Beauvoir as Semiologist and the Myth of the Eternal Feminine

Abstract Beauvoir’s The Second Sex is typically not read as a phenomenological semiology, but this author gives a reading of the text as a feminist phenomenological semiology understood in a political, economic, socially lived approach. Enacting the methods of semiology and phenomenology together can help navigate the tension that arises between embodied subjects immersed in a linguistic and mythical world, the inherited meanings and values that are faced in lived experience, and the capacity for potential meaning-making and world-creating in which subjects engage.