ABSTRACT
Drawing on Henri Bergson’s Creative Evolution and sexual difference feminism, this article elaborates a figuration of sexual difference as different tendencies in the evolution of life on Earth. While Bergson’s philosophy is not feminist, his durational account of evolution articulates a cluster of concepts that offer significant insight into the effort to theorise sexual difference both in human beings and in many forms of life on Earth. I argue that Bergson’s concepts of duration, the élan vital, the virtual, the actual, and the process of actualisation can be taken up as a way to figure sexual differentiation as a fundamental tendency in the evolution of life without construing sexual difference hierarchically and without rendering sexual difference as a static universal. In the context of thinking the sexuate status of humanity, a Bergsonian conceptualisation of sexual difference as evolving tendencies, which generates actualisations of sexed specificity, overcomes a normative position in which woman and man are conceived in terms of fixed attributes that are proper to each sex. Feminist thinking should affirm the diverging actualisations of sexed specificity and embrace the tremendous variety of articulations of female, male, and intersexuality within the human species and within the human individual without hierarchising certain actualisations over others and without claiming that there is a proper way to be a specific sex.
