Originally published in Mandy Merck and Stella Sandford, eds, Further Adventures of the Dialectic of Sex:Critical Essays on Shulamith Firestone (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), chapter 7. Full paper.
There is the appearance of something paradoxical in Firestone’s dedication of The Dialectic of Sex to Simone de Beauvoir. Where de Beauvoir argued that “one is not born a woman, but, rather, becomes one,” relegating biology to the section of The Second Sex on the “myth” of destiny, Firestone opens The Dialectic of Sex by calling the oppression of women “a fundamental biological condition.” Where de Beauvoir is one of the founders of a social constructionist view of gender, Firestone seems to regress to a naïve biological reductionism in which gender follows immediately from the biological fact of sex. As Judith Butler has pointed out, however, this distinction between social constructionist and biological reductionist accounts of sex and gender is not as clear as it seems to be. I will argue that Firestone is aware of some of this complexity, and so appeals to biology not as a fixed substance to which women’s oppression can be reduced, but rather as one element within a theorization of feminist revolution which would conclude by dissolving the specificity of the biological. The dialectic in The Dialectic of Sex, that is, is based on the mutually constitutive and mutually contradictory relationship between the social construction of gender and the biological facticity of sex.