"The second sex" of pain and laughter: Painful giggling transressions of gender divide

Abstract

By the mid-20th century, Simone de Beauvoir has published an important and ground-breaking research into the facts, myths and living experience of "the second sex" (Le Deuxième Sexe, 1949). Drawing on contemporary theories based on phenomenology and existentialism, de Beauvoir argues that the "man" is a historical idea, and the woman as a "becoming". At the end of the 20th century pain studies have gained vast attention in political theory, especially in political effect theory and "new materialism". Numerous studies have neglected de Beauvoir's frequent arguments dealing with "women's pain" and women's agency in human mitsein, particularly regarding the woman's embeddedness in social myths that "feminise" the body of a woman, as a form of crisis and resistance to be subjected to species and reproduction. This paper deals with the crisis and critique of physiological, economic, psychological and social disposability of female bodies. In addition, this research re-questions the limits of physical, semiological, cultural and political dissemination of (female) laughter, seen through the lens of interruptions and destabilizations of the hegemonic gender discourse incarcerated within the gender divide. Consequently, we are to open up a space for interrogating the "irony of giggle" as a form of resistance to the contemporary body politics - as a non-place, devoid of any political agency.