The floating “a”

Abstract

This chapter argues that both the H.M. Parshley and the Borde and Malovany-Chevallier translations of: “On ne naît pas femme: On le devient” lead to dead ends. By omitting the “a,” the new translation erases the diversity of women and negates their capacity for liberation. By inserting it, the older translation obscures the ways the material realities produced by the myth of woman subvert the emergence of a woman and haunts the lives of women who challenge the myth. For the nuances of the French to cross the language divide we need to let the “a” float between these English translations. Read as “One is not born but becomes (a) woman” the sentence speaks to the phenomenological ambiguities, and current political realities of being (a) woman—the subject of Beauvoir’s The Second Sex and of this particular sentence.