more thoughts on the biological

Am still stuck on the biological stuff – sorry for harping on about this. But I am intrigued by her descriptions of the body, and how she interconnects the various somata. I am assuming, after some thought, that the use of soma is to emphasise the body of the organism (what we in Danish would call legeme, as distinct from krop, which means body) from the body, which is soma+situation. Is that too simplistic and does it read a postmodern sex/gender distinction into Beauvoir? Her point is, it seems to me, that while the female soma has things in common with other somata (sorry for sounding like a wanker with this plural), the human female is also distinct by virtue of the resistance to the subordination to the species, experience of destiny and process of distinction from the male (p. 39). This destiny which women experience, what would that be? From the immediate context, I would have assumed that it was this subordination to the species, but would that not go against her denial that biological data form a fixed identity (p.45), or should we read on to where she says: ‘In truth these facts cannot be denied, but they do not carry their meaning in themselves’?

This brings me to my next point: The gendered discourse of science.

As soon as we accept a human perspective defining the body starting from existence, biology becomes an abstract science; when the physiological given (muscular inferiority) takes on meaning, this meaning immediately becomes dependant on a whole context; ‘weakness’ is weakness only in light of the aims man sets for himself, the instruments at his disposal and the laws he imposes.

Is she here accepting scientific discourse as gendered, or as a given, before contextualised meaning is bestowed? And would this not be crucial to the discussion raised by Jess, when this was just a googlegroup:

I think there's a difference between 'One is not born, but becomes a woman' and 'One is not born, but becomes, woman,' are different, definitely, but even based on Moi's discussion, I think there's more to be unpacked: French does, after all, tend to multitask! (That is, Moi says that Beauvoir rejects 'Woman' as a patriarchal myth, so she could never mean the second sentence, but I personally think that the idea that one becomes Woman because one lives in the context of such patriarchal myth is far more interesting and useful! And more proximate, imo, to Irigaray...)

To which Jennifer replied:

Interesting .... I have always assumed that Beauvoir meant the second of the
two.

I am chewing my way through Dialectic of Enlightenment and its feminist expansion, Nicht Ich, by Christina von Braun, and so am very influenced by the viewpoint of the patriarchal myth, which Jess connects to Irigaray.

Any thoughts?