The temporality of remaining trapped. Beauvoir on aging as a gendered phenomenon

In this contribution, we discuss the phenomenon of aging as gender-based with the help of Beauvoir’s account of aging, temporality, and gender. We explore how the social centring of the reproductive capacities of women’s bodies impacts the ways in which they might tend to experience growing old. The first section frames our analysis within Beauvoir’s philosophical project and thus poses the issue of elderly women as people who cease being able to fulfil their reproductive ‘duties’ in patriarchal societies; in the second section we stress the relationship between temporality and gender as transcendental structures of the self. This methodological basis allows us to explore in the third section the core of the Beauvoirian thesis by addressing the existential dimension of aging for women, who still have – even in an advanced age – to navigate challenging experiences related to sexuality and reproduction.