Young, Iris Marion.

On Female Body Experience: "Throwing Like a Girl" and Other Essays. New York: Oxford UP, 2005.

Chapter 1, “Lived Body vs. Gender: Reflections on Social Structures and Subjectivity.”

One of the most valuable things that Young starts with in this chapter is a survey of the way feminist writing developed along the years. Specifically, she follows the way major feminist theorists have positioned themselves in relation to the sex-gender distinction, focusing on Toril Moi’s critique of Judith Butler. Moi points to the fact that Butler’s distinctive theorization of sex and gender obscures the real life consequences of these definitions and, therefore suggests no real way of dealing with them or even understanding them in practice. Moi suggests an alternative to the theory of gender that would address those issues. She proposes the lived body as a definition that includes a wider range of lived experiences than does gender and pertains to concrete real life experience. “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.” (16)

Youngs intervention at this point is in claiming that gender is important for theorizing larger structures and social forces et large rather than for looking at subjectivity and individual experiences: “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 shared gender identity to men and women… 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.” (22) She proposes to combine a phenomenological theorization of the lived body for individual concerns and gender theory for structural and social concerns through Pierre Bordieu’s theory of habitus (26).

Chapter 2, “Throwing Like a Girl: a Phenomenology of Feminine Body Comportment, Motility, and Spatiality.”

Young’s starting point in this chapter is a description of the difference in the way young boys and young girls throw a ball. The questions she offers following this description are about the tendencies of the female body in its comportment, motility and spatiality, trying to figure out what are these tendencies and how they can be accounted for. Her focus is on body movements that include orienting one’s whole body in space in order to perform a specific task. She relies heavily on Merleau Ponty’s phenomenology and Beauvoir’s existentialist theory, suggesting 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.” (32)

She begins with claiming that there is a specific ‘style’ of female bodily comportment, that when performing tasks—like running, throwing, climbing, hitting, etc.—females tend to (1) not incorporate the whole body and (2) not move and “follow through in the direction of her intention.” (33) This tendency comes from lack of faith in the abilities of the female’s own body to fulfill tasks and a fear of getting hurt. This is also the result of giving more attention to the body as the thing that needs to carry on the task rather than attention to the task.

Following the three modalities of feminine motility, Young claims that feminine movement exhibits: ambiguous transcendence—the female body is “overlaid with immanence” and does not fully acts upon the world; inhibited intentionality—each task that is enacted (“I can”) projects the sense of its own failure (“I cannot”); and discontinuous unity—unity within female body and with its surrounding is discontinuous. Young goes on to explore three characteristics of female experience of lived space (spatiality)—as enclosed or confining, as having dual structure and herself as positioned in it. She shows how female body motility leads to experience space as enclosed. The dual structure of female spatiality stems from seeing herself as observing the surrounding space but not being a part of it, creating a separate “here” and “there”. Being positioned in space means that a female experiences her body as rooted in a specific place, like an object, rather than as constituting space through perception and motility. In the last part of the chapter Young connects these female existential experiences to her social context as a woman in a patriarchal world, claiming that “women in a sexist society are physically handicapped.” (42) Some of the social forces that cause these modalities of feminine body existence are the objectifying gaze and the threat of invasion to her space.