Iris Marion Young and a Phenomenology of Feminine Intellectuality
In this paper, I aim to critically analyze Iris Marion Young’s definition of the phenomenology of feminine motility and spatiality.
For centuries, most prominent philosophers deigned to define human existence, corporeality, and motility in universals in an effort to understand the nature of living and existence. However, in doing so, these philosophers neglect certain fundamental differences in the experiences of swathes of the population, understating the effect that oppression, discrimination, and subjugation have historically had on certain populations. In this paper, I aim to critically analyze Iris Marion Young’s definition of the phenomenology of feminine motility and spatiality. I expand upon Young’s work to establish the model of a distinctly feminine motility and spatiality in the physical sense by articulating a phenomenology of feminine intellectuality.
To that end, I begin with a background on Young’s examination of the case study of comportmental differences between men and women and summarize the key aspects of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s and Simone de Beauvoir’s ideas which Young uses to define a uniquely feminine phenomenology. In the next section, I describe in detail her theory of feminine motility and spatiality. Finally, using the framework that Young established for motility and spatiality, I offer a further understanding of the feminine condition through a phenomenological reading of feminine intellectuality.
“Throwing Like a Girl”
Iris Marion Young, a modern American political theorist and social thinker, is perhaps best known for her feminist analyses and critiques of prominent philosophical ideologues. In her 1980 essay “Throwing Like a Girl: A Phenomenology of Feminine Body Comportment Motility and Spatiality,” Young examines the case study of research on how the form of the human body informs how girls and boys — women and men — throw objects differently. She analyzes the research of Erwin Straus which found that girls tended not to employ the full use of their bodies when throwing compared to boys of the same age, who tended to thrust their entire body into the throw, resulting in a more powerful, precise throw (Straus).
Young importantly does not dispute Straus’s empirical results but rather she took issue with his overly simplistic conclusion that the difference is plainly the “manifestation of a biological, not acquired, difference” (Straus 157). Young argues in her essay that further examination by Straus was needed into the phenomenological differences in feminine and masculine body comportment in order to justify such a grand conclusion. She provides an alternative conclusion to Straus’s. Rather than attributing the body comportmental differences between girls and boys simply to biological differences, Young argues that social conditioning due to a history of sex-based oppression plays the larger role in how girls and women move about in space and use their bodies and their awareness of their spatiality; these are the characteristics of a feminine phenomenology to Young.
Necessary to understanding Young’s theory of feminine body comportment is the idea that it builds on a pre-existing framework based on Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s theory of the body and Simone de Beauvoir’s theory of the feminine experience based on historical oppression (Young 141). She draws upon Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of the lived body from Phenomenology of Perception, both critiquing it for its misguided principle of universality and by using its framework to understand feminine motility and spatiality in relation to women’s oppression. In accordance with de Beauvoir’s concept of the “feminine” existence from The Second Sex, Young defines femininity not as an intangible quality innate to all women but rather the condition or situation in which women find themselves at a specific point in time. The historical context dictates that feminine existence, to Young and to us, is defined by sex-based oppression in a patriarchical society. Therefore, to be a woman is to experience a constant tension between transcendence (subjectivity) and immanence (objectivity). Young synthesized the two philosophers’ ideas to create a theory that women experience a limited ability to exercise the spatiality and motility that Merleau-Ponty believed all humans could exercise because of the immanence that necessarily characterizes the feminine condition according to de Beauvoir.
A Model of Feminine Body Comportment
Thus far, I have laid the groundwork to understand Young’s theory of feminine body comportment by understanding that she is building upon existing theory on the body and the feminine condition using a case study of throwing. In this section, I describe in greater detail Young’s theory of the phenomenology of feminine motility and spatiality, informed by a historic oppression and denigration based on sex in a patriarchical society. To that end, she described three modalities to explain the phenomenology of the feminine bodily experience.
Young writes in §II of “Throwing Like a Girl”:
“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” (141).
Here, Young defines the three tenets of her theory on feminine motility and spatiality, describing how immanence affects the movement of woman in space and causes the contradiction of feminine bodily existence in both possessing autonomy as subject — by virtue of being human — and being oppressed as object — by virtue of being a woman.
First, Young writes that woman experiences ambiguous transcendence which is a body that can experience transcendence which is yet laden with immanence due to the feminine condition. Transcendence, according to Merleau-Ponty, is characterized by an individual’s ability to thrust themself fully into the world with “unbroken directedness” (Young 145). Immanence prevents woman from fully committing herself to the transcendent task of self-actualization. While she has access to transcendence through her humanity, she is still overlaid with immanence through her womanhood — something impossible to overcome through individual talent or willpower alone (145).
Second, she explains that Merleau-Ponty’s theory of the body necessitates an intentionality inherent to the fundamental belief that “I can.” However, feminine motility is defined by an inhibited intentionality, characterized by a pursuit of the “I can” while limiting the body’s full range of expression in a self-imposed “I cannot.” Immanence permeates the feminine experience and results in woman denying herself, whether consciously or unconsciously, an uninhibited use and ownership of space which is seen in masculine comportment. This means that while woman has access to a theoretical understanding of “I can” as a possibility for someone, it is measurably more difficult to apply that principle to herself (146–7).
Third and fundamental to Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of the body is a Kantian concept of transcendental subjectivity which results in a unity between the body and the environment. Within the case study, this explains why boys and men were observed to throw their entire body and being into motion, allowing them to propel an object with great force and precision. Here again, the feminine experience, laden with immanence, is defined by a discontinuous unity which serves to explain the sex-based differences in body comportment. Woman tends to isolate her motion to one or two body parts, localizing her energy to specific actions in line with inhibited intentionality (147–8).
The three modalities together explain while feminine bodily experience is not limited to simply existing and regarding one’s body as a thing to manipulate and govern. Feminine body comportment dictates that woman’s body is “a fragile thing, which must be picked up and coaxed into movement, a thing which exists as looked at and acted upon” (Young 148).
Phenomenology of Feminine Intellectuality
I have thus far explained Young’s theory of the body informed by sex-based oppression to explain the feminine bodily experience, specifically the three modalities which she uses to describe feminine motility and spatiality. In the following section, I argue for a phenomenological reading of feminine intellectuality, which I will call feminine mind comportment based on historic oppression using Young’s model of feminine motility and spatiality.
Intellectual pursuits are among the most transcendent; the activity of learning and achieving understanding beyond one’s own body is the core of subjectivity that Merleau-Ponty articulated in Phenomenology. However, the feminine condition, including intellectual pursuits, is necessarily laden with immanence. In the revolutionary push for a progressive society, educational attainment has been the landmark equalizer across historical socio-economic divisions. For centuries, however, many countries and societies barred women from achieving educational attainment. Up until the last century, the majority of the Ivy League universities did not admit women with Columbia University being the last institution in the prestigious academic league to begin admitting women in 1983 (Belkin).
Societal institutions, which have historically excluded women, and individuals traditionally perceived women as having inferior intellectual capability to men and thus deemed it unproductive to waste resources educating them. Today, however, women outnumber men in enrollment rates in higher education and outnumber men as a percentage of the college-educated workplace (Fry). Given these statistics, it would be reasonable to assume that woman would be treated as an intellectual equal to man, but on the contrary, ample research and historical data reveals that feminine intellectuality is often questioned and outright denied. This, I argue, is the same feminine comportment that Young articulated first in relation to feminine motility and spatiality which I analyze using the same three modalities she outlined: an experience of ambiguous transcendence, an inhibited intentionality, and a discontinuous unity.
1. De Beauvoir described the feminine condition in her thought as one that is characterized by transcendence, by virtue of being human, yet laden with immanence, by virtue of being woman. Young, using de Beauvoir’s theory, defined a phenomenology of feminine body comportment within the framework of inhibited transcendence. Just as woman localizes movement to one specific part of her body due to a lack of trust in her motility, so, too, does woman limit herself intellectually when she is in an environment, a condition, which brings to the forefront her immanence. A study by Mikyong Minsun Kim, a scholar of higher education research, comparing women who attend women-only colleges versus coeducational colleges found that those who attended women-only institutions were more likely to participate in “intellectually stimulating and cultivating” extracurricular activities, though critical thinking and analytical skills did not differ noticeably between students of the differing institutions (Kim). In a social and intellectual environment in which she is not othered on the basis of her sex, woman can, for a time, overcome immanence and exist as a transcendent being.
2. Merleau-Ponty’s theory of the body necessitates an intentionality inherent to the fundamental belief that “I can.” However, feminine motility is defined by an inhibited intentionality, characterized by a pursuit of the “I can” while limiting the body’s full range of expression in a self-imposed “I cannot.” Young’s analysis of feminine body comportment describes woman’s lack of trust in her bodily abilities, manifesting itself as an understanding that “I can” applies in a general sense but not necessarily to herself.
Given this hyperawareness of her shortcomings, the feminine mind comportment explains that woman fears to speak without thorough confirmation and utmost confidence in the veracity, strength, and relevance of her words. Despite the fact that women outnumber men in higher education overall, research suggests that in the educational setting, men speak more frequently and for greater lengths of time; speak more assertively; and tend not to wait for their turn to speak compared to women present in the same class (Lee and Mccabe). This phenomenon is likely due to the fact that masculine mind comportment is not laden with the same immanence that permeates feminine mind comportment.
3. The Kantian idea of transcendental subjectivity, a unity between the body and the environment, appears as a core concept in Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of the body. However, Young argues that this unadulterated thrusting of one’s body into an action or unabated ownership of space is absent from the feminine condition, laden with immanence, defined by a discontinuous unity. As woman tends to isolate her motion to one or two body parts, she also tends to regard with incongruous scrutiny the limitations of her intellectuality — quick to accept criticisms while hesitant to uplift her ego.
This discontinued unity between her mind and her understanding of the environment is a product of society’s historical disavowal of the idea that women were intellectually equal to men. The legacy of such history has been inherited by the succeeding generations despite changing trends. While women now outnumber men in higher education, gender stereotypes persist in which there is unconscious bias towards perceiving men as more intellectual. Research has found evidence that people are less likely to refer women to jobs that require a greater level of intellectuality and that sex-based bias about feminine intellectuality emerges in young children (Bian et al.).
One may be tempted to argue that this definition of feminine mind comportment does not account for women who break barriers by achieving great intellectual accomplishments and occupy positions of power in academic and corporate settings. However, this argument does not preclude confident or academically accomplished women. The mere existence of such women in society does not contradict the conclusions of this paper; on the contrary, their existence may be a strong testament to the phenomenology of feminine mind comportment. An analysis by two professors in the Harvard Business Review found that professional advancement or lack thereof is often attributed to levels of confidence for women but rarely men. When a woman fails to achieve career goals, it is attributed to her lack of confidence in performing certain tasks. In addition, when a woman exhibits too many extroverted or outgoing attributes, she is still evaluated as lacking confidence by peers and employers (Baker and Bourke). This situation results in a bind for intellectually and professionally ambitious women who — through the expectations for themselves and by those around them — must find the right balance of expressing confidence in a way that is not expected for men.
Conclusion
In this paper, I have argued that feminine mind comportment is the result of woman’s situation and condition in society rather than a trait inherent to female biology using the framework that Young created in her 1980 essay “Throwing Like a Girl” which examines feminine body comportment and came to a similar conclusion. Like feminine body comportment, these findings are not inherent to the feminine condition in a vacuum, but rather, strong evidence suggests that they are linked to the social environment and perception of the feminine mind. Women are keenly aware of the ways in which they are limited based on the perception of them by others, often based on their sex. This gives rise to a feminine mind comportment that naturally is more hesitant, apologetic, and calculated. As in feminine body comportment which is associated with lack of trust in one’s body, there is a lack of trust in one’s mind to know, understand, and execute. Unlike the discrepancy between the sexes in body comportment, which can be, at least in part, explained by innate biological differences, the scientific consensus is that there exists no significant differences in intellectuality between men and women. Therefore, perception of such a difference is due to a storied history ingraining this idea into the minds of those even in a generation where women outpace men in higher education and the workplace.
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