On ne naît pas femme : on le devient The Life of a Sentence

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.

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.

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 BodySubject. 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 Bogi
17. Retranslating The Second Sex into Finnish: Choices, Practices, and Ideas Erika Ruonakoski