Sexualidade feminina, alienação corporal e destino: discutindo algumas teses de Freud a partir da crítica de Beauvoir

Abstract

The article is constructed in three stages: providing a commentary on the item The psychoanalytic viewpoint of The second sex, presenting the problem of bodily alienation as it appears in this book, formulating some questions arising from the confrontation of the previous two steps with some of Freud’s theses about female sexuality. Such questions are briefly as follows. Does it make sense for feminism to assume an inferiority in the biological condition of women compared to that of men, even if this inferiority is indicated as something surpassed by our social context and by our existence? To take this condition as something, from the begining, inferior, would this not already be an internal thesis to the ideology of patriarchy instead of an element that would serve us to respond to the establishment of this ideology? If we refuse the idea that the oppression of women is directly related to the “consequences of sexual specification” (as supposed by Beauvoir), will we still have an answer for this state of things? If we do not refuse it, then would it condemn us to assume, together with Beauvoir, the thesis of the biological inferiority of women? But, if this is the result, how far would the arguments against the Freudian thesis of psychic inferiority (with its implication of destiny) go?