Drawing from Young’s essay “Throwing Like a Girl,” adopt for a period of one week a different gendered body comportment than the one you currently habitually adopt. To do so, choose three different ways of publically living your body (e.g. seating position on public transportation, the length of your stride, the way you drink from a glass, etc.) and change the way you comport yourself in these three respects to correspond to a different gender identity than the one you currently occupy.
After experimenting with a different way of embodying gender for a week, write an essay that reports on your experience. Your essay should describe how gender is embodied (draw upon Young here) and explain how your experience of experimenting with your own embodiment of gender illustrates this. In discussing your own experiences, relate it to one of the three modalities of motility discussed in section II of the Young article (transcendence, intentionality, and unity).
Your essay should have a clear thesis that makes a claim about how bodily comportment relates to one’s experience of gender. You should treat your experiment with different bodily comportments as evidence in support of or opposition to your thesis.
NEED TO BE:
ORGANIZED
CLEAR THESIS IN INTRODUCTION
CITE FROM READINGS
BE CLEAR AND NON REPETITIVE
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Throwing Like a Girl:
A Phenomenology
off Feminine Body Comportment
Motility and Spatiality*
Iris Marion Young
Department of Philosophy, Miami University
In discussing the fundamental significance of lateral space, which is one of
the unique spatial dimensions generated by the human upright posture, Erwin
Straus (1966) pauses at “the remarkable difference in the manner of throwing
of the two sexes”1 [p. 157]. Citing a study and photographs of young boys and
girls, he (Straus, 1966) 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 strength of his total motorium_The ball leaves the hand
with considerable acceleration; it moves toward its goal in a long flat curve [p. 157-158].2
This paper was first presented at a meeting ofthe mid-west division ofthe Society for Women
in Philosophy (SWIP) in October 1977. Versions ofthe paper 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 paper were complete while I was a fellow in the National
Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship in Residence for College Teachers program at the
University of Chicago.
^rwin W. Straus, The Upright Posture, in Phenomenological Psychology (New York: Basic
Books, 1966), pp. 137-165. References to particular pages are indicated in the text.
2Studies continue to be performed which 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, Vol. 48, No. 2, May 1977, pp. 311-318. The study found that boys had significantly
greater velocities than girls.
See also F. J. J. Buytendijk’s remarks in Woman: A Contemporary View (New York: Newman
Press, 1968), pp. 144-115. In raising the example of throwing, Buytendijk is concerned to stress,
as am 1 in this paper, that the important thing to investigate is not the strictly physical
phenomena, but rather the manner in which each sex projects her or his Being-in-the-world
through movement.
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” [p.
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 (1966) provides
further evidence against the breast by pointing out that “it seems certain” that
the Amazons, who cut off their right breast, “threw a ball just like our Betty’s,
Mary’s and Susan’s” [p. 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 which 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, then
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’ 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 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 woman
can be attributed to some natural and eternal “feminine essence” is perhaps
most thoroughly and systematically expressed by de 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” which denies the real differences in the behavior and
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experiences of men and women. Even though there is no eternal feminine
essence, there is (de Beauvoir, 1974) “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 socio-historical set of circumstances,
despite the individual variation in each woman’s experience, opportunities,
and possibilities, has a unity which can be described and made intelligible. It
should be emphasized, however, that this unity is specific to a particular social
formation during a particular historical epoch.
De Beauvoir (1974) 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 ofthe woman’s body
as relating to its surroundings in living action. When de 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
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, de
Beauvoir tends to create the impression that it is woman’s anatomy and
physiology as such which are at least in part determinative of her unfree
status.5
This paper seeks to begin to fill a gap that thus exists both in 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 ofthe bodily comportment
of women and the phenonemological description based on it. The account
developed here claims only to describe the modalities of feminine bodily
3Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (New York: Vintage Books, 1974), p. xxxv. Cf.
Buytendijk, pp. 275-276.
4See Chapter I, The Date of Biology.
5Firestone claims that de Beauvoir’s account served as the basis of her own thesis that the
oppression of women is rooted in nature, and thus requires the transcendence of nature itself to
be overcome. See The Dialectic of Sex (New York: Bantom Books, 1970). De 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 de Beauvoir, however, indicates that
perhaps de Beauvoir has not steered away from causes in “nature” as much as is desirable.
YOUNG
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 epoch, but it
is not the concern of this paper 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
which relate to the comportment or orientation of the body as a whole, which
entail gross movement, or which require the enlistment of strength and the
confrontation of the body’s capacities and possibilities with the resistance and
malleability of things. Primarily the kind of movement I am concerned with is
movement in which the body aims at the accomplishment of a definite
purpose or task. There are thus many aspects of feminine bodily existence
which I leave out of account here. Most notable of these is the body in its
sexual being. Another aspect of bodily existence, among others, which I leave
unconsidered is structured body movement which 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 which initially defines the relation of a subject to
its world. Thus 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 de Beauvoir’s understanding, I take
“femininity” to designate not a mysterious quality or essence which all women
have by virtue of their being biologically female. It is, rather, a set of
structures and conditions which 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
6In his discussion of the “dynamics of feminine existence,” Buytendijk focuses precisely on
those sorts of motions which 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 (pp. 278-9). Such an approach, however, contradicts the basic existentialist assumption
that Being-in-the-world consists in projecting purposes and goals which structure one’s
situatedness. While there is certainly something to be learned from reflecting upon feminine
movement in noninstrumental 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 paper, a full phenomenology of feminine existence must take account
of this noninstrumental movement.
7It is not impossible, moreover, for men to be “feminine” in at least some respects, according to
the above definition.
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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 ofthe 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 ofthe theory ofthe lived
body as expressed by Merleau-Ponty and the theory of the situation of
women as developed by de Beauvoir (1974). I assume that at the most basic
descriptive level, Merleau-Ponty’s account of the relation ofthe lived body to
its world, as developed in the Phenomenology of Perception (1962), applies to
any human existence in a general way. At a more specific level, however, there
is a particular style of bodily comportment which is typical of feminine
existence, and this style consists of particular modalities ofthe structures and
conditions of the body’s existence in the world.8
As a framework for developing these modalities, I rely on de 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 by the subjectivity, autonomy, and creativity
which are definitive of being human and which 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 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 ofthe
142 YOUNG
oppression of women, as well as raise some further questions about feminine
Being-in-the-world which require further investigation.
I
The basic difference which 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. 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 arm is not extended as far as it 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 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 further apart than do woman, 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 women most
often carry books embraced to their chests, while boys and men swing them
along their sides.
The approach persons of each sex take to the performance of physical tasks
that require force, strength, arid muscular coordination is frequently
different. There are indeed real physical differences between men and woman
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, but 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
THROWING LIKE A GIRL 143
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 more often display bravado 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 motin 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 them in
imagination which we are not free to move beyond; the space available to our
movement is a constricted space. Thus, for example, in softball or volley ball
women tend to remain in one place more often than men, 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 self-conscious 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
10It 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 of those women in our
own society who do heavy physical work.
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All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions144 YOUNG
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 out 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 encumberance,
rather than the media for the enactment of our aims. We feel as though we
must have our attention directed upon our body to make sure it is doing what
we wish it 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 to greatly underestimate our bodily capacity. l1 We decide
beforehand?usually mistakenly?that the task is beyond us, and thus give it
less than our full effort. At such a half-hearted level, of course, we cannot
perform the tasks, become frustrated, and fulfill our own prophecy. In
entering a task we frequently are self-conscious 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 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 which 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.
nSee A. M. Gross, Estimated versus actual physical strength in three enthnic groups, Child
Development, 39 (1968), pp. 283-90. In a test of children at several different ages, at all but the
youngest age-level, girls rated themselves lower than boys and rated themselves on self-estimates
of strength, and as the girls grow older, their self-estimates of strength become even lower.
12See Marguerite A. Cifton and Hope M. Smith, Comparison of Expressed Self-Concept of
Highly Skilled Males and Females Concerning Motor Performance, Perceptual and Motor
Skills, 16 (1963), pp. 199-201. Women consistently underestimated their level of acheivement in
skills like running and jumping far more often than men did.
THROWING LIKE A GIRL 145
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, Merleau-Ponty (1962) takes as
his task the articulation of the primordial structures of existence, which are
prior to and the ground of all reflective relation to the world. In asking how
there can be a world for a subject, Merleau-Ponty reorients the entire
tradition of that questioning by locating subjectivity not in mind or
consciousness, but in the body. Merleau-Ponty gives to the lived body the
ontological status which Sartre, as well as “intellectualist” thinkers before
him, attribute to consciousness alone: the status of transcendence as being
for-itself. It is the body in its orientation toward and action upon and within
its surroundings which constitutes the initial meaning giving act (p. 121; pp.
146-147). The body is the first locus of intentionality, as pure presence to the
world and openness upon its possibilities. The most primordial intentional
act is the motion ofthe body orienting itself with respect to and moving within
its surroundings. There is a w
Jermaine Byrant
Nicole Johnson
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