In this article we analyze Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex in order to come up with a category system including gender categories that do not only represent a binary notion but also include non-binary forms of gender. By manually annotating and then visualizing features of gender roles as a networked graph and analyzing the resulting gender sphere we come up with two category systems, one containing five, the other one four gender categories, each of which contain a number of gender roles. We compare the gender sphere Beauvoir creates in her text with one resulting from the analysis of narrative texts that she used as references for her analysis of gender roles. In this fiction corpus, we annotated character features, clothes and gender roles, evaluated them quantitatively and then matched them with the gender sphere. Thus it becomes visible that the literary corpus creates a scalar notion of gender ranging from a female to a male pole with a neutral center. Roles relevant for and characters showing traits of gender-diversity are set at the margins. Unlike this scalar notion Beauvoir works towards a more spherical understanding of gender where roles relevant for gender-diversity are well integrated into the center of the gender sphere. Although Beauvoir’s gender sphere cannot be mapped onto the graph data of the fiction corpus, it does offer a good starting point for macro- and microanalysis of literary characters, the features, clothes and roles that are used to describe them and the resulting gender specific profiling.
Schumacher et al. (Fri,) studied this question.
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