Becoming woman---becoming self---becoming other

Through the phenomenological writings on lived embodiment and intersubjectivity by Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, this dissertation aims at reaching an understanding of the meaning of the notion of 'woman' on the level of selfhood. More specifically, it explores the meaning of the notion of 'woman' from the two separate but interrelated perspectives of sexual difference and lived embodiment. In the first section on sexual difference, I join the feminist discussion, which shows dissatisfaction with understanding sexual difference in terms of negation, opposition or complementarity and I explore Merleau-Ponty's ontology of reversible flesh as a possible venue towards an understanding of sexual difference beyond the binary between man and woman. Here I engage in dialogue with the work of Elizabeth Grosz, Diane Elam, Rosi Braidotti and Luce Irigaray and argue for an understanding of sexual difference in terms of radical otherness. The analysis of sexual difference leads me to an analysis of the self-givenness of the lived body through which the self discovers itself as other to itself. Here I draw on the work on the lived body by both Husserl and Merleau-Ponty and demonstrate its usefulness for theorizing gendered selfhood. These two sections are then brought together in a concluding section in which I discuss the meaning of the notion of 'woman' on the basis of the analysis of sexual difference and the investigation into lived embodiment. In the concluding section the intimate relation between sexual difference and lived embodiment is brought to light. Ultimately the dissertation argues for an understanding of gendered selfhood as emerging in a continuous process of selving and othering in which otherness is not added on to selfhood from the outside but, rather, belongs to the ontological constitution of the self. It aims at reaching a richer understanding of the meaning of the notion of 'woman' by understanding it in terms of selfhood emerging in relation to otherness made manifest in external others and in the self-givenness of the lived body.