Under Construction Journal Issue 6.1 UNDER CONSTRUCTION JOURNAL 6.1 | Page 29

epistemology “takes the perspective that there is no essential truth of being to be discovered, and – since
there is no truth to woman – we cannot ask what woman is”. Her existentialism considers the body as
“never an essence but always conceived in relation to its situation”. Conversely, Beauvoir continues that:
“woman is her body as man is his, but her body is something other than her”. Thus, “woman fluctuates
between freedom and alienation; transcendence and immanence; subject-being and object-being”. It is
through this philosophicaly-orientated reflection upon the ways in which men live their lives that the
consistent presence of potential cultural entrapments for women inhering within gender can be better
understood.
Beauvoir’s philosophy conceived of another “painful split” to be found “between [women’s]
autonomy and a culture in which women are compelled to exist as the Other”. Moi further argues in
relation to this split that “the social oppression of women […] mirrors or repeats the ontological ambiguity
of existence”. Thus, women continually live under two conflicting modes of existence, and as a result
of the pressures from society and culture, she must “live her body as an object”. Judith Butler’s
summarises:
“How one is produced as woman versus the creative aspect by which woman constantly produces
herself in this way, but in adherence to cultural norms and social pressures. Becoming a subject
is an active process of interpretation and appropriation within the context of received cultural
possibilities”.
Thus, for Butler, Beauvoir’s notion of “choosing a gender is understood as the embodiment of possibilities
within a network of deeply entrenched cultural norms”. These statements show that a woman’s ability to
identify and create herself is restricted by cultural and social ideologies about women, which suggests
that such narratives are not written by women, hence their living within the condition of objects.
What becomes illuminated through Beauvoir’s work with reference to the figure of the flapper is
the idea that, though she may be seen as an emancipatory or a liberated construction of women, she still
exists as another site of cultural entrapment. Thus, though she may appear to women as a site of
expression, she must still be considered for the ways she is confined by cultural standards and norms
(particularly those highlighted within this piece) operative within consumer capitalism. Thus the way the
flapper was exhibited and reproduced on the covers of magazines created further societal pressures for
women in the 1920s. Exercising control and self-fashioning over women’s bodies, such as through their
diet, to attain the flapper’s elongated, slim silhouette, creates further ambiguity around what is
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