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ON FEMALE BODY EXPERIENCE STUDIES IN FEMINIST PHILOSOPHY Cheshire Calhoun, Series Editor Advisory Board Susan Bordo, University of Kentucky Harry Brod, Temple University Claudia Card, University of Wisconsin Lorraine Code, York University, Toronto Kimberle Crenshaw, Columbia Law School/UCLA School of Law Jame Flax, Howard University Ann Garry, California State University, Los Angeles Sally Haslanger, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Hilde Hein, College of the Holy Cross Alison Jagger, University of Colorado, Boulder Helen Longino, University of Minnesota Maria Lugones, SUNY Binghamton Uma Narayan, Vassar College James Sterba, University of Notre Dame Rosemarie Tong, University of North Carolina, Charlotte Nancy Tuana, University of Oregon Karen Warren, Macalester College Published in the series: Gender in the Mirror: Confounding Imagery Diana Tietjens Meyers Autonomy, Gender, Politics Marilyn Friedman On Female Body Experience: “Throwing Like a Girl” and Other Essays Iris Marion Young ON FEMALE BODY EXPERIENCE “Throwing Like a Girl” and Other Essays Iris Marion Young 1 2005 3 Oxford New York Auckland Bangkok Buenos Aires Cape Town Chennai Dar es Salaam Delhi Hong Kong Istanbul Karachi Kolkata Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Mumbai Nairobi São Paulo Shanghai Singapore Taipei Tokyo Toronto Copyright  2005 by Oxford University Press, Inc. Published by Oxford University Press, Inc. 198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016 www.oup.com Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Young, Iris Marion, 1949– On female body experience : “Throwing like a girl” and other essays / Iris Marion Young. p. cm.—(Studies in feminist philosophy) Includes index. ISBN 0-19-516192-0; 0-19-516193-9 (pbk.) 1. Feminist theory. 2. Women—Psychology. 3. Women—Social Conditions. 4. Body, Human—Social aspects. 5. Sex role. I. Title. II. Series HQ1190 .Y679 2004 305.42’01—dc22 2004044842 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper For Morgen, again This page intentionally left blank Acknowledgments All but one of these essays has been previously published, and I gratefully acknowledge the editors of the journals and books in which they have appeared: “Throwing Like a Girl: A Phenomenology of Feminine Body Comportment, Motility, and Spatiality” was first published in Human Studies 3 (1980): 137−56, and it is reprinted here with permission of Kluwer Academic Publishers. “Pregnant Embodiment: Subjectivity and Alienation” appeared in Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 9.1 (January 1984): 45−62. It is reprinted with permission of Martin Scrivener. A shorter version of “Women Recovering Our Clothes” appeared in Postmodernism and Continental Philosophy, ed. Hugh Silverman and Donn Welton (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988), 144−52, and it is reprinted by permission. The advertisement from the Woolmark Company facing “Women Recovering Our Clothes” is reprinted from Self (Fall 1985). A shorter version of “Breasted Experience: The Look and the Feeling” was published in Medicine and Lived Body, ed. Drew Leder and Mary Rawlinson (D. Reidel/Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1990); it is reprinted by permission. All four of these articles were collected in Iris Marion Young, Throwing Like a Girl and Other Essays in Feminist Philosophy and Female Body Experience (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990). “House and Home: Feminist Variations on a Theme” was first published in Iris Marion Young, Intersecting Voices: Dilemmas of Gender, Political Philosophy and Policy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997); it is reprinted by permission. viii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS “A Room of One’s Own: Old Age, Extended Care, and Privacy” is a revised version of an essay published in Privacies: Philosophical Evaluations, ed. Beate Roessler (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2004); reprinted by permission. “Lived Body vs. Gender: Reflections on Social Structure and Subjectivity” was first published in Ratio: An International Journal of Analytic Philosophy 15.4 (December 2002): 410−28; reprinted with permission of Blackwell Publishing. I am grateful to Cheshire Calhoun for encouraging me to collect these essays, together with the previously unpublished “Menstrual Meditations,” into a volume for this series. Contents Introduction 3 1. Lived Body vs. Gender: Reflections on Social Structure and Subjectivity 12 2. Throwing Like a Girl: A Phenomenology of Feminine Body Comportment, Motility, and Spatiality 27 3. Pregnant Embodiment: Subjectivity and Alienation 46 4. Women Recovering Our Clothes 62 5. Breasted Experience: The Look and the Feeling 75 6. Menstrual Meditations 97 7. House and Home: Feminist Variations on a Theme 123 8. A Room of One’s Own: Old Age, Extended Care, and Privacy 155 Index 171 This page intentionally left blank ON FEMALE BODY EXPERIENCE This page intentionally left blank Introduction Much has changed for women since I was a little girl in the 1950s in New York City. In many places the lives and spaces of women and men have become less separate, and women fill roles and appear in places that might have surprised my grandmother. For all that, the image of woman has not ceased being that of the Other: the surface that reflects fantasies and fears arising from our human being as vulnerable bodies. Just because images and expectations about women make us asymmetrically associated with sex, birth, age, and flesh, we have little voice to express our own point of view on this fleeting existence or on the social relations that position us. The essays in this volume reflect on different aspects of women’s everyday lived bodily experience. One of their purposes is simply expressive: to give words to meanings often unspoken, in ways that I hope evoke recognition and even a little bit of pleasure. Each of the essays also engages in social criticism; they expose mundane ways that actions and opportunities for women are unfairly constrained by social norms regulating body comportment and by the needs of people for bodily care. The essays thus take a feminist perspective, both as expressing sexand gender-specific female subjectivity, and as claiming that women are not as free as we ought to be. The composition of these essays spans more than twenty-five years of thinking about embodiment. I began work on the earliest, “Throwing Like a Girl,” in 1977. The ink is barely dry on “Menstrual Meditations.” When I began writing on themes of female embodiment, neither philosophical nor feminist-theoretical nor sociological literature contained many works engaged in such a project. In the discipline of philosophy in the United States, only scholars of existential phenomenology, 3 4 INTRODUCTION the tradition from which my first work in this field arose, made body experience thematic. This rich and lively theoretical discussion, however, made little or no reference to sexual difference or gender. Sandra Bartky was the only philosopher I was aware of whose work aimed to bring ideas of existential phenomenology to analysis of women’s gender-specific experience. While feminist theorists often referred to facts and experiences of women’s bodies, in these early years they had not yet developed theoretical methods for reflection on female embodiment. In the late 1970s and early 1980s American philosophers were only just beginning to notice Foucault’s paradigm-shifting accounts of power. Shortly thereafter, the writing of theorists such as Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray gave feminist scholars new and often controversial vocabularies for articulating womanly experience. In the succeeding decades, scholarly literature reflecting on female and male body experience from a feminist point of view has bloomed with hundreds of flowers. Important feminist writers have explored issues of embodiment, experience, and meaning using methods derived from continental philosophy. I have in mind scholars such as Christine Battersby, Susan Bordo, Judith Butler, Sonia Kruks, Dorothea Olkowski, Gail Weiss, and members of the “Australian school” of feminist philosophy such as Rosalind Diprose, Moira Gatens, and Elizabeth Grosz. It is most natural that feminist concerns should have led scholars to uncover and challenge tendencies of Western philosophical and socialtheoretical traditions to ignore or repress the significance of embodiment for thought, action, and feeling. Because much feminist reflection begins from the sociohistorical fact that women’s bodily differences from men have grounded or served as excuses for structural inequalities, inquiry about the status and malleability of bodies in relation to social status is for us a matter of some urgency. Scholarship in women’s studies deserves significant credit for leading critical social theory toward more systematic reflection on socialized bodies. In the decades since I began work in this field, moreover, exciting work on embodiment and society has blossomed more broadly in philosophy, sociology, literary studies, communication, and other disciplines. My own reflections on embodied experience have benefited from these intellectual currents. Just because they have become so numerous and diverse, I have not tried to catalog or synthesize theories of embodiment here. I offer these essays as one set of overlapping inquiries about social meanings of female embodiment, in conversation with others. Nor have I attempted to revise the older essays included here in light of more recent concepts, distinctions, and arguments about gendered subjectivity or embodiment. If nothing else, the collection exhibits a trajectory of thinking of one idiosyncratic feminist critical theorist over several decades of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century; they may also INTRODUCTION 5 reflect an evolution in the way a number of theorists have approached themes of gender and sexual difference. In the remainder of this introduction I shall explain some of what I mean by the title themes and briefly gesture toward the themes of the individual essays. Female/Feminine Experience In Phenomenal Woman, Christine Battersby distinguishes between the “female” and the “feminine” as a category for envisioning alternative human possibilities. Western metaphysics has postulated the idea of an autonomous individual subject, a self-enclosed ego that inhabits but is distinct from a body. Reflection on the existential qualities of female bodies, Battersby suggests, upsets most of the assumptions of this ontology—that selves are independent of one another, that their rational core stands at a distance from the pains and sufferings of vulnerable bodies. Battersby proposes a different philosophical framework arising from this female embodiment, from the experience of a body with the capacity to generate another body. This starting point, she suggests, acknowledges that the subject lives as flesh, and that there are inevitable dependencies between self and other. These in turn engender power inequalities that cannot be abolished but should be acknowledged if each of us is to receive due respect.1 Battersby is less specific about the category of the “feminine” about which she evinces suspicion. As I reconstruct this distinction, the “feminine” signifies a relational position in a dichotomy, masculine/feminine, where the first is more highly valued than the second, and where the second is partly defined as a lack with respect to the first. This dichotomy lines up with others that have a homologous hierarchical logic, such as mind/body, reason/passion, public/private, hard science/soft science, and dozens of other value-laden dichotomies whose discursive application has practical effects in personal lives, workplaces, media imagery, and politics, to name only a few social fields. As contrasted with the female, and logically connected to this semiotic operation, I conceive the feminine also as a set of normatively disciplined expectations imposed on female bodies by male-dominated society. Among other things, these norms socially script caretaking work as belonging to women and the dispositions of caretaking as ill-fitting us for many other activities. Normative femininity detaches persons who fall under its disciplines from expressions or enactments of power and authority. Disciplines of the feminine, finally, aim to mask or subordinate the raw facts of embodiment, to make the body “pretty” by con- 1. Christine Battersby, Phenomenal Woman: Feminist Metaphysics and the Patterns of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1998). 6 INTRODUCTION straining fluid flesh, masking its organic smells with perfumes, painting skin, lips, eyes, and hair that have lost their nubile luster. Battersby’s distinction between the female and the feminine resonates with this book’s title and helps situate its chapters. I take some issue, however, with the strength of the distinction as she seems to draw it. By means of this distinction, Battersby herself tends to set up something of a hierarchical dichotomy. “Female” is a more useful category than “feminine” for feminist theory, it seems, because the feminine is more hostage to hegemonic discourses. I think that distinguishing concepts of female and feminine in gendered social experience is both plausible and useful. The first refers more to living out materialities of bodies, while the second refers more to gendered social conventions. Nevertheless, I think that these two aspects of sexed and gendered experience are more ambiguously and problematically related than Battersby suggests. Experience and social structure often make the difference between them undecidable. I think that reflection on feminine meanings that are often devalued by dominant norms sometimes provides a basis for social criticism. Looking to either the female or the feminine for conceptual alternatives, however, risks reinscribing the very structures we aim to transform. Some of the essays collected here reflect more on constraints and possibilities of the feminine, and some more on the ineluctable but nevertheless historically specific experiences of living in female bodies. “Throwing Like a Girl,” for example, theorizes socially constructed habits of feminine body comportment in male-dominated society, and their implications for the sense of agency and power of persons who inhabit these body modalities. “Women Recovering Our Clothes” and “House and Home” also dwell on experiences and values traditionally associated with the feminine, both for the sake of exposing the oppressions they support and also in order to envision liberating possibilities in them. “Pregnant Embodiment,” “Breasted Experience,” and “Menstrual Meditations,” on the other hand, focus more on female experience. My interest is to explore the distinctive feelings and modalities of being-inthe-world that these aspects of embodiment produce. While many women never become pregnant or give birth, menstruating and having breasts are common to most women for a good part of their lives. Oddly, feminist scholars have thought systematically very little about these ordinary body experiences with which most women identify specifically as women, even though the concrete quality of these experiences varies greatly. The Tradition of Existential Phenomenology “Body experience” is another key term in my title. None of these essays takes bodies as objects or things to observe, study or explain. Rather, INTRODUCTION 7 the essays aim to describe subjectivity and women’s experience as lived and felt in the flesh. Thomas Csordas points out that when recent philosophy and social theory have thematized bodies, they have most often analyzed bodies or discourses about bodies as texts.2 Foucault, for example, exposes and criticizes disciplinary discourses through which subjects operate on their own bodies. Feminist and queer theorists such as Judith Butler extend such analyses of discourses about normative bodies. Some students of media, to take a different kind of example, explore representations of bodies and their interactions in film, television, and popular magazines, using interpretive tools from deconstruction or psychoanalysis to theorize how such images interpellate and position their audiences. Less articulated, according to Csordas, especially in recent decades, are critical theoretical interpretations of embodiment as a mode of being-in-the-world. The two theoretical approaches are complementary, he suggests, but not reducible one to the other. He argues that the imbalance should be corrected, and that more work should be done to theorize embodiment as lived. The essays collected here do both. They draw liberally on textual and discourse-analytic approaches to female bodies and feminine meanings, as well as on a large body of normative arguments from moral and political philosophy. The core task of all but the first, however, is to describe embodied being-in-the-world through modalities of sexual and gender difference. As I noted above, when I began writing about female embodiment, existential phenomenology was the primary approach available to American philosophers for such a project. The earliest essay here reprinted, “Throwing Like a Girl,” relies specifically on the theories of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Simone de Beauvoir. Within the phenomenological tradition, Merleau-Ponty took the revolutionary step of theorizing consciousness itself as embodied. The subject who constitutes a world is always an embodied subject. Heidegger and Sartre had already moved away from the Husserlian quest for transcendental phenomenal essences toward conceptualizing being-in-the-world as situated. There is no situation, however, without embodied location and interaction. Conversely, the body as lived is always layered with social and historical meaning and is not some primitive matter prior to or underlying economic and political relations or cultural meanings. Simone de Beauvoir deepened this point by thematizing sexual difference as constitutive of much situated being-in-the-world. More recent French philosophy criticized existential phenomenology on many grounds. Its concept of consciousness, even when embodied, assumes the subject as unitary and original to experience. The normative commitments of existential phenomenology express a naive humanism 2. Thomas J. Csordas, “Embodiment and Cultural Phenomenology,” in Perspectives on Embodiment: The Intersections of Nature and Culture, ed. Gail Weiss and Honi Fern Haber (New York: Routledge, 1997), 143−62. 8 INTRODUCTION insufficiently aware of social plurality and the forms that power and repression take in well-intentioned liberal law and social criticism. After reading Lacan, Foucault, Derrida, Kristeva, Deleuze, Irigaray, and Bourdieu, we cannot be so innocent as to believe that phenomenology can discover a “pure” embodied experience prior to ideology and science. Most of the essays in this book are influenced by these writers often called postmodern, and by their critical reaction to the existential phenomenological tradition. On the other side of this critique it seems to me that one can no longer say that phenomenology is a rigorous method, but more that it is an approach to inquiry. It is notable that some Anglo-American philosophers and social theorists who for many years aligned themselves with these French postmodern thinkers have in recent years become more interested in the French phenomenologists. For some time now they have studied the work of Emmanuel Levinas, about whom Derrida says so much. More recently, Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy seems to be gaining renewed interest. Recent feminist scholarship on Simone de Beauvoir’s existentialism, moreover, has reevaluated her continuing contribution to feminist thought, and several writers now interpret her philosophical framework as closer to Merleau-Ponty’s than to Jean-Paul Sartre’s.3 One of the reasons for continuing scholarly attention to Beauvoir, Merleau-Ponty, and others in the tradition of existential phenomenology, I believe, is that this philosophy offers a unique approach to theorizing subjectivity. An existential phenomenological approach aims to speak from the point of view of the constituted subject’s experience, in ways that complement but do not duplicate the observational or interpretive methods of Foucault, Butler, or Bourdieu. Phenomenology, says Merleau-Ponty, “tries to give a direct description of our experience as it is, without taking account of its psychological origin and the causal explanation which the scientist, the historian or the sociologist may be able to provide.”4 In Merleau-Ponty’s particular theorizing, the consciousness that constitutes its world is the body as lived in a tangible encounter with human and nonhuman others. The descriptive phenomenologist’s task is to reveal the sense “where the paths of my various experiences intersect, and also where by own and other people’s interact and engage each other like gears.”5 Elizabeth Grosz argues that phenomenological description of lived body experience makes unique contributions to feminist philosophy, 3. See, for example, Toril Moi, What Is a Woman?: And Other Essays (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); Debra B. Bergoffen, Philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir: Gendered Phenomenologies, Erotic Generosities (Albany: State University of New York, 1997); and Sonia Kruks, Retrieving Experience: Subjectivity and Recognition in Feminist Politics (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2001). 4. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (New York: Humanities Press, 1962), vii. 5. Ibid, viii. INTRODUCTION 9 alongside more psychoanalytic, deconstructionist, and ontological theories. She suggests that theorizing lived embodiment disrupts many dichotomies that structure more abstract thought—such as those distinguishing private and public, self and other, nature and culture. Grosz properly cautions against taking phenomenology to describe a foundational experience unconditioned by power and ideology. She argues, nevertheless, that “without some acknowledgment of the formative role of experience in the establishment of knowledges, feminism has no grounds from which to dispute patriarchal norms.”6 Sonia Kruks likewise recommends phenomenological descriptions of lived body experience as an important resource for feminist projects of social criticism and transformation. Reflective inquiry that aims to express embodied being-in-the-world captures some of the feeling that can motivate social criticism and political organization. Descriptions of lived female and feminine experience can reveal reasons that differently situated women may have to sympathize with one another’s embodied situation, while at the same time remaining sufficiently vague to allow for concrete variation.7 Order and Themes of the Essays How do girls and women constitute their experienced world through their movement and orientation in places? What are some of the feelings of ambivalence, pleasure, power, shame, objectification, and solidarity that girls and women have about bodies, their shape, flows, and capacities? How do the things and people we touch and are touched by become a material support for or extension of ourselves? To the extent that women occupy relatively disadvantaged positions in gendered power and role structures, how, if at all, is our subordination embodied? These are the kinds of questions with which I approach themes and subjects of female experience in this volume. I have ordered them in the manner that seems thematically most sensible, rather than according to the chronology of their composition. Thus the first essay of this book, “Lived Body vs. Gender,” is one of the most recently written. It evaluates Toril Moi’s arguments for abandoning the concept of gender for feminist theory and replacing it with the concept of lived body derived from existential phenomenology. I agree with Moi that lived body is a better concept than gender as a category theorizing subjectivity. I argue, however, that we need to retain and reposition a concept of gender for theorizing social structure. I begin 6. Elizabeth A. Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1994), 236−48. 7. Sonia Kruks, Retrieving Experience: Subjectivity and Recognition in Feminist Politics (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2001). 10 INTRODUCTION with this essay because it is the most methodological and programmatic in the volume. It reviews a history of theoretical debates in feminist theory in the last two decades and explains the meaning and function of the category of lived body. Thus this essay serves as a theoretical introduction to some of the concepts applied in the rest of the essays. The next cluster of essays reflects on core elements of female body experience: movement in space, pregnancy, being breasted, menstruating. As mentioned above, “Throwing Like a Girl” describes experience and oppressions of feminine styles of comportment. Not all women necessarily express feminine motility and spatiality, which I describe as moving in a constricted space; some men do, moreover, though not many, and often only when working at it. Although there is something a bit dated about the way the essay expresses its feminist sentiments, I reprint it here because many teachers and students have told me that they continue to read the essay and find exciting the discussion it generates. By no means all women become pregnant and give birth; some actively resist pressures to bear children either at certain times in their lives or for their entire lives. The very forces that would make childbearing normative for women, I suggest, also tend to rob those women who do choose to bear and birth children of the subjectivity of the experience. From the point of view of dominant discourse, pregnancy is a deviant condition, a temporary inconvenience instrumental to the social value of babies. “Pregnant Embodiment” takes a different perspective on pregnancy. What happens when we think of being pregnant as an intrinsic value, and describe it less as a process of producing a baby and more as a way of being-in-the-world with uniquely interesting characteristics? I take my main textual inspiration in this essay from some of Julia Kristeva’s work, as well as from ideas of the women’s health movement of the early 1980s. The next two essays thematize aspects of female embodiment nearly universal to women, having breasts and menstruating. Women live each of these aspects of female embodiment in historically, culturally, and individually variable ways. While each essay tries to recognize such sociohistorical specificity, their level is too abstract to analyze these empirical differences. Both try to lay out some of the general meanings of female body experience and our encounter with normatively masculine institutions. “Breasted Experience” relies on Luce Irigaray’s distinctions between a dominant Western specular ontology of solids and her vision of a tactile ontology of fluids. “Menstrual Meditations,” the most recently written essay in this book, returns to the work of Simone de Beauvoir and also relies on the research of some remarkable contemporary feminist social scientists. The final cluster of essays, on clothes, home, and old-age residences, explore aspects of everyday life gendered as feminine but which, I argue, harbor universalizable normative ideals. Both “Women Recovering Our INTRODUCTION 11 Clothes” and “House and Home: Feminist Variations on a Theme” apply a method I derive from Irigaray. They first describe a mode of existence in its femininity as constructed by patriarchal norms, and reflect on the devaluated position in which this puts women who learn to live as feminine. Then they flip the valuation and ask whether this position of feminine other can serve as a standpoint from which to criticize dominant social relations and generate alternative ideals. The last essay in the volume, “A Room of One’s Own: Privacy, Old Age, and Nursing Homes,” extends the social criticism begun in the essay on home to argue that nursing homes typically deny to frail old people one of the material bases of self. While these essays take as their subject central aspects of women’s experience, I do not claim that they represent a definitive account of female body experience. They are idiosyncratic even as I hope that they communicate with the thoughts and feelings of readers. Many additional themes and questions deserve our descriptive and analytical attention. 1 Lived Body vs. Gender: Reflections on Social Structure and Subjectivity In her thorough and provocative essay “What Is a Woman?” Toril Moi argues that recent feminist and queer theorizing has brought us to the end of a constructivist gender rope.1 While feminist theory of the 1970s found a distinction between sex and gender liberating for both theory and practice, subsequent feminist and queer critiques have rightly questioned the distinction. By destabilizing categories of both biological sex and gender identity, recent deconstructive approaches to feminist and queer theorizing have opened greater possibilities for thinking a plurality of intersecting identities and practices. Deconstructive challenge to the sex/gender distinction has increasingly abstracted from embodiment, however, at the same time that it has rendered a concept of gender virtually useless for theorizing subjectivity and identity. At this theoretical pass, Moi proposes that we throw over the concept of gender altogether and renew a concept of the lived body derived from existential phenomenology, as a means of theorizing sexual subjectivity without danger of either biological reductionism or gender essentialism. Moi is not alone in proposing that feminist and queer theory question the usefulness of a concept of gender even more deeply than have deconstructive critiques, and I will refer to other recent writings that make similar points in the course of my discussion. I concentrate on Moi because her analysis of the evolution of our troubles with gender is so thorough, and because I find attractive her proposal that feminist and queer theory adopt a concept of the lived body to do the work that she argues that the category of gender does not do well. I find Moi’s argu1. Toril Moi, “What Is a Woman?” in What Is a Woman and Other Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). 12 LIVED BODY VS. GENDER 13 ment incomplete, however. While she is correct that gender is a problematic concept for theorizing subjectivity, there are or ought to be other aspects of feminist and queer theorizing that cannot do without a concept of gender. By reflecting on Moi’s account of recent feminist and queer theorizing, we discover that these aspects, which concern social structure more than subjectivity and identity, have been relatively neglected. The oppression of women and people who transgress heterosexual norms occurs through systemic processes and social structures which need description that uses different concepts from those appropriate for describing subjects and their experience. Moi’s proposal to reconstitute a concept of the lived body helps for the latter, but for the former we need a reconstituted concept of gender. I. The Sex-Gender Distinction Early feminist appropriations of what until then had been an obscure psychological distinction between gender, as referring to self-conception and behavior, and sex, as referring to anatomy and physiology, were very theoretically and politically productive. At this theoretical moment challenging the conviction that “biology is destiny” was an important feminist project. In order to argue for opening wider opportunities for women, we needed ways to conceptualize capacities and dispositions of members of both sexes that distanced behavior, temperament, and achievement from biological or natural explanations. A distinction between sex and gender served this purpose. Feminists could affirm that of course men and women are “different” in physique and reproductive function, while denying that these differences have any relevance for the opportunities members of the sexes should have or the activities that they should engage in. Such gender rules and expectations are socially constituted and socially changeable. Much of this early second-wave feminist theorizing invoked an ideal of equality for women that envisioned an end to gender. “Androgyny” named the ideal that many feminists theorized, a social condition in which biological sex would have no implications for a person’s life prospects, or the way people treated one another (including, importantly, in the most consistent of these theories, one’s choice of sex partners). These androgynous persons in the transformed liberated society would have no categorically distinct forms of dress, comportment, occupations, propensities toward aggression or passivity, associated with their embodiment. We would all be just people with various bodies.2 2. For one statement of the androgynous ideal, see Ann Ferguson, “Androgyny as an Ideal for Human Development,” in Sexual Democracy: Women, Oppression, and Revolution (Westview, Conn.: Allen and Unwin, 1991). 14 ON FEMALE BODY EXPERIENCE This appeal to an ideal of androgyny was short lived. Some of the turning-point texts of feminist theory in the late 1970s and early 1980s turned instead to accounts of the social and psychological specificities of femininely gendered identity and social perspective derived from gender roles. While not at all explained by biological distinctions between men and women, nevertheless there are deep social divisions of masculine and feminine gendered dispositions and experience which have implications for the psychic lives of men and women, their interactions with one another, their dispositions to care for children or exercise authority. Nancy Chodorow, Carol Gilligan, Nancy Hartsock, and others developed theories of feminine gender identities as expressing a general structure of subjectivity and social standpoint in significant ways defining the lives and possibilities of most women.3 No sooner had such a general account of feminine gender identity emerged than it came under attack as “essentialist.” These accounts assume mothering as defining the experience of most women. They fail to inquire about the differences that race or class positioning make to caring practices, and they assume that women are or wish to be in relationships with men. They extrapolate from the historical specificity of twentieth-century affluent urban nuclear families and occupational structures, ignoring historical and cross-cultural specifications in the organization of family and work. Although the criticisms were not always voiced in the fairest way, most feminist theorists took their points to heart. Queer theory broke into this dissolution of gender theory in the person of writers such as Diana Fuss and Judith Butler. Because Moi focuses on Butler’s subversion of the sex-gender distinction, and I will support Moi’s conclusion in specific respects, I will follow Moi in this focus. In Gender Trouble, Butler questioned the motive of feminist theory to seek a theory of gender identity. Feminists believe they need such a general theory of gender, she argued, in order to know what is the subject of feminist politics. Feminism has no meaning as a specific transformative social movement, it is thought, without an account of the “agent” of change, the subject to be liberated; that subject is “woman,” and “gender” is the concept that displays what a woman is. As gendered, “women” are distinct from the biological sex, female. Butler argued, however, that the feminist distinction between sex and gender nevertheless retains a binarism of stable categorical complementarity between male and female, which reproduces a logic of heterosexual normativity. The very distinction between sex and gender ought to be put 3. Nancy Chodorow, The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978); Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982); Nancy C. M. Hartsock, Money, Sex, and Power: Toward a Feminist Historical Materialism (Boston; Longman, 1983). LIVED BODY VS. GENDER 15 in question in order to challenge any reliance on a distinction between nature and culture, or any conception that subjects have inner lives to which an idea of stable gender identity corresponds. Gender is nothing other than a social performative. The discursive rules of normative heterosexuality produce gendered performances that subjects reiterate and cite; the sexing of bodies themselves derives from such performatives. In this process of reiterated gender performance some persons become constituted as abject, outside the heterosexual binary. Radical politics, then, consists in troubling the gender binaries and playing with gender citation. In response to the critical reaction of some commentators that her theory of gender as performance makes bodies and sexual identity simply a product of discourse, in Bodies That Matter Butler argues that the materiality of sexed bodies is itself socially constituted. She insists that such production of bodies is not “idealist,” and that a valuation of “materialism” over “idealism” itself relies on a questionable binary logic. Moi does not refute Butler’s arguments, which she takes to be cogent, given their terms and methods. She argues nevertheless that ideals of subjectivity and sexuality have become increasingly abstract in this train of theorizing that begins with the sex-gender distinction and ends deconstructing a material-ideal dichotomy. It is not clear at this point what lived problems the theory addresses or how the concepts help people understand and describe their experience. Butler successfully calls into question the logic of the sex-gender distinction, yet her theorizing never goes beyond these terms and remains tied to them. This line of critique, Moi argues, calls for throwing off the idea of gender altogether as useful for understanding subjectivity and identity. Queer theory and practice bend gender meanings, aiming to loosen them from the normative polarities of hegemonic masculinity and femininity. Moi suggests that queer and feminist theorists should make a break with gender altogether. II. The Lived Body For an alternative to the categories of sex and gender, Moi proposes to return to the framework of existential phenomenology on which Simone de Beauvoir relies.4 The central category for this theoretical approach is 4. Sonia Kruks gives a reading of the existentialism of Simone de Beauvoir that aims to respond to contemporary conundrums of “identity politics” in feminist theory. She too proposes to understand Beauvoir as developing a concept of the lived body useful for feminist theory, and she argues that interpretations of Beauvoir have failed to appreciate the extent to which she was influenced by Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s concept of the lived body; see Kruks, “Freedoms That Matter: Subjectivity and Situation in the Work of Beauvoir, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty,” in Retrieving Experience: Subjectivity and Recognition in Feminist Politics (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2001), 27–51. Debra B. Bergoffen also recommends a return to Simone de Beauvoir as a way out of conundrums of 16 ON FEMALE BODY EXPERIENCE that of the lived body. A reconstituted concept of the lived body, Moi argues, would offer feminists an idea that can serve the function we have wanted from the sex-gender categorization, without bringing its problems. The lived body is a unified idea of a physical body acting and experiencing in a specific sociocultural context; it is body-in-situation. For existentialist theory, situation denotes the produce of facticity and freedom. The person always faces the material facts of her body and its relation to a given environment. Her bodily organs have certain feeling capacities and function in determinate ways; her size, age, health, and training make her capable of strength and movement in relation to her environment in specific ways. Her skin has a particular color, her face determinate features, her hair particular color and texture, all with their own aesthetic properties. Her specific body lives in a specific context— crowded by other people, anchored to the earth by gravity, surrounded by buildings and streets with a unique history, hearing particular languages, having food and shelter available, or not, as a result of culturally specific social processes that make specific requirements on her to access them. All these concrete material relations of a person’s bodily existence and her physical and social environment constitute her facticity. The person, however, is an actor; she has an ontological freedom to construct herself in relation to this facticity. The human actor has specific projects, things she aims to accomplish, ways she aims to express herself, make her mark on the world, transform her surroundings and relationships. Often these are projects she engages in jointly with others. Situation, then, is the way that the facts of embodiment, social and physical environment, appear in light of the projects a person has. She finds that her movements are awkward in relation to her desire to dance. She sees the huge city with its thousand-year history as an opportunity for learning about her ancestors. “To claim that the body is a situation is to acknowledge that the meaning of a woman’s body is bound up with the way she uses her freedom” (Moi, “Woman,” 65). How does Moi propose that the idea of the lived body might replace that of gender, and the distinction between sex and gender? Like the category of sex, that of the lived body can refer to the specific physical facts of bodies, including sexual and reproductive differentiation. “Woman” and “man” name the physical facticity of certain bodies, some with penises, others with clitorises and breasts, each with differing experiences of desire and sexual feeling. A category of lived body, moreover, need not make sexual difference dimorphous; some bodies have gender theorizing to which recent feminist and queer theories have come. See Bergoffen, “Simone de Beauvoir: Disrupting the Metonymy of Gender,” in Resistance, Flight, Creation: Feminist Enactments of French Philosophy, ed. Dorothea Olkowski (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2000), 97–119. LIVED BODY VS. GENDER 17 physical traits like those of men in certain respects, those of women in others. People experience their desires and feeling in diverse ways that do not neatly correlate with sexual dimorphism or heterosexual norms. As a lived body, moreover, perceptual capacities and motility are not distinct from association with sexual specificity; nor is size, bone structure or skin color. Most important for the proposal Moi makes, the concept of the lived body, unlike the concept of sex, is not biologistic. It does not refer to an objectivist scientific account that generalizes laws of physiology and function. A scientific approach to bodies proceeds at a significantly higher level of abstraction than does a description of bodies as lived. The idea of the lived body thus can bring the physical facts of different bodies into theory without the reductionist and dichotomous implications of the category of “sex.” The idea of the lived body, moreover, refuses the distinction between nature and culture that grounds a distinction between sex and gender. The body as lived is always enculturated: by the phonemes a body learns to pronounce at a very early age, by the clothes the person wears that mark her nation, her age, her occupational status, and in what is culturally expected or required of women. The body is enculturated by habits of comportment distinctive to interactional settings of business or pleasure; often they are specific to locale or group. Contexts of discourse and interaction position persons in systems of evaluation and expectations which often implicate their embodied being; the person experiences herself as looked at in certain ways, described in her physical being in certain ways, she experiences the bodily reactions of others to her, and she reacts to them. The diverse phenomena that have come under the rubric of “gender” in feminist theory can be redescribed in the idea of lived body as some among many forms of bodily habitus and interactions with others that we enact and experience. In such redescription we find that Butler is right in at least this respect: it is a mystification to attribute the ways of being associated with the category “gender” to some inner core of identity of a subject, whether understood as “natural” or acquired. In a recent essay Linda Nicholson similarly proposes that feminist and queer theory focus on the sociohistorical differentiation of bodies as lived, rather than maintain a distinction between biological sex and embodiment and gender as historically variable. To the extent that this distinction between sex and gender remains, feminist theory continues a “biological foundationalism,” as distinct from biological reductionism. The study of sexuality, reproduction, and the roles assigned to men and women should consist in reading bodies themselves and not presume a nature/culture distinction that considers gender as “merely cultural.”5 5. Linda Nicholson, “Interpreting Gender,” in The Play of Reason: From the Modern to the Postmodern (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1999), 53–76. 18 ON FEMALE BODY EXPERIENCE The idea of the lived body thus does the work the category “gender” has done, but better and more. It does this work better because the category of the lived body allows description of the habits and interactions of men with women, women with women, and men with men in ways that can attend to the plural possibilities of comportment, without necessary reduction to the normative heterosexual binary of “masculine” and “feminine.” It does more because it helps avoid a problem generated by use of ascriptive general categories such as “gender,” “race,” “nationality,” “sexual orientation,” to describe the constructed identities of individuals, namely the additive character that identities appear to have under this description. If we conceptualize individual identities as constituted by the diverse group identities—gender, race, class, sexual orientation, and so on—there seems to be a mystery about both how persons are individualized, and how these different group identities combine in the person. With the idea of the lived body there is no such puzzle. Each person is a distinctive body, with specific features, capacities, and desires that are similar to and different from those of others in determinate respects. She is born in a particular place and time, is raised in a particular family setting, and all these have specific sociocultural histories that stand in relation to the history of others in particular ways. What we call categories of gender, race, ethnicity, etc., are shorthand for a set of structures that position persons, a point to which I will return. They are not properly theorized as general group identities that add together to constitute individual identities. The individual person lives out her unique body in a sociohistorical context of the behavior and expectations of others, but she does not have to worry about constituting her identity from a set of generalized “pop-beads” strung together.6 By means of a category of the lived body, then, “one can arrive at a highly historicized and concrete understanding of bodies and subjectivity without relying on the sex-gender distinction that Butler takes as axiomatic” (Moi, “Woman,” 46). The idea of the lived body recognizes that a person’s subjectivity is conditioned by sociocultural facts and the behavior and expectations of others in ways that she has not chosen. At the same time, the theory of the lived body says that each person takes up and acts in relation to these unchosen facts in her own way. To consider the body as a situation . . . is to consider both the fact of being a specific kind of body and the meaning that concrete body has for the situated individual. This is not the equivalent of either sex or gender. The same is true for “lived experience” which encompasses our experience of all kinds of situations (race, class, nationality, etc.) and is a far more wide-ranging concept than the highly psychologizing concept of gender identity. (Moi, “Woman,” 81) 6. See Elizabeth Spelman, Inessential Woman: Problems of Exclusion in Feminist Thought (Boston: Beacon Press, 1988). LIVED BODY VS. GENDER 19 III. Is the Lived Body Enough? Toril Moi argues that a concept of the lived body serves feminist theoretical purposes better than a concept of gender. She defines those purposes as providing a theory of subjectivity and the body, and providing an understanding of what it means to be a woman or man in a particular society (“Woman,” 4, 36, 14). Feminist theory, she says, ought to become a project of dispelling confusions concerning bodies, sex, sexuality, sexual difference, and the power relations among women and men, heterosexuals and homosexuals (120). This last phrase about power relations is extremely vague. Depending on how it is specified, the scope of theorizing power relations might fall beyond what I take as Moi’s major emphasis in defining the tasks of feminist theory. She defines this theory as focusing on subjectivity, who one is as an agent, the attributes and capacities one has for experience, the relations with others that contribute to one’s sense of self. In the essay I referred to earlier, Linda Nicholson also seems to consider that the theoretical function a concept of gender has meant to serve is one of theorizing self-identity and the social constitution of the human character. Recent discussions questioning the stability of gender and the adequacy of a sex-gender distinction well reveal dilemmas and increasing abstraction into which feminist and queer theory have been forced or to which they have had to respond. These problems with a concept of gender have surfaced at least partly because gender aims to be a general category, but subjectivity is always particular. Moi’s appropriation of the concept of the lived body offers more refined tools for theorizing sexed subjectivity, and the experience of differently situated men and women, than does the more blunt category of gender. Agreeing with this means dispensing with gender altogether, however, only if the projects of feminist and queer theories consist only in theorizing subjectivity. But I think they are not. The debates about gender and essentialism that Moi aims to bring to a close with her arguments have, I think, tended to narrow the interests of feminists and queer theorists to issues of experience, identity, and subjectivity. Her discussion clears the way for asking whether other aspects of a project for feminist and queer theory have been obscured by these debates, for which a resituated concept of gender might still be needed. In the remaining pages of this essay I want to suggest that a concept of gender is important for theorizing social structures and their implications for the freedom and well being of persons. As I understand them, feminist and queer theory consist not only in giving account of the meaning of the lives of women and men in all their relational and sexual diversity. Nor are they only about analyzing how discourses construct subjects and the stereotypical or defamatory aspects of some of these discourses that contribute to the suffering of some men and women who fall on the wrong side of normalizing processes. Feminist and queer theories are also projects of social criticism. These are 20 ON FEMALE BODY EXPERIENCE theoretical efforts to identify certain wrongful harms or injustices, locate and explain their sources in institutions and social relations, and propose directions for institutionally oriented action to change them. This latter set of tasks requires the theorist to have an account not only of individual experience, subjectivity, and identity, but also of social structures. In other writings I have articulated a concept of social structure specifically directed at the project of giving an institutional account of sources of injustice in response to the dilemmas that emerge from claiming that individuals share group identities.7 Structures denote the confluence of institutional rules and interactive routines, mobilization of resources, and physical structures, which constitute the historical givens in relation to which individuals act, and which are relatively stable over time. Structures also connote the wider social outcomes that result from the confluence of many individual actions within given institutional relations, whose collective consequences often do not bear the mark of any person or group’s intention. Alexander Wendt distinguishes two levels of kinds of structure, micro and macro levels. Micro structures refer to structural analysis of interaction. The patterning of practices and interactive routines, the rules which actors implicitly and explicitly follow and the resources and instruments they mobilize in their interactions can all be regarded as structured. Gender structures are very important to interactions at this micro level. In recommending that feminist social theory complement attention to subjectivity and identity with renewed attention to social structures, however, I am more concerned with what Wendt refers to as the macro level, which involves “multiply realizable outcomes.”8 That is to say, social theory that wishes to understand and criticize the constraints on individuals and groups that render them relatively unfree and limited in their opportunities in relation to others need to have a picture of large-scale systemic outcomes of the operations of many institutions and practices which produce outcomes that constrain some people in specific ways at the same time that they enable others. Macro structures depend on micro-level interactions for their production and reproduction, according to Wendt, but their form and the ways they constrain and enable cannot be reduced to effects of particular interactions. Social structures position individuals in relations of labor and production, power and subordination, desire and sexuality, prestige and status. 7. See my Inclusion and Democracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), especially chapter 3; see also “Equality of Whom? Social Groups and Judgments of Injustice,” Journal of Political Philosophy 9.1 (March 2001): 1–18. There I build a definition of social structures by drawing primarily on ideas of Peter Blau, Anthony Giddens, and JeanPaul Sartre. 8. Alexander Wendt, Social Theory and International Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), chapter 4. LIVED BODY VS. GENDER 21 The way a person is positioned in structures is as much a function of how other people treat him or her within various institutional settings as of the attitude a person takes to himself or herself. Any individual occupies multiple positions in structures, and these positionings become differently salient depending on the institutional setting and the position of others there. From the point of view of critical social theory, the main reason to care about structures is in order to have an account of the constitution and causes of social inequality. Some people encounter relative constraints in their freedom and material well-being as the cumulative effect of the possibilities of their social positions, as compared with others who in their social positions have more options or easier access to benefits. Social groups defined by caste, class, race, age, ethnicity, and, of course, gender, name subjective identities less than axes of structural inequality. They name structural positions whose occupants are privileged or disadvantaged in relation to one another due to the adherence of actors to institutional rules and norms and the pursuit of their interests and goals within institutions. A structural account offers a way of understanding inequality of opportunity, oppression and domination, that does not seek individualized perpetrators but rather considers most actors complicit in its production, to a greater or lesser degree. Nancy Folbre conceptualizes such issues of social inequality in terms she calls “structures of constraint.”9 Structures of constraint include sets of asset distributions, rules, norms, and preferences that afford more freedom and opportunity for benefits to some than others. Constraints define the range of options available to individuals, or the costs of pursuing some options rather than others: time and money as basic assets. Legal rules function as important constraints, but so do culture norms. They impose a “price” on nonconformity. Preferences can be constraints when they conflict with one another. A configuration of particular assets, rules, norms, and preferences creates the constraints that define what we call social groups based on gender, class, race, age, and so on. Thus membership in the group called “women” is the product of a loose configuration of different structural factors. To describe and explain some of the structures and processes that effect differential opportunities and privileges in contemporary society, I suggest, we cannot do without a concept of gender. Feminist and queer theories need conceptual tools to describe the rules and practices of institutions that presume differing roles for men and women, and/or presume that men and women are coupled with each other in intimate relations. We need tools for understanding how and why certain patterns in the allocation of tasks or status recognition remain persistent in ways that limit the options of many women and of most people whose sexual and 9. Nancy Folbre, Who Pays for the Kids? Gender and the Structures of Constraint (New York: Routledge, 1994), especially chapter 2. 22 ON FEMALE BODY EXPERIENCE intimate choices deviate from heterosexual norms. An important conceptual shift occurs, however, when we understand the concept of gender as a tool for theorizing structures more than subjects. We no longer need to ascribe a single or shared gender identity to men and women. My own effort to respond to critiques of early feminist theories of gender turned in this direction of theorizing gender as an attribute of social structures more than of persons. In “Gender as Seriality: Thinking about Women as a Social Collective,” I draw on a concept from Sartre’s later philosophy, his idea of a series.10 Gender, I suggest there, is best understood as a particular form of the social positioning of lived bodies in relation to one another within historically and socially specific institutions and processes that have material effects on the environment in which people act and reproduce relations of power and privilege among them. On this account, what it means to say that individual persons are “gendered” is that we all find ourselves passively grouped according to these structural relations, in ways too impersonal to ground identity. There I proposed that there are two basic axes of gender structures: a sexual division of labor and normative heterosexuality. Here I will take a lead from Bob Connell and add to these a third axis, gendered hierarchies of power.11 The structuring of work and occupations by gender is a basic aspect of all modern societies (and many premodern societies), with far-reaching consequences for the lives of individuals and the constraints and opportunities they face. The core of a gendered division of labor in modern societies is the division between “private” and “public” work. An aspect of the basic structure of these societies is that the work of caring—for persons, their bodily needs, their emotional well being, and the maintenance of their dwellings—takes place primarily in unpaid labor in private homes. While recent decades have seen some changes in the allocation of their work between men and women, it is still the case that this unpaid caring and household work falls primarily to women. The operations of the entire society depend on the regular performance of this work, yet it goes relatively unnoticed and little valued. The persons to whom this work is assigned have less time and energy to devote to other tasks and activities than do those who do less of it. This gendered division of labor persists apparently because people collectively do not wish to organize broadly funded public services that take more collective responsibility for care work. Despite many significant changes in gender ideas and ideology in contemporary societies, there has been little change in this basic division of labor. Indeed, neo-liberal economic policies 10. In I. M. Young, Intersecting Voices: Dilemmas of Gender, Political Philosophy, and Policy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997). 11. R. W. Connell, Gender and Power (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1987). LIVED BODY VS. GENDER 23 across the globe have had the effect of retrenching this division where it may have loosened. Feminist social and political theory in the last twenty years has documented dozens of ways that this gendered structure constrains the opportunities of those persons doing unpaid care work, mostly women.12 They work longer hours than others and are rendered dependent on other people for provision of their needs, which makes them vulnerable to poverty or abuse. Feminist researchers have also documented how this basic structure underlies occupational divisions in public paid work according to gender. When occupations involve caring they tend to become female-gendered. Because many women arrange their public work lives in relation to caring responsibilities, only a relatively small number of occupations welcome them, which helps keep wages low in those occupations. The structuring of both private and public work along these lines exhibits gendered hierarchies of status and power, not to mention financial reward. It might be thought that these structural consequences of a sexual division of labor describe Western industrial societies primarily. Theorized at the right level of categorical generality, however, similar structures describe much about many less developed countries, especially in urban life. As some feminist scholars of development have argued, for example, both government policy and the policies of international organizations such as the International Monetary Fund implicitly rely on the assumption that unpaid domestic labor is infinitely expandable, and that household caretakers are available to take up the slack in meeting the needs of their family members when food subsidies are slashed, school fees go up, or health clinics are closed. A structural account of the sexual division of labor, that is, does not assume that this division of labor has the same content across societies. It is a theoretical framework that asks whether there are tasks and occupations usually performed by members of one sex or the other, and/or whether the social norms and cultural products of the society tend to represent certain tasks or occupations as more appropriately performed by members of one sex or the other. For any society, both today and in the past, the answer is usually yes, but there is nevertheless considerable variation among them in which occupations are sex-associated, the ideologies often legitimating these associations, how many tasks are sextyped, and what implications this sexual division of labor has for the distribution of resources among persons, their relative status, and the constraints and opportunities that condition their lives. 12. Nancy Folbre’s book, cited above, is an excellent analysis of the operations of these constraints in several countries in Europe, Asia, and Latin America, as well as the United States. 24 ON FEMALE BODY EXPERIENCE A second axis of gender structuring in our society is normative heterosexuality. This structuring consists in the diverse institutional and ideological facts that privilege heterosexual coupling. These include the form and implications of many legal institutions, many rules and policies of private organizations in allocating positions and benefits, the structuring of schooling and mainstream media to accord with these institutions, as well as the assumptions many people make in their everyday interactions with others. Together such social facts make structures with differential consequences on the lives of different men and women, and which sometimes produce serious suffering or wrongful limitations on freedom. The system of normative heterosexuality significantly constrains the lives of men and women, with all their varying sexual and desiring inclinations, motivating some to adjust their lives in ways they believe will bring them material reward and acceptance, and others to carve out lives in the interstices of social relations where their desires and projects do not fit, or openly to rebel. Cheshire Calhoun argues that lesbian and gay subordination is different in form from the structural constraints on the lives of women or people of color, for example. Whereas structures of female subordination or institutionalized racism confine people perceived as belonging to certain categories as having certain places or positions, Calhoun argues that persons who transgress heterosexual norms have no legitimized place at all in political citizenship, civil society, or private spheres. Structures of normative heterosexuality constrain lesbians and gay men by enforcing their invisibility.13 Institutionalized valuations of particular associations of maleness or masculinity condition hierarchies of power in ways that constrain the possible actions of many people seem quite resistant to change. Positions and practices of institutionalized and organized violence are most important here—military and police forces, prison systems, etc. In general, the structuring of state institutions, corporations, and other bureaucracies according to hierarchies of decision making authority and status affords some people significant privileges and freedom—and these are usually men—at the same time that they limit, constrain, and subordinate others, including most women and many men. Gendered hierarchies of power intersect with a sexual division of labor and normative heterosexuality in many ways to reproduce a sense of entitlement of men to women’s service and an association of heterosexual masculinity with force and command. When describing social structures as gendered, it is not necessary to make generalizations about men and women nor is it necessary to reduce varying gender structures to a common principle. A gendered occupational division of labor may strongly code certain occupations as female 13. Cheshire Calhoun, Feminism, the Family, and the Politics of the Closet: Lesbian and Gay Displacement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). LIVED BODY VS. GENDER 25 and others as male, and these codings may have far-reaching implications for the power, prestige, and material reward incumbents of each enjoy. Nothing follows from this, however, about what most men or most women do for a living. Recognizing the structures of normative heterosexuality may well result in theorizing plural understandings of gender, varying rules and practices that make expectations on men and women regarding sexual interaction, relation of adults and children, social aesthetics, relationship of persons to workplace roles, and so on— rules that do not share a common logic and in some respects may be in tension with one another. Structures of a gendered hierarchy of power differentiate men from one another according to social roles and dispositions and do not simply differentiate men and women. The most important thing about the analysis is to understand how the rules, relations, and their material consequences produce privileges for some people that underlie an interest in their maintenance at the same time that they limit options of others, cause relative deprivations in their lives, or render them vulnerable to domination and exploitation. In this essay I have agreed with Toril Moi’s proposal that the existential phenomenological category of the lived body is a richer and more flexible concept than gender for theorizing the socially constituted experience of women and men than concepts of either sex or gender. The lived body is particular in its morphology, material similarities, and differences from other bodies. I have argued, moreover, that this proposal should not mean dispensing with a category of gender, but rather confining its use to analysis of social structures for the purposes of understanding certain specific relations of power, opportunity, and resource distribution. An obvious question arises at this point, as to the relation of lived bodies to these structures. Another reason that turning to a concept of lived body may be productive for feminist and queer theory is precisely that it can offer a way of articulating how persons live out their positioning in social structures along with the opportunities and constraints they produce. I do not have the space here to develop the framework for such articulation, and I will offer only a few lines toward a sketch. Gender structures, I said above, are historically given and condition the action and consciousness of individual persons. They precede that action and consciousness. Each person experiences aspects of gender structures as facticity, as sociohistorical givens with which she or he must deal. Every person faces the question of what to wear, for example, and clothing options and conventions derive from multiple structures of profit seeking, class and occupational distinction, income distribution, heterosexual normativity, and spaces and expectations of occasions and activities and the possibilities of conformity and transgression they bring. However limited the choices or the resources to enact them, each person takes up the constrained possibilities that gender structures offer in their own way, forming their own habits as variations on those possi- 26 ON FEMALE BODY EXPERIENCE bilities, or actively trying to resist or refigure them. Gender as structured is also lived through individual bodies, always as personal experiential response and not as a set of attributes that individuals have in common. Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of the habitus offers one interpretation of how generalized social structures are produced and reproduced in the movement and interaction of bodies. Especially in his understanding of gender structures, however, Bourdieu’s understanding of the relation of social structures to actors and experience conceptualizes these structures too rigidly and ahistorically.14 It may be more fruitful to draw on a theory of the lived body like that of Maurice Merleau-Ponty but connect it more explicitly than he does to how the body lives out its positions in social structures of the division of labor, hierarchies of power, and norms of sexuality.15 Under the influence of such a theory of how bodies live out their structured positioning, moreover, one might find that a deconstructive gender theory such as Judith Butler’s appears not as a theory of the determination or constitution of gendered subjects, but as a theory of the variable movements of habituated bodies reacting to, reproducing, and modifying structures. 14. See for example, Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1990), especially chapters 3 and 4. Toril Moi herself explores the implications of Bourdieu’s theory for feminist theory; see “Appropriating Bourdieu: Feminist Theory and Pierre Bourdieu’s Sociology of Culture,” chapter 3 of What Is a Woman?. Bourdieu’s book, La Domination masculine (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1998), assumes that he can generalize about gender structures largely from his observations of Kabylic society in North Africa. 15. Nick Crossley argues that a reconstruction of Merleau-Ponty’s theory of sociality and habit can serve social theory better than Bourdieu’s concept of habitus because Merleau-Ponty’s conceptualization gives more place to freedom and individual difference. See Crossley, “The Phenomenological Habitus and Its Construction,” Theory and Society 30 (2001): 81–120; see also Crossley’s “Habitus, Agency, and Change: Engaging with Bourdieu,” paper presented at “Philosophy of the Social Science,” Czech Academy of Sciences, Prague, May 2001. 2 Throwing Like a Girl: A Phenomenology of Feminine Body Comportment, Motility, and Spatiality In discussing the fundamental significance of lateral space, which is one of the unique spatial dimensions generated by the human upright posture, Erwin Straus pauses at “the remarkable difference in the manner of throwing of the two sexes” (157).1 Citing a study and photographs of young boys and girls, he describes the difference as follows: The girl of five does not make any use of lateral space. She does not stretch her arm sideward; she does not twist her trunk; she does not move her legs, which remain side by side. All she does in preparation for throwing is to lift her right arm forward to the horizontal and to bend the forearm backward in a pronate position. . . . The ball is released without force, speed, or accurate aim. . . . A boy of the same age, when preparing to throw, stretches his right arm sideward and backward; supinates the forearm; twists, turns and bends his trunk; and moves his right foot backward. From this stance, he can support his throwing almost with the full This essay was first presented at a meeting of the Mid-West Division of the Society for Women in Philosophy (SWIP) in October 1977. Versions of the essay were subsequently presented at a session sponsored by SWIP at the Western Division meetings of the American Philosophical Association, April 1978, and at the third annual Merleau-Ponty Circle meeting, Duquesne University, September 1978. Many people in discussions at those meetings contributed gratifying and helpful responses. I am particularly grateful to Professors Sandra Bartky, Claudia Card, Margaret Simons, J. Davidson Alexander, and William McBride for their criticisms and suggestions. Final revisions of the essay were completed while I was a fellow in the National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship in Residence for College Teachers program at the University of Chicago. 1. Erwin W. Straus, “The Upright Posture,” Phenomenological Psychology (New York: Basic Books, 1966), 137–65. References to particular pages are indicated in the text. 27 28 ON FEMALE BODY EXPERIENCE strength of his total motorium. . . . The ball leaves the hand with considerable acceleration; it moves toward its goal in a long flat curve. (157–60)2 Though he does not stop to trouble himself with the problem for long, Straus makes a few remarks in the attempt to explain this “remarkable difference.” Since the difference is observed at such an early age, he says, it seems to be “the manifestation of a biological, not an acquired, difference” (157). He is somewhat at a loss, however, to specify the source of the difference. Since the feminine style of throwing is observed in young children, it cannot result from the development of the breast. Straus provides further evidence against the breast by pointing out that “it seems certain” that the Amazons, who cut off their right breasts, “threw a ball just like our Betty’s, Mary’s and Susan’s” (158). Having thus dismissed the breast, Straus considers the weaker muscle power of the girl as an explanation of the difference but concludes that the girl should be expected to compensate for such relative weakness with the added preparation of reaching around and back. Straus explains the difference in style of throwing by referring to a “feminine attitude” in relation to the world and to space. The difference for him is biologically based, but he denies that it is specifically anatomical. Girls throw in a way different from boys because girls are “feminine.” What is even more amazing than this “explanation” is the fact that a perspective that takes body comportment and movement as definitive for the structure and meaning of human lived experience devotes no more than an incidental page to such a “remarkable difference” between masculine and feminine body comportment and style of movement, for throwing is by no means the only activity in which such a difference can be observed. If there are indeed typically “feminine” styles of body comportment and movement, this should generate for the existential phenomenologist a concern to specify such a differentiation of the modalities of the lived body. Yet Straus is by no means alone in his failure to describe the modalities, meaning, and implications of the difference between “masculine” and “feminine” body comportment and movement. A virtue of Straus’s account of the typical difference of the sexes in throwing is that he does not explain this difference on the basis of physical attributes. Straus is convinced, however, that the early age at which 2. Studies continue to be performed that arrive at similar observations. See, for example, Lolas E. Kalverson, Mary Ann Robertson, M. Joanne Safrit, and Thomas W. Roberts, “Effect of Guided Practice on Overhand Throw Ball Velocities of Kindergarten Children,” Research Quarterly (American Alliance for Health, Physical Education, and Recreation) 48 (May 1977): 311–18. The study found that boys achieved significantly greater velocities than girls did. See also F. J. J. Buytendijk’s remarks in Woman: A Contemporary View (New York: Newman Press, 1968), 144–45. In raising the example of throwing, Buytendijk is concerned to stress, as am I in this essay, that the important thing to investigate is not the strictly physical phenomenon, but rather the manner in which each sex projects her or his Being-in-the-world through movement. THROWING LIKE A GIRL 29 the difference appears shows that it is not an acquired difference, and thus he is forced back onto a mysterious “feminine essence” in order to explain it. The feminist denial that the real differences in behavior and psychology between men and women can be attributed to some natural and eternal feminine essence is perhaps most thoroughly and systematically expressed by Beauvoir. Every human existence is defined by its situation; the particular existence of the female person is no less defined by the historical, cultural, social, and economic limits of her situation. We reduce women’s condition simply to unintelligibility if we “explain” it by appeal to some natural and ahistorical feminine essence. In denying such a feminine essence, however, we should not fall into that “nominalism” that denies the real differences in the behavior and experiences of men and women. Even though there is no eternal feminine essence, there is “a common basis which underlies every individual female existence in the present state of education and custom.”3 The situation of women within a given sociohistorical set of circumstances, despite the individual variation in each woman’s experience, opportunities, and possibilities, has a unity that can be described and made intelligible. It should be emphasized, however, that this unity is specific to a particular social formation during a particular epoch. Beauvoir proceeds to give such an account of the situation of women with remarkable depth, clarity, and ingenuity. Yet she also, to a large extent, fails to give a place to the status and orientation of the woman’s body as relating to its surroundings in living action. When Beauvoir does talk about the woman’s bodily being and her physical relation to her surroundings, she tends to focus on the more evident facts of a woman’s physiology. She discusses how women experience the body as a burden, how the hormonal and physiological changes the body undergoes at puberty, during menstruation and pregnancy, are felt to be fearful and mysterious, and she claims that these phenomena weigh down the woman’s existence by tying her to nature, immanence, and the requirements of the species at the expense of her own individuality.4 By largely ignoring the situatedness of the woman’s actual bodily movement and orientation to its surroundings and its world, Beauvoir tends to create the impression that it is woman’s anatomy and physiology as such that at least in part determine her unfree status.5 3. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (New York: Vintage Books, 1974), xxxv. See also Buytendijk, 175–76. 4. See Beauvoir, The Second Sex, chapter 1, “The Data of Biology.” 5. Shulasmith Firestone claims that Beauvoir’s account served as the basis of her own thesis that the oppression of women is rooted in nature and thus to be overcome requires the transcendence of nature itself. See The Dialectic of Sex (New York: Bantam Books, 1970). Beauvoir would claim that Firestone is guilty of desituating woman’s situation by pinning a source on nature as such. That Firestone would find inspiration for her thesis in Beauvoir, however, indicates that perhaps de Beauvoir has not steered away from causes in “nature” as much as is desirable. 30 ON FEMALE BODY EXPERIENCE This essay seeks to begin to fill a gap that thus exists in both existential phenomenology and feminist theory. It traces in a provisional way some of the basic modalities of feminine body comportment, manner of moving, and relation in space. It brings intelligibility and significance to certain observable and rather ordinary ways in which women in our society typically comport themselves and move differently from the ways that men do. In accordance with the existentialist concern with the situatedness of human experience, I make no claim to the universality of this typicality of the bodily comportment of women and the phenomenological description based on it. The account developed here claims only to describe the modalities of feminine bodily existence for women situated in contemporary advanced industrial, urban, and commercial society. Elements of the account developed here may or may not apply to the situation of woman in other societies and other epochs, but it is not the concern of this essay to determine to which, if any, other social circumstances this account applies. The scope of bodily existence and movement with which I am concerned here is also limited. I concentrate primarily on those sorts of bodily activities that relate to the comportment or orientation of the body as a whole, that entail gross movement, or that require the enlistment of strength and the confrontation of the body’s capacities and possibilities with the resistance and malleability of things. The kind of movement I am primarily concerned with is movement in which the body aims to accomplish a definite purpose or task. There are thus many aspects of feminine bodily existence that I leave out of this account. Most notable of these is the body in its sexual being. Another aspect of bodily existence, among others, that I leave unconsidered is structured body movement that does not have a particular aim—for example, dancing. Besides reasons of space, this limitation of subject is based on the conviction, derived primarily from Merleau-Ponty, that it is the ordinary purposive orientation of the body as a whole toward things and its environment that initially defines the relation of a subject to its world. Thus a focus upon ways in which the feminine body frequently or typically conducts itself in such comportment or movement may be particularly revelatory of the structures of feminine existence.6 Before entering the analysis, I should clarify what I mean here by “feminine” existence. In accordance with Beauvoir’s understanding, I 6. In his discussion of the “dynamics of feminine existence,” Buytendijk focuses precisely on those sorts of motions that are aimless. He claims that it is through these kinds of expressive movements—e.g., walking for the sake of walking—and not through action aimed at the accomplishment of particular purposes that the pure image of masculine or feminine existence is manifest (Woman: A Contemporary View, 278–79). Such an approach, however, contradicts the basic existentialist assumption that Being-in-the-world consists in projecting purposes and goals that structure one’s situatedness. While there is certainly something to be learned from reflecting upon feminine movement in noninstru- THROWING LIKE A GIRL 31 take “femininity” to designate not a mysterious quality or essence that all women have by virtue of their being biologically female. It is, rather, a set of structures and conditions that delimit the typical situation of being a woman in a particular society, as well as the typical way in which this situation is lived by the women themselves. Defined as such, it is not necessary that any women be “feminine”—that is, it is not necessary that there be distinctive structures and behavior typical of the situation of women.7 This understanding of “feminine” existence makes it possible to say that some women escape or transcend the typical situation and definition of women in various degrees and respects. I mention this primarily to indicate that the account offered here of the modalities of feminine bodily existence is not to be falsified by referring to some individual women to whom aspects of the account do not apply, or even to some individual men to whom they do. The account developed here combines the insights of the theory of the lived body as expressed by Merleau-Ponty and the theory of the situation of women as developed by Beauvoir. I assume that at the most basic descriptive level, Merleau-Ponty’s account of the relation of the lived body to its world, as developed in The Phenomenology of Perception, applies to any human existence in a general way. At a more specific level, however, there is a particular style of bodily comportment that is typical of feminine existence, and this style consists of particular modalities of the structures and conditions of the body’s existence in the world.8 As a framework for developing these modalities, I rely on Beauvoir’s account of woman’s existence in patriarchal society as defined by a basic tension between immanence and transcendence.9 The culture and society in which the female person dwells defines woman as Other, as the inessential correlate to man, as mere object and immanence. Woman is thereby both culturally and socially denied the subjectivity, autonomy, and creativity that are definitive of being human and that in patriarchal society are accorded the man. At the same time, however, because she is a human existence, the female person necessarily is a subjectivity and transcendence, and she knows herself to be. The female person who mental activity, given that accomplishing tasks is basic to the structure of human existence, it serves as a better starting point for investigation of feminine motility. As I point out at the end of this essay, a full phenomenology of feminine existence must take account of this noninstrumental movement. 7. It is not impossible, moreover, for men to be “feminine” in at least some respects, according to the above definition. 8. On this level of specificity there also exist particular modalities of masculine motility, inasmuch as there is a particular style of movement more or less typical of men. I will not, however, be concerned with those in this essay. 9. See Beauvoir, The Second Sex, chapter 21, “Woman’s Situation and Character.” 32 ON FEMALE BODY EXPERIENCE enacts the existence of women in patriarchal society must therefore live a contradiction: as human she is a free subject who participates in transcendence, but her situation as a woman denies her that subjectivity and transcendence. My suggestion is that the modalities of feminine bodily comportment, motility, and spatiality exhibit this same tension between transcendence and immanence, between subjectivity and being a mere object. Section I offers some specific observations about bodily comportment, physical engagement with things, ways of using the body in performing tasks, and bodily self-image, which I find typical of feminine existence. Section II gives a general phenomenological account of the modalities of feminine bodily comportment and motility. Section III develops these modalities further in terms of the spatiality generated by them. Finally, in section IV, I draw out some of the implications of this account for an understanding of the oppression of women as well as raise some further questions about feminine being-in-the-world that require further investigation. I The basic difference that Straus observes between the way boys and girls throw is that girls do not bring their whole bodies into the motion as much as the boys do. They do not reach back, twist, move backward, step, and lean forward. Rather, the girls tend to remain relatively immobile except for their arms, and even the arms are not extended as far as they could be. Throwing is not the only movement in which there is a typical difference in the way men and women use their bodies. Reflection on feminine comportment and body movement in other physical activities reveals that these also are frequently characterized, much as in the throwing case, by a failure to make full use of the body’s spatial and lateral potentialities. Even in the most simple body orientations of men and women as they sit, stand, and walk, one can observe a typical difference in body style and extension. Women generally are not as open with their bodies as are men in their gait and stride. Typically, the masculine stride is longer proportional to a man’s body than is the feminine stride to a woman’s. The man typically swings his arms in a more open and loose fashion than does a woman and typically has more up and down rhythm in his step. Though we now wear pants more than we used to and consequently do not have to restrict our sitting postures because of dress, women still tend to sit with their legs relatively close together and their arms across their bodies. When simply standing or leaning, men tend to keep their feet farther apart than do women, and we also tend more to keep our hands and arms touching or shielding our bodies. A final indicative difference is the way each carries books or parcels; girls and THROWING LIKE A GIRL 33 women most often carry books embraced to their chests, while boys and men swing them along their sides. The approach that people of each sex take to the performance of physical tasks that require force, strength, and muscular coordination is frequently different. There are indeed real physical differences between men and women in the kind and limit of their physical strength. Many of the observed differences between men and women in the performance of tasks requiring coordinated strength, however, are due not so much to brute muscular strength as to the way each sex uses the body in approaching tasks. Women often do not perceive themselves as capable of lifting and carrying heavy things, pushing and shoving with significant force, pulling, squeezing, grasping, or twisting with force. When we attempt such tasks, we frequently fail to summon the full possibilities of our muscular coordination, position, poise, and bearing. Women tend not to put their whole bodies into engagement in a physical task with the same ease and naturalness as men. For example, in attempting to lift something, women more often than men fail to plant themselves firmly and make their thighs bear the greatest proportion of the weight. Instead, we tend to concentrate our effort on those parts of the body most immediately connected to the task—the arms and shoulders—rarely bringing the power of the legs to the task at all. When turning or twisting something, to take another example, we frequently concentrate effort in the hand and wrist, not bringing to the task the power of the shoulder, which is necessary for its efficient performance.10 The previously cited throwing example can be extended to a great deal of athletic activity. Now, most men are by no means superior athletes, and their sporting efforts display bravado more often than genuine skill and coordination. The relatively untrained man nevertheless engages in sport generally with more free motion and open reach than does his female counterpart. Not only is there a typical style of throwing like a girl, but there is a more or less typical style of running like a girl, climbing like a girl, swinging like a girl, hitting like a girl. They have in common first that the whole body is not put into fluid and directed motion, but rather, in swinging and hitting, for example, the motion is concentrated in one body part; and second that the woman’s motion tends not to reach, extend, lean, stretch, and follow through in the direction of her intention. For many women as they move in sport, a space surrounds us in imagination that we are not free to move beyond; the space available to our movement is a constricted space. Thus, for example, in softball or 10. It should be noted that this is probably typical only of women in advanced industrial societies, where the model of the bourgeois woman has been extended to most women. It would not apply to those societies, for example, where most people, including women, do heavy physical work. Nor does this particular observation, of course, hold true in our own society for women who do heavy physical work. 34 ON FEMALE BODY EXPERIENCE volleyball women tend to remain in one place more often than men do, neither jumping to reach nor running to approach the ball. Men more often move out toward a ball in flight and confront it with their own countermotion. Women tend to wait for and then react to its approach, rather than going forth to meet it. We frequently respond to the motion of a ball coming toward us as though it were coming at us, and our immediate bodily impulse is to flee, duck, or otherwise protect ourselves from its flight. Less often than men, moreover, do women give selfconscious direction and placement to their motion in sport. Rather than aiming at a certain place where we wish to hit a ball, for example, we tend to hit it in a “general” direction. Women often approach a physical engagement with things with timidity, uncertainty, and hesitancy. Typically, we lack an entire trust in our bodies to carry us to our aims. There is, I suggest, a double hesitation here. On the one hand, we often lack confidence that we have the capacity to do what must be done. Many times I have slowed a hiking party in which the men bounded across a harmless stream while I stood on the other side warily testing my footing on various stones, holding on to overhanging branches. Though the others crossed with ease, I do not believe it is easy for me, even though once I take a committed step I am across in a flash. The other side of this tentativeness is, I suggest, a fear of getting hurt, which is greater in women than in men. Our attention is often divided between the aim to be realized in motion and the body that must accomplish it, while at the same time saving itself from harm. We often experience our bodies as a fragile encumbrance, rather than the medium for the enactment of our aims. We feel as though we must have our attention directed upon our bodies to make sure they are doing what we wish them to do, rather than paying attention to what we want to do through our bodies. All the above factors operate to produce in many women a greater or lesser feeling of incapacity, frustration, and self-consciousness. We have more of a tendency than men do to greatly underestimate our bodily capacity.11 We decide beforehand—usually mistakenly—that the task is beyond us and thus give it less than our full effort. At such a halfhearted level, of course, we cannot perform the tasks, become frustrated, and fulfill our own prophecy. In entering a task we frequently are selfconscious about appearing awkward and at the same time do not wish to appear too strong. Both worries contribute to our awkwardness and frustration. If we should finally release ourselves from this spiral and really give a physical task our best effort, we are greatly surprised indeed 11. See A. M. Gross, “Estimated versus Actual Physical Strength in Three Ethnic Groups,” Child Development 39 (1968): 283–90. In a test of children at several different ages, at all but the youngest age level, girls rated themselves lower than boys rated themselves on self-estimates of strength, and as the girls grow older, their self-estimates of strength become even lower. THROWING LIKE A GIRL 35 at what our bodies can accomplish. It has been found that women more often than men underestimate the level of achievement they have reached.12 None of the observations that have been made thus far about the way women typically move and comport their bodies applies to all women all of the time. Nor do those women who manifest some aspect of this typicality do so in the same degree. There is no inherent, mysterious connection between these sorts of typical comportments and being a female person. Many of them result, as will be developed later, from lack of practice in using the body and performing tasks. Even given these qualifications, one can nevertheless sensibly speak of a general feminine style of body comportment and movement. The next section will develop a specific categorical description of the modalities of the comportment and movement. II The three modalities of feminine motility are that feminine movement exhibits an ambiguous transcendence, an inhibited intentionality, and a discontinuous unity with its surroundings. A source of these contradictory modalities is the bodily self-reference of feminine comportment, which derives from the woman’s experience of her body as a thing at the same time that she experiences it as a capacity. 1. In his Phenomenology of Perception,13 Merleau-Ponty takes as his task the articulation of the primordial str...
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Summary on “On Female Body Experience”
Authored over an interval of more than twenty years, the thesis by one Iris Marion Young
contained in this particular volume demonstrates different facets of women have lived body and
psychological involvement in contemporary Western communities. Using the ideas of
various/several twentieth-century global philosoph...


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