her, is a separate, less important battle than her wider ‘querelle feminine’ to which she dedicates almost 1000 pages. In her chapter, the lesbian is ‘othered’ not only from men, but also from other women, the ‘normal’ heterosexual women she refers to. At best, the lesbian is a thought experiment, her actions and intentions explored only to return to the feminist study of the heterosexual female and her relation to the patriarchy in her relationships with men; at worst she is a hindrance to feminism. In closing her chapter, Beauvoir leaves us with the image of the lesbian as a leech to other women. ‘Nothing gives a darker impression of narrow-mindedness and of mutilation than these groups of emancipated women,’she exclaims.

I am not surprised by this. The Freudian foundations, well-established in French intellectual circles of the time, upon which Le Deuxième Sexe was built, influenced Beauvoir’s tone. There is a clinical detachment with which the lives of queer women are explored. Like a patient on an examination table, so the lesbian is looked at through a magnifying glass, her every action unpicked with surgical precision to reveal the findings on the ‘lesbian condition’. There are no real lesbian lives in Le Deuxième Sexe; all lesbians depicted are psychoanalyst specimens and their author, a supposed spokesperson for bisexuality, removes herself completely from the discourse. She speaks of ‘them’ as if they are all not one and the same: queer.

Beauvoir sees the lesbian condition as inherently tied to the patriarchy. Lesbianism is reduced to a ‘masculine protest’. In adopting this lifestyle, the lesbian attempts to ‘reconcile her autonomy with the passivity of her flesh’, to separate herself from the label of woman which by nature indicates Otherness. In a lesbian relationship, Beauvoir tells us, there is no masculine Subject, no penis to envy, no patriarchal force dictating all sexual and even societal acts. 

So lesbianism is emancipation? Unfortunately for us, Beauvoir continues in her examination of the lesbian condition. By the end of her chapter, lesbianism emerges as one of the horrors brought about by the patriarchy. The lesbian is doomed to live in ‘bad faith’ as much as the married woman, the mother and the prostitute. She mocks the lesbian’s ‘comédie’, her ‘performance’, shoving her onto a stage and shining a cruel spotlight onto her. Whilst rightfully rejecting what is now identified as the butch-femme dynamic, Beauvoir nevertheless implicitly enforces it:

The lesbian plays first at being a man; then even being a lesbian becomes a game; masculine clothing, at first a disguise, becomes a uniform; and under the pretext of escaping male oppression, woman becomes enslaved to the character she plays; wishing to not be confined in woman’s situation, she is imprisoned in that of the lesbian.

The lesbian can never escape the patriarchy because she can can never become part of its system of power. She is ultimately still a woman, a ‘castrate’ as Beauvoir deems her, but simultaneously an incomplete woman, far from the marks of femininity harboured by the housewife and the mother. She is thus banished from both male and female communities, in a more dire position than even the woman Other, to the point that, Beauvoir tells us, ‘her disorder may lead to psychosis’. 

Therefore, the lesbian has no place amongst Beauvoir’s feminists. Her ‘empty bragging’ of emancipation, her ‘play-acting’ at being a man which ends incessantly in a frustrated failure, dooms the lesbian to a tragic fate of ‘burning humiliation’. But lesbian life does not end in tragedy. The joys of finding a label that even begins to represent identity, and the community that comes with it, are overlooked by Beauvoir’s pen. I am sure that we are all tired of queer shame being hammered incessantly into our queer discourse. 

I do not resent Beauvoir. I understand my privilege here; I am a queer woman in an increasingy progressive community in which fears of prosecution no longer cross my mind. I also appreciate the foundations she built, over 70 years ago now, for feminists today. But I also think that, for progress to take its course, we must question texts like Le Deuxième Sexe. As I moved towards a more queer feminism, I discovered Monique Wittig. Her claim that ‘lesbians are not women’ echoes Beauvoir’s words, but moves on to argue that this is precisely what allows queer women to escape ‘the straight mind’, to form their own identities in a sphere that has not been tainted by the patriarchal gender binary. Wittig celebrates my queerness.

As you can see above, my opinions will undoubtedly change with the flow of wave after wave of feminism. I too used to see my feminine ‘performances’ through Beauvoir’s words, once. Trusting and loving are not one and the same. I love Simone de Beauvoir, but I can no longer trust her.