Revealing Male Bodies

Chapter 11. The Tall and the Short of It: Male Sports Bodies

Chapter 11 The Tall and the Short of It Male Sports Bodies d o n i h d e The challenge to produce this essay comes from Susan Bordo, who in her essay ‘‘Reading the Male Body’’ complains that males themselves have written little about the male experience of their bodies—‘‘Men have rarely interrogated themselves as men . . . for they generally have not appeared to themselves as men, but rather as the generic ‘Man’, norm and form of humanity . . . When men problematize themselves as men, a fundamental and divisive sexual ontology is thus disturbed.’’1 —I am responding to this challenge. A second inspiration for this article comes from Iris Young, most particularly from her ‘‘Throwing Like a Girl,’’ an early essay to which she has also responded retrospectively by noting the experience of her teenaged daughter’s somewhat changed situation.2 As a reader of much feminist literature, beginning with feminist critiques of science and technology —my usual focal interest—but also regarding ‘‘bodies,’’ which often enter into phenomenological contexts, I find a set of issues which revolve around how one experiences embodiment. Within a phenomenological history, the issue falls between two contrasting godfathers, Maurice Merleau-Ponty on one side, and Michel Foucault on the other.3 One might characterize the Merleau-Pontean perspective as a form of ‘‘phenomenological materialism’’ insofar as his concept of the ‘‘lived body’’ (corps vécu) holds that the active, perceptual being of incarnate embodiment is the opening to the world that allows us to have ‘‘worlds’’ in any sense. At bottom, the anonymity of the active, perceiving bodily being he seeks to elicit could be said to be both ‘‘preconceptual’’ and ‘‘precultural’’; without this sense of body, there is no experience at all. As well, this sense of the body is developed and described from a firstperson perspective. In contrast, Foucault’s ‘‘body’’ is thoroughly a ‘‘cultural body,’’ often described and analyzed from a third-person perspective. The body objectified by the medical gaze in the clinic, the body of the condemned in the regicide, and the subjection of bodies within all forms of discipline are culturally constructed bodies. Insofar as there is ‘‘experience ,’’ it is experience suffered or wrought upon human bodies. I have previously used the terms ‘‘body one’’ to refer to the bodily expe- 232 / Don Ihde rience which Merleau-Ponty elicits, particularly in Phenomenology of Perception (hereafter PP),4 and ‘‘body two’’ for the culturally constructed body which has parallels with a Foucaultean framework. However, what I term ‘‘body two’’ is the cultural-body-as-experienced body.5 The problem, as it often takes shape in feminist literature, is the combination or noncombination of these perspectives within the experience of the writer. Young is particularly good at combining: the sense of both acting, but also of being seen, in the ambiguous transcendence of throwing like a girl; the self-pleasure of, but also social construction of, breasted being; and the obviously unique self/other experience of pregnant embodiment, all combine these themes and announce the ambiguities which keep any clear line of demarcation between ‘‘body one’’ and ‘‘body two’’ from being drawn. Young thus combines, with at least partial success, the notions of lived and culturally experienced body. Young also indirectly led me to understand, within PP, something that I had not previously seen. There, Merleau-Ponty sets up a dialectic between what could be called a ‘‘normative’’ body experience, and the pathological experience which is only indirectly noted in his famous Schneider (who is a brain-damaged aphasic). Young, in the critique included in ‘‘Throwing Like a Girl,’’ basically shows that Merleau-Ponty’s body experience is abstracted from gendered bodies, and thus implicitly may be describing the focally ‘‘masculine,’’ since he does not capture the ambiguous transcendence of female embodiment. That point is granted—but what is the masculine body experience which is inherent in the corps vécu? I now argue that the emphasis upon perception within actional situations, the transparency of the ‘‘normal’’ body, the sense of ‘‘I can’’ which occurs in PP, is open to being secretly a ‘‘normative’’ sports body. This slide from a normative, active, and externally focused body to the athletic body allows certain ‘‘body two’’ aspects to come into play. This healthy, implicitly athletic embodiment contrasts with the debilities of Schneider—but also by extension with virtually any other form of unhealthy, or even less than well-conditioned, sense of body, as well as any ambiguously transcendent female embodiment...