ABSTRACT
Simone de Beauvoir's development of the self as a situated body- subject provides a framework for balancing this tension. As such, returning to her conceptualisation of the situated self, offers a useful framework for addressing some of the questions about power and agency that trouble recent feminist thinking. For Beauvoir, every concrete human being is always uniquely situated, and it is her application and extension of this concept which shows such promise for theorists working on mens violence. The connections between the conceptual thinking of Beauvoir and Pierre Bourdieu commented on by Toril Moi the links between Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Martin Heidegger and Bourdieu have also been made. The concept has also been productively employed by feminist researchers working on mens violence. The sex/gender distinction that Judith Butler claims was one of the pivotal contributions of Beauvoir's Second Sex, though useful in challenging essentialist arguments for specific regimes of gender inequality, reiterates culture/nature and mind/body dichotomies, leaving the body outside history.
