An idea · Twentieth Century (to mid-century) · first attested 1949
The Other
Identity is constructed in relation to the one who is not Me.
Beauvoir applies Hegel's master-slave dialectic to gender. Man has historically constituted himself as Self by constituting woman as Other — the inessential, the not-quite-subject, the second sex. The category of Otherness extends beyond gender; Edward Said, Frantz Fanon, and others will use it to analyze colonialism, race, and many other structures of domination.