On Female Body Experience: Throwing Like a Girl and Other Essays (review)

This review was written while Iris Marion Young was still vibrantly with us. Her voice remains in her absence. Writing this review, I fully expected to continue our conversations. I had no idea that cancer would end them. I have not changed the review as written, save for these few sentences that can only go so far in expressing my profound sense of loss and my gratefulness for her patient thinking that refused to rush to easy categorizations of complex issues and that asked us to take up the political obligations that come with being philosophers.

Young’s On Female Body Experience gathers together essays, all but one previously published in earlier versions, spanning the last twenty-two years. For some, the republication of “Throwing Like a Girl” is recommendation enough for this book, but this would be selling the volume short; for however justly important “Throwing Like a Girl” is for feminists and phenomenologists, its import is best understood in the context of this collection, where the analysis of girls’ throwing is situated among analyses of the adolescent’s experience of menstruation, and women’s experiences of their breasted and pregnant bodies. Moving through the life cycle in this way we discover the different ways in which the politics of gender alienate women from their lived bodies and the ways in which attending to the experiences of the lived body liberate (or at least have the potential to liberate) women from debilitating embodied dispositions.

Throughout these analyses Young distinguished the concept of the lived body from the idea of the sexed/gendered body. Resisting the temptation to substitute the lived body for the sexed/gendered body, Young negotiated the relationship between these bodies through the phenomenological notion of the situation. She defined the situation as, “the way the facts of embodiment, social and physical environment, appear in the light of the projects a person has” (16). According to Young, examining women’s situation by attending to the lived body rather than to the body conceived of as sexed or gendered avoids falsifying binaries of nature versus culture, evades presupposed heterosexual norms, and annuls sexual dimorphism assumptions. Young did not, however, think that we could simply dispose of the sex/gender distinction; for if the value of the idea of the lived body lies in the ways that it gets us to the particularities of women’s experiences that cannot (ought not) be circumscribed by the sex/ gender distinction and its implicit categorizations of embodiment, then the concept of sex/gender alerts us to the ways in which women’s experiences are situated in a heterosexist world. While attending to the lived body gets us to the phenomenological facts of embodiment, the concept of sex/gender gets us to the structures of the social and physical situations within which our bodies are lived. Discovering the ways in which sexed/gendered social structures has directed women toward certain projects (for example, care taking) and defected them from others (for example, becoming a fighter pilot), and noting the ways in which these structures tap women’s unpaid labor for neoliberal economic profit and foster violent ideals of masculinity, we are prepared to assess our projects for the ways in which they alienate us from the possibilities of our lived bodies and validate an exploitative and militaristic status quo.

Feminist theorists have long protested the arbitrary distinction between theory and practice. They have alerted us to the practical implications embedded in all theoretical discourse. The essays in On Female Body Experience make this case with specific reference to phenomenology. They show us the ways in which the phenomenological turn to everyday experience through the act of bracketing (stepping back and placing our taken for granted practices and assumptions out of play) constitutes an act of suspicion that is politically subversive. For example, in “Breasted Experience: The Look and the Feeling,” Young noted the ways in which the breasts of nursing mothers shatter distinctions...