On female body experience: "Throwing like a girl" and other essays (review)

Although women have made great strides, Iris Marion Young maintains that "the image of the woman has not ceased being that of the Other" (3). Women's actions and opportunities continue to be constrained by sex- and gender-specific roles and too often, women's voices are rendered inaudible. Accordingly, On Female Body Experience: "Throwing Like a Girl" and Other Essays investigates different aspects of women's lived bodily experiences. The essays, spanning over two decades of Young's insightful and original scholarship, aim to expose the tensions between the social norms that invest the female body and women's lived experiences.

Of particular note is Young's ability to speak to a diverse group of readers. On the one hand, her analysis of female embodiment using the lens of existential phenomenology and the works of de Beauvoir, Merleau-Ponty, Irigaray, and Kristeva (among others), ensures that this volume will be of interest to scholars of feminist theory and phenomenology. On the other hand, Young's clarity and use of anecdotes make even the most philosophically challenging passages accessible to almost any reader interested in female embodiment.

The first essay, "Lived Body versus Gender," one of Young's most recent, serves as a good example. Here, Young analyzes Toril Moi's proposal to abandon the concept of gender in feminist theory and replace it with the concept of the "lived body." Like Moi, Young argues that using a reconstituted concept of the lived body to analyze sexual subjectivity may help circumvent injustices such as biological reductionism and gender essentialism. Yet unlike Moi, Young concludes that we need not, and indeed, should not, dispense with the concept of gender. Rather, she recommends restricting its use to the analysis of social structures, for gender can help to elucidate specific relations of power, opportunity, and resource distribution. Although the concept of the lived body, derived from existential phenomenology, can be complicated at times, Young ensures that the essay can be appreciated by students, as well as scholars, not only because of the clarity of her prose but also because she situates the debate in its historical context. Her brief, yet rich historical overview of the central themes in feminist theory over the past two decades provides an instructive introduction to the collection.

The other essays aim to describe embodied being-in-the-world through sexual and gender differences. In "Throwing Like a Girl: A Phenomenology of Feminine Body Comportment, Motility and Spatiality," Young examines the socially constructed habits of feminine body comportment in a male-dominated society. She provides a description of the particular ways in which many girls and women walk, sit, or throw a ball and an insightful analysis of the implications of this unique body comportment for a woman's sense of agency and power. In "Women Recovering Our Clothes" and "House and Home: Feminist Variations on a Theme," Young's analysis of female embodiment draws on Irigaray's methodology. That is, she moves from an account of the oppression tied to femininity to a critique of patriarchal values through a woman-centered account of the positive aspects of a specifically female experience. The last essay in the collection, "A Room of One's Own: Privacy, Old Age, and Nursing Homes" argues that nursing homes deny the elderly, most of whom are women, one of the material bases of self, personal space.

Two particularly moving discussions of female oppression and experience can be found in "Breasted Experience: The Look and the Feeling" and "Pregnant Embodiment: Subjectivity and Alienation." In the former, Young explores the social construction of breasts in patriarchal society. On the one hand, breasts are the symbol of female sexuality and the object of the male gaze. On the other hand, during motherhood, the breasts are seen only as the source of life and nurture, with the breast-feeding woman serving as the prototypical image of purity and goodness. This dichotomy between motherhood and sexuality...