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
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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
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2004044842
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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
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ON FEMALE BODY EXPERIENCE
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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
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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.
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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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