SE1 E3: Throwing Like A Girl
Transcript: S01E03 – Iris Marion Young’s “Throwing Like a Girl”
[theme music fades in]
[outtake]
Anna 0:06
Just transcend!! Just transcend it!!
[Kristin laughs]
[theme music plays]
Welcome to thinking bodies, a feminist philosophy podcast.
Kristin 0:13
Anna!
Anna 0:14
Kristin!
Kristin 0:15
This is our second episode!
Anna 0:18
Oh wow.
Kristin 0:19
We made it to round two! We are a success!…
Here on thinking bodies, we discuss works of feminist philosophy that deserve more attention, works that we love. We crowdsource voice clips and collage with them as a feminist D.I.T. experiment.
Anna 0:43
A “do it together” podcast! I'm Anna Mudde. I'm on the Lands of the Michif/Métis nation and in the Lands of the nehiyawak, the Anishnabek, the Dakota, Lakota, and Nakoda peoples, which is also called “Pile of Bones.”
Kristin 0:56
And I'm Kristin Rodier, recording today from Amiskwaciy Waskahikan, homeland of the Plains Cree, the Woodland Cree, the Beaver Cree, the Ojibway, and the Métis, also called “Beaver Hills House.”
Guest Voices Introduce Themselves 1:12
I'm Meghan Dean… This is Grayson Hunt… My name is Jane Dryden.
Anna 1:19
Today's episode is on Iris Marion Young's “Throwing like a Girl: A Phenomenology of Feminine Bodily Comportment, Motility, and Spatiality,” from 1980.
Kristin 1:28
The year of my birth.
Anna 1:30
Oh, it's an auspicious year! Very good. I love it already. This is another fabulous title and also a bit of an uncomfortable title.
I'm going to play some voice clips for Kristin that she hasn't heard. Are you ready, Kristin?
Kristin 1:43
I feel. Ready.
Anna 1:49
So, Kristin, what has been up since last episode? What kind of experimental results have emerged from the first part of our experiment?
Kristin 1:59
Yeah, I was thinking about that because, you know, we thought about how to put together a feminist DIY philosophy podcast. One of the goals is about doing some deep reading together.
Anna 2:13
Yeah.
Kristin 2:14
Yeah. And I think the process of editing really for me was deep reading, but in a way it was deep reading our conversation. And what I loved about it was seeing that, you know, I knew what you were saying while we were talking, but I really got what you were getting towards by listening and re-listening to what you were saying while I was editing.
Anna 2:42
Yeah… over and over again.
Kristin 2:43
Over and over again, just, you know, clipping and moving stuff around. I thought, oh, that's what she meant! Or, oh, that's what our contributor was saying! And so I had a really nice experience with the with the sounds, with what everyone was saying, kind of getting to understand the views more through the through the process.
Anna 3:05
Yeah, that's a really good point. I was, I did the sort of well, the AI did the transcription and then I went through the transcript to correct the eye because we still get to do that. For a little while longer, we get to correct the AI.
Kristin 3:21
Right. It's not always right.
Anna 3:24
We get to correct the AI! Yeah, but it's so true. I was thinking the same thing that I really got to. Yeah, I really got to read what you were saying in a different way and remembering our conversation, but also getting it in textual format, which of course is different. And so yeah, I really, really enjoyed that kind of deep reading. Yeah, that's a really nice way to think about what editing is, is like really deep reading.
Kristin 3:49
Also, I really liked how, you know, we have different perspectives and I feel like I got to know yours better through listening to you more intently. But also, there were so many times where I was kind of off track and you've saved me! And I, in the moment didn't even know that! [laughs]
Anna 4:08
[laughing] You can… you will no doubt do that for me many times in the future!
Kristin 4:15
It was nice because it kind of I took some responsibility off and I go, “Well, if Anna said it, then that's… that's what we needed,” you know? And I don't have to be an expert. That's the whole point.
Anna 4:26
Yeah.
Kristin 4:26
So, yeah, I just I just loved that creative process. So it was great.
Anna 4:32
Such a good. Such a… yeah. I love your way of putting that, that it's a really nice exercise in deep reading because, of course, that's at least how I tend to read deeply is in part reading slowly and also like reading multiple times. And you get different things every time from a good text. So hopefully that means we produced a good text!
[theme music]
Anna 5:02
When we describe something as feminine, whether that's a person or a gesture or a smell or clothing, what do we mean? What do we mean by feminine? What could it mean for so many different kinds of things to be feminine? And if we're describing the movement of our bodies as feminine movement, how are our bodies moving? What is that movement like? Are the possible movements that we undertake already shaped by things like gendered expectations or by threats of objectification or violence? And if you've heard the description that someone, quote unquote throws like a girl, and if that's usually a negative thing, what does it actually mean? What does it mean to “throw like a girl”?
Kristin 5:53
I love these questions and I love this article. I think it opens up so much for us to think about in terms of, you know, being able to unpack the meaning of something like “throwing like a girl.” This is not something that people say as a compliment.
Anna 6:09
No. And it's often not directed at girls themselves, which is also a very interesting feature of the phrase. Yeah,
Kristin 6:18
Exactly. Right. So then there's this description of feminine movement, sort of traveling, but also being a tool of kind of policing movement. So how does that work? Yeah. So I just love these questions.
Anna 6:32
I remember one of the reasons why I find this title uncomfortable is precisely because of the way that it polices and the way that it uses gender assumptions about girls to police boys. And of course, that implies a certain kind of negativity about “throwing like a girl”. She's drawing on this piece by Erwin Strauss. He is observing that boys and girls seem to throw balls, projectiles, differently than one another. And he calls this difference a “remarkable difference.” In general, boys use more lateral space, so like side-to-side space than girls do.
Kristin 7:17
Mm
Anna 7:18
They sort of involve their whole bodies, whereas girls seem to throw with their arms or their hands alone. So it sort of appears that it's “a thing,” if you want to put it that way. It's “a thing” to “throw like a girl”, even if you're not a girl, even if you're not a woman, maybe especially if you're not a girl or a woman. Or if other people think that you're not a woman or a girl. He doesn't think that the difference is anatomical. But it is absolutely biological, he says. There's some sort of feminine attitude or… something like that.
Kristin 7:56
So it's not in the arm.
Anna 7:57
It's not in the arm. It's not in the arm. There's no breast in the way. It’s something that’s in the body, though, right? And biologically in the body.
Kristin 8:09
Hmm. I was kind of just even thinking about how some of this sits for me. Like, I feel like I don't ““throw like a girl”.” I don't know… whatever or based on the description that we have in the in the text, whatever it means to “throw like a girl”, I feel like I don't. But, I mean, I sort of came through a lot of sports when I was young and there was a lot to kind of, um, overcome for that. And also kind of like having a non-normative body from pretty young age. It's sort of, you know, this idea of lateral space using up lateral space will think about what it's like to call a, you know, a gendered, you know, feminine person “wide.”
Anna 8:56
Right.
Kristin 8:57
We're encouraged to take up less space, right: less space, you know, cross your legs, you know, whatever it is, it's just sort of like a shrinking smallness. But if you already don't fit that, there's kind of an availability, I think. But also I think just, you know, the there's been so much more sports encouraged, I think, and in a really different kind of mindset around that. What about you?
Anna 9:24
Well, I tried never to throw at all. [both laugh] Where I do… I do feel sort of like seen-slash-called out by this piece, but I think part it's because I wasn't very involved in sports. And when I think about why that was, I mean… I experience cheering as, like, yelling. [Kristin laughs] So I was just not suited for certain activities, I think.
[both laugh]
So this is all really interesting. Iris Marion Young's question is, if there are feminine ways of being and moving, what are they? And why? Strauss is convinced that there's this inherent biological difference between boys and girls. He calls it a “feminine attitude” in relation to the world and space, whatever that is, he says, it's natural. It's not learned. It's not acquired. It's just part of having a girl's body.
Kristin 10:42
And this is what Young is really taking on. You know, so she's not giving us this, you know, grand theory of oppression. You know, what is gender? What is gender oppression? You know, what is all aspects of embodiment? But basically trying to come up with some kind of explanation for if there are these differences, not necessarily where have they come from, but what are they like?
Anna 11:07
Right.
Kristin 11:08
So what is it like to move your body in this particular way? And what might that mean?
Anna 11:17
Right. Right! And so then we can ask, right, if it's not biological, what's Young's framework for this observable difference? And one of the nice things about her analysis is that she notices that what we might call feminine movement is not unique to people who are girls or women. Feminine movement is part of all bodies, and it's possible for all bodies. So anyone can, to use the phrase “throw like a girl.” And if that's so right, that's actually a really good reason for us to think that this is not biological. This is not some sort of inherent quality.
Kristin 12:05
Yeah.
Anna 12:06
And so we can ask them, well, what is her alternative? And her answer is the one that we get from existential phenomenological philosophers. And that is: “the answer is situation.” And situation is kind of hard to describe.
Kristin 12:22
Yeah, it takes a kind of methodological backing up, I think, to get us into situation.
Anna 12:27
Yeah. So I'll back up a little bit then. So I'm thinking about the ways that, like, in philosophical orthodoxy subjects do things, right? They think, they act, they feel, they move, they decide, they intend, they can transcend or sort of, I don't know, overcome their body by imagining themselves elsewhere. Right? We can… our capacity to plan right, requires us to, like, transcend where we are in time and space in and sort of think about where we're going to be in time and space in the future. We can also do that with memory. We can transcend in that way, too. By contrast, objects have things done to them. They are thought about, they are acted upon, they are moved. They don't feel, they don't intend, they don't decide anything. And so we get this firm split between subject and object and also between then mind and body. The mind is the thing that does the thinking, we're led to believe, and the body is the thing that's sort of like the object part of the human being, something like that.
Kristin 13:43
Yeah. Yeah. And so then you have this kind of, you know, set of theoretical assumptions, right, that get us this mind that is beyond the body. And then you have the body which is like sort of this dead lump object, you know, piece of matter. And so then it's like, Well, how would these things have anything to do with each other? You know, so you end up with these weird, like, ghost in the machine ontologies where the mind is like driving the body. And, and they are two sort of separate kinds of things, right?
Anna 14:13
Right.
Kristin 14:14
And, and so situation comes in and really subverts that separation, resists that separation.
Anna 14:23
Yeah. And so the situated subject is, well, it's also called the body subject or the lived body. And this is the idea that the mind and body aren’t separated, but they're sort of fused into a living ambiguity so that what we're dealing with is an organism as opposed to a separate and separable mind and body. And that means that what I'm thinking about is always affected by where and what my body is doing. And that my body can do things without my thinking about it as though it sort of thinks itself as though it has a mind of its own.
Kristin 15:03
Yeah, that's the that's the thinking body piece. Right? Like…
Anna 15:07
Yeah, thinking bodies! And so the thinking throwing body is a body that has been formed by all of its environment, all of its experiences, social and physical, what it is like, but also what it's been exposed to.
Kristin 15:22
Merleau-Ponty has a lovely example about the woman with a really large feather in her hat.
Anna 15:25
Oh, I love that example. Yeah.
Kristin 15:29
I'd like to see more people with large feathers in their hats, by the way.
Anna 15:32
We could just do it. You and I. [laughs]
Kristin 15:35
But he talks about how, you know, she puts on her hat. She knows how high the feather is. And so she knows exactly how much to duck under a doorway, so that the feather doesn't touch. But she's not like sort of measuring and calculating objectively with the mind. Right. Her body has incorporated the feather as part of its lived experience in the world. Right. So it's a it's a thinking body, kind of like we're trying to think about together. So this is kind of where we can think about transcendence. So I'm an object, of course, you know, I have a physical body, but… and I'm an object for others. Right? But I'm also a subject for others, right? You don't take me in the way you take the cup, you know, as another object in the world…
Anna 16:27
Not usually, no! [laughs]
Kristin 16:30
But one of my body's capacities is to transcend that object-ness into consciousness. So deciding, acting, moving, dancing, throwing all of these things come from my lived body. And so that's why instead of, like, where you have philosophers who think of, you know, our kind of base consciousness of the world as being, I think, the existential phenomenologists will still think of it as “I can.”
Anna 16:58
Right.
Kristin 16:59
So I come into the world and experience my body as a body of possibilities towards tasks.
Anna 17:05
And then because we don't, like, control everything about our bodies or about the world, we can't always actually do the thing. So the “I can” is the sort of intention part, and when it comes to fruition, well, then I've engaged in a certain kind of transcendence. Transcendence in this case is always situated, and it's always made possible by particular bodily affordances. And of course, bodily affordances vary so much. Right? We're thinking here about “throwing like a girl” or “throwing like a boy,” but there are bodies that don't throw.
Kristin 17:46
Mm hmm. So and the other thing is, like, important to think about and describe these kinds of, you know, limitations on possibilities that are due to oppressive structures. Because those then show us what the structures are and how they operate and the meaning of them, but then also give us clues to understanding those embodied habits.
Anna 18:13
Yeah. Nice. Oh, I love that. Kristin, I think maybe we want to hear from Iris Marion Young herself. Do you want to read a quote?
Kristin 18:21
Okay, So she writes, “Once we take the locus of subjectivity and transcendence to be the lived body rather than pure consciousness, all transcendence is ambiguous because the body as natural and material is imminence.” [So imminence kind of names that object ness of the body.] “But as is not the ever present possibility of any lived body to be passive, to be touched, as well as touching to be grasped, as well as grasping, which I am referring to here as the ambiguity of the transcendence of the feminine lived body. The lived body as transcendence is pure fluid action, the continuous calling forth of capacities which are applied to the world.”
I think this is really interesting. Sort of like ideally, or without oppression, let's say, the body can transcend eminence towards the “I can.” But when your body is overly associated with imminence because of oppression, actually it then is kind of pushed into immanence more. It becomes this kind of self-fulfilling embodiment.
Anna 19:33
Right? Yeah. So there's this. I was thinking, too, about the way she's saying, like, look, it's not that feminine embodiment is this tension between imminence and transcendence. That's human embodiment. Human embodiment is a tension between imminence and transcendence.
Kristin 19:52
Totally.
Anna 19:53
It's never pure consciousness. We have the lived body. But in addition to that, there's something about feminine bodily existence that always involves that sense of being an object for oneself and for others, as well as or at the same time as being subject. So, Young says that feminine bodily existence expresses… I would call it a kind of embodied knowledge, like a deep knowledge that is aware of itself in those sort of conscious/unconscious ways you're talking about as both subject and object at the same time. And that might show up in all kinds of ways: having to or feeling the need to be attractive in certain ways, holding your body in certain ways, speaking in certain ways, moving in certain ways. And to describe that, she pulls out these three dimensions or like kind of maybe analytic categories for thinking about what it's… what it is to “throw like a girl” or “move like a girl.” So, she starts with that bit about “ambiguous transcendence,” she calls it. So this is this is the experience of knowing and experiencing yourself as touching and touched. So not just the toucher, but also that which is touched, grasping and grasped. So not just the thing that holds on, but the thing that gets grasped. So, when I have both of those at the same time and that's really clear to me, I don't fully transcend being an object. I don't go from the touched to the touching. I'm always both. And I know myself then as very clearly a thing for others and in the world, even when I'm doing that subject stuff, right, the like feeling and thinking and planning and deciding and all that kind of stuff.
Kristin 21:58
This is kind of where philosophers can get tied up with everyday language, I think, because, you know, philosophers would say, well, or Sartre, let's say, would say “to be just to be self-conscious, because consciousness is always my consciousness for me.” But that's different from the sense of “self-conscious” as we will use it every day -- say, I'm really conscious of myself, which really just means, like, my skin or my hair or my walk or my, you know, whatever, my body. So, this is kind of ambiguous. Transcendence for me really touches on self-consciousness in the everyday way of talking about it, right? I'm seeing myself as others see me at the same time as I'm seeing myself. And because of that, I can't kind of get out of myself to do the thing I want to do.
Anna 22:47
Yeah. And I actually think that's a superpower, but um… like, I think that training actually trains those of us who have it to like certain kinds of really cool things. But yeah, it, it does sort of feed into this feminine bodily existence that she's describing here. So then the next part is what she calls “inhibited intentionality.” So we were talking about the “I can” before, the sort of intention to do something. So this is, she notices, sort of expressed in bodily movement and comportment by doing two things at the same time. So, I have something in mind to do. But the way that I'm doing it communicates “I cannot” or seems to be grounded in the sense that I cannot. So here, like, I don't really commit to throwing the ball with my full body. Maybe I just use my arm or maybe just my hand. And so in expressing the “I can,” I throw the ball. I also in a way, right, sort of don't really throw it. I'm sort of expressing the “I cannot.”
Kristin 24:02
Exactly. Kind of like, you know, you have to… this… this this reading always brings mw back to gym class in ways that
Anna 24:11
Oh, goodness.
Kristin 24:11
I'm not prepared to go mentally, in my memory. But it is you know, when you think about all the kind of mocking and the expectations and the, you know, gender norms, and so it's like, okay, everybody, you know, it's dodgeball day or whatever it is. And so you just kind of are given these messages about whether you're good or not or you can do it or not.
Anna 24:33
Yep.
Kristin 24:33
And that I mean, what are we supposed to be invulnerable to those messages? You know, they come in and then, you know, you're throwing, but you go, “oh, I’m not going to get it…”
Anna 24:43
Yeah. Or it's like an apology. Like, you know, I'm going to throw the ball, but I'm sort of, like, apologizing with my body on the way out, right? Like, it's sort of like “Sorry!” Right?
Kristin 24:56
[laughing] Yeah. Yeah. And that that there's self-conscious teenage stuff around there about being seen trying to do something to raise.
Anna 25:03
Yes. Oh, yeah, of course. And again, this is not just for throwing balls and it is not just for girls and women.
Yeah. And so then the third sort of picking up on the what it is to have that “I can”-“I cannot,” the way that she describes this here is “discontinuous unity.” So, boys tend to on this view tend to use the whole bodies to do certain kinds of tasks throwing things as an example, here. Whereas girls tend to use only one part of their bodies as we were we were talking about before – so here their arms or their hands – while the rest of the body remains relatively immobile. And so she's really like paying close attention to, like, what it was that Erwin Strauss was observing and trying to describe that. As a result, though, like, you're not going to throw a ball as far, if your body throws balls, if you're only using part of your body than if you're using a whole body. That is a feature of human bodies.
Kristin 26:11
Absolutely. I stopped playing baseball and stuff like that when I was about 13 or so, but I really took on later on playing competitive pool – billiards.
Anna 26:25
Oh! I didn't know this about you, Kristin! This is entirely new information!
Kristin 26:30
This is from the lost years before I went to university.
Anna 26:36
Should we all have lost years? I think probably we should, yes.
Kristin 26:39
And and I never I didn't think about this period of time where I started playing competitive pool and really developing a stance and a bridge, you know, all different kinds of hand positioning and stuff like that. I didn't think about them till my 200-level philosophy class, which was, you know, philosophy of human nature class, where we took Merleau-Ponty on on spatiality and motility. And he is talking about how we, like incorporate objects into our body. And I thought, oh my God, this makes complete sense about pool, because I had taken a bunch of lessons or whatever, and sort of once you start, once you get into your stance and you start breaking down the kind of flow of getting down your stance and accomplishing your task, you go… if you make an adjustment, you have to start all over again.
Anna 27:30
Right.
Kristin 27:30
Or if you move your hand in a funny way, you have to start all over again because you've kind of broken down that fluidity where the cue is taken into your body and where it just sort of becomes this extension of what you're doing. And then I thought about all the people that I would watch play pool that don't know how to play pool... [laughs] and, you know…
Anna 27:54
It's painful, right?! [laughing]
Kristin 27:59
But it made perfect sense to me with this article because you see someone standing and then they move the right hand a little bit, the left hand a little bit, the head, you know, it's just all these different individual parts when they need to kind of work together. And I think a lot of why gender might play out differently with playing pool is because it's quite physically vulnerable. Like, you have to be forward into the queue and the ball, and you think like that versus like, thinking, “Oh, I'm totally bent over right now.” So I think it is I think there is something there around the social environment affecting the possibilities and sort of having to overcome that in order to accomplish a particular task. And how do you overcome it?
Anna 28:46
Yes. And often… Often, I suppose, we don't. It's often really hard to overcome it. And if we do, it's probably because we have training. But also, there are probably things in the world that support our doing that in all sorts of physical but also social ways.
Kristin 29:05
Totally.
Anna 29:06
Yeah.
[music plays]
Megan Dean 29:15
I'm Megan Dean, assistant professor of philosophy at Michigan State University and the North American coordinator for Culinary Mind Center for Philosophy of Food. I am so happy to share a little bit about what Iris Marion Young's work means to me, and particularly the paper “Throwing Like a Girl,” which I first read in undergrad. In section one of the paper, Young writes, quote, “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 my footing on various stones, holding on to overhanging branches. Though the others cross 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.” End quote. So, I have definitely had this experience. It's very vivid for me. This memory like feeling scared I will fall, doubtful that I'm going to be able to cross, embarrassed and ashamed that I'm hesitating, and that other people can see me, and frustrated and disgusted with myself for being so incapable.
What I learned from Young is not just that I was not alone in having this sort of messy, embarrassing hiking experience. And that in itself was a really helpful thing for me to know. But she argues that this experience reflects a common understanding of the feminine body as something which is often incapable, untrustworthy, weak, fragile, easily hurt. And at the same time, it's something that other people are looking at and judging – a visual object. And so while, you know, I'm trying to accomplish a task that I find challenging, I'm also worrying: Do I look awkward? Do I look dorky? Do I look unattractive? So it's no surprise that many girls and women may find themselves moving awkwardly with hesitation and difficulty and are at times maybe unable to accomplish certain physical tasks when you know there's all of this going on in the background.
And for me, the big takeaway here is that this understanding of the feminine body doesn't just shape how some people experience their own bodies, but even more than that, that what we are literally able to do is also shaped in part by this understanding. So our agency is profoundly shaped and constructed by how we think about our bodies, how other people think about our bodies, too, and in this case, how we think about them in gendered ways.
So Young's account of this is very sophisticated. You know, she's not just saying, “oh, just think more positive thoughts about your body and then you'll be empowered. You'll be able to leap across streams with ease.” She really emphasizes how the material social, economic context we live in inform our understandings about femininity, gender, you know, bodies more generally. And it can be very challenging to change these understandings either on an individual sort of interpersonal level, or more broadly on a community level, without at the same time changing these systems and structures.
But they can change. You know, things can be different, maybe even better. And that's one of the lessons that I take from this paper. And when I taught this paper recently in my feminist philosophy class, many of my students shared that their access to girls’ sports has really helped them with confidence in their physical abilities, at least in certain areas of their lives. Not everyone is interested in sports, but I think this underscores how ethically and existentially important access to sports can be. And this is part of why it is so troubling that trans and gender non-conforming people are being excluded from sports in many places. So, thank you for this opportunity to chat with you a bit about Young. And good luck with the episode.
[music plays]
Kristin 33:33
Megan brings up so many good points and I'm really, really happy to hear her relation to it as being like, “Oh, I'm not alone in thinking that I might fall or don't myself or hesitate or be frustrated or disgusted with myself.” You know, on a hike or whatever, you know, we have different bodily possibilities for, you know, any kind of group activity like that. But it also… we're working with the social, cultural meanings around all of our different bodies in that space. So “whose body is supposed to be able to move in particular ways, and what can they do?” really affects our possibilities and our access to spaces.
And I love that Megan pointed out this isn't just about going “well, yes, you can! You know, girl power! Think your way out of these restrictions, and then your body can do whatever!”
Anna 34:38
“Just transcend! Just transcend it!”
Kristin 34:40
And that's so important to point out whenever we're talking about resisting embodied oppression is not putting it on the individual to sort of think your way out of something.
Anna 34:56
Right. Right.
Kristin 34:57
Because that actually further responsiblizes the individual for their oppression and I think makes it harder for us to change collectively.
Anna 35:07
That's right. It's true. Like, it's really helpful on the one hand to be able to name those things and be able to say, “Oh, right. My feeling that way is a function of systems of oppression. I can understand that.” And also not saying, “and so, I overcome that by just yeah, surpassing it, knowing that this is a feature of my oppression and then deciding to do things differently.” Right? That's not how those things change. And it calls us into solidarity, actually. Right? This like, very personal, very bodily, intimate kind of experience we have of ourselves and with ourselves can really call us into into solidarity with others. That sort of way of thinking about how impressions are embodied and what the mechanisms for changing that sense of embodied experience are really point us toward wide kinds of, deep kinds of, solidarity across a lot of kinds of differences.
Kristin 36:15
Absolutely.
Anna 36:17
This is sort of making me think about some of the other things that Young says in the paper. So could you read is another passage, Kristin?
Kristin 36:26
Sure.
Anna 36:27
Amazing! Here it is.
Kristin 36:30
Okay. “Patriarchal society defines women as object as a mere body. And in sexist society. Women are in fact frequently regarded by others as objects and mere bodies, an essential part of the situation of being a woman…” [and that… she's using “situation” there, right?] “…of being a woman is that of living the ever-present possibility that one will be gazed upon as a mere body, as shape and flesh that presents itself as the potential object of another subject's intentions and manipulations rather than as a living manifestation of action and intention. The source of this objectified bodily existence is in the attitude of others regarding her. But the woman herself often actively takes up her body as a mere thing. She gazes at it in the mirror, worries about how it looks to others, prunes it, shapes it, molds it, and decorates it,” unquote.
Anna 37:29
And so, yeah, I mean, she's trying to explain here why it is that someone might come to be aware of themselves as subject and also very much as object. It's not that… she uses the word “attitude,” here. It's others’ attitudes in regarding her that often shape that sense, that sense of herself or that sense of oneself, right?, because this this need not be unique to women alone. But she is noticing that this happens in gendered ways, in part because of how we understand women and how we socialize ourselves collectively.
Kristin 38:12
Yeah. I'm thinking about here, like, there's so much philosophical literature on objectification, you know, and this, this area of philosophy really sort of just talks about subject-object, and doesn't really kind of slice and dice objectification in a bunch of different ways. Because there are many ways we can… I'm thinking about Nussbaum and other people here like we can enjoy being an object for others; I want you to take me as an object in certain ways; you know, I want that kind of, you know, relational embodiment where we're attending to each other’s object-ness in certain ways. Right? That's good! But I think the use of objectification here is really about a kind of reduction of self.
Anna 38:56
Yeah. Yeah. That's a really good way to put it, actually, and maybe you can… This is a long passage, listeners, this is a long passage, but it's really great Iris Marion Young. So Kristin, can you finish that?
Kristin 39:08
Sure. So “To open her body in free, active and open extension and bold outward directness is for a woman to invite objectification. The threat of being seen is, however, not the only threat of objectification which the woman lives. She also lives the threat of invasion of her body space. The most extreme form of such spatial and bodily invasion is the threat of rape. But we are daily subject to the possibility of bodily invasion in many far more subtle ways as well. It is acceptable, for example, for women to be touched in ways and under circumstances that it is not acceptable for men to be touched and by persons – men – whom it is not acceptable for them to touch, would suggest that the enclosed space, which has been described as a modality of feminine spatiality, is in part a defence against such invasion.”
Yeah. That's so interesting.
Anna 40:14
So interesting and that just last passage there really reminds me of Marianne Wex, who's a photographer and an artist, has a series of photos I think may be taken in Germany… I would have to check that… of men sitting with, you know, legs wide and women sitting not just with their legs crossed, one over the other, but with their arms crossed, one of the other. As though as those sort of in protection. But also, like, not taking up too much space, right? Not as “free, active, and open extension and bold outward directness,” so that, you will not be “inviting objectification,” Young says here.
Kristin 41:02
Is that is that the photo series on like man spreading?
Anna 41:05
Yeah, I guess it… I guess! But it's quite old. I think it was done probably in the seventies or something so it's like it's.
Kristin 41:11
[laughing] Okay. So they wouldn't have had that word.
Anna 41:13
No, they wouldn't have had the word. But she really was kind of picking up on this. There's also like images of people like standing and leaning or, like, you know, standing and taking up little space. And of course, that's that's culturally bound as well. Right. This is European/Euro-American kind of cultural embodiment. But yeah, I think it always reminds me of those photos when I read this section of Young.
Kristin 41:42
And Shannon Sullivan also writes about relationships to space and whiteness. And I think her term is “ontological expansiveness,” so that it's actually racialized, the idea that all space should be open for me to enter into and I should be safe, I should be able to, you know, project my aims and my tasks into the world in any space – any space should be available to me in that that is a kind of ontological expansiveness that's related to whiteness that goes, you know, that that undergirds, you know, colonialism, imperialism, and lots of other, you know, structures. So we have to think about, you know, the point here is not, “oh, you know, there should we should all be able to spread as much, you
know, we should all take up space.” But that, you know, there needs to be more of a sort of relational responsive taking in of the impact of my space, near space, and how we're sharing space together.
[music plays]
Anna 42:46
I'm going to play our next clip. And this one is from Grayson Hunt.
Grayson Hunt 42:53
Hi, this is Grayson Hunt. I think the point of the paper is to say that there is an explanation that can be given for why women move differently than men. She's saying, look, it's not anatomy or physiology or even some mysterious feminine essence as to why women do these things worse than men. It's actually our situation. I'm saying “our” because I used to identify as a woman and certainly still identify as having feminine bodily comportment as I read this. And of course, you don't have to be a woman to have feminine bodily comportment. So better and worse ways to do things. Women do it worse. We do it imminently, ambiguously, more statically, more anchored.
The problem for me is why that is considered a deficit when she acknowledges and realizes these ways of moving have been adapted in a hostile environment. The essay focuses on the effects of oppression on bodily movements, but it measures the bodily movements affected by oppression against the non-oppressed, where the non-oppressed bodily movement is the golden standard. So maybe the standard that this essay kind of not unwittingly upholds, but, you know, she is saying there's a better and worse way to do things and that it is situational. I know that means she's critiquing the oppressive system, but she's not quite critiquing the oppressors’ bodily comportment the way she is the oppressed bodily comportment. So, I do think experientially the description she offers is right. And it is something that I kind of immediately latched on to.
Nowadays, you know, we have so much more, kind of, language and social categories available to us. And so the essay does smack a bit femme-phobic, where to do things in a different way, maybe with a lighter touch or even more adornment. Think about the way women or femmes might walk in the world. And I know how to do that when I'm walking. If I want to walk in a femme way, I detach my torso from my hips, right? And then my hips move with my legs. And there's a lot more fluidity and motion side to side, for instance. Whereas if I want to walk, quote, “like a man,” I attach my hips to my torso, straighten up, so to speak – happy pride, everyone! – and then just use my legs detached from my hips. That way, there's no side-to-side movement of my hips. I look more masculine, but there's a lot less motion in taking up of space. So that's, you know, just an example where there's more motion. And I would lose points according to, you know, the metric that's being used here. She also admits that the reason some people express more objectivity than subjectivity, right, by withdrawing from the world, by remaining more imminent, is in response to the threat of danger. Right? This is real material danger. Rape is the example she gives, right? She is aware of rape culture in the way that it affects bodies.
So to say that she understands that people move in a more imminent, limited, ambiguous bodily comportment in response to the threat of danger, to see that as a deficit rather than a strength, than an adaptation, you know, feels like a limited view. I think that an analysis of accessibility and ableism could really help kind of shift the standard according to which the bodies in this story, in this essay, are being judged.
[music plays]
Kristin 47:14
This is so helpful, I think, in many, many ways. I think I we've been talking about a little bit about how the binary is not really working here, like between “throwing like a girl” or “throwing like a boy.” Boy is good because somehow valued, you know, but I feel like I've had sort of brackets or quotation marks around all of that, saying, you know, if you want to, you know, get somebody out at first base, then you probably need to throw this kind of way. But that's all relative to wanting to compete in a particular kind of sport. Right? Whereas that's really limited to this one particular example. When we're talking about how this has reverberations around bodily comportment and in all aspects of society, where actually what it is a sort of adaptation to gendered oppression. So in a way, the example of “throwing like a girl” takes a little bit too much of the social impact of it away, I think.
Anna 48:20
Right? Yeah. Yeah. That Grayson says “adapted it in a hostile environment,” which was perfect. Perfectly put.
Kristin 48:30
And I really like the idea of distilling from it a kind of femme phobic line of thinking. And I think this is where I was trying to lean towards, around thinking about different forms of objectification that are joyful and intimate and relational. And I was thinking about Ann Cahill's work on feminine beautification, because there really is this kind of anti-beautification thread through a lot of the existential phenomenological work because it tracks back to this transcendence where the body doesn't impact your ability at all. But you know, we can also delight in and find pleasure in adorning the body, attending to the body, attending to each other's bodies, doing each other's nails, you know. And thinking about all the ways that we can train expertise around aesthetics and taking care of ourselves and each other around the body. So, I definitely have come to that critique as well in this kind of immanence-transcendence binary.
Anna 49:43
Yeah. I mean, you're saying that, too, really puts me in mind of the skill set that I always identify with the drag community as just like… I mean, I don't have words for how much skill I just sort of see. And also amazing performance and joy. Right? But just like skill with makeup and putting… oh gosh, putting on false eyelashes. Like, anyone who has ever tried to do this knows just how deeply skillful all of that is, and how much it requires. And also how knowing all of those things – Sandra Lee Bartky talks about this – those are skills that generally speaking get you no social respect. Within particular communities, of course, that's not the case. But in general, being really good at applying makeup, for instance, or taking pride in that or joy in that is not respected, it's not valued in the way that other things are.
Kristin 51:05
Well, and that's kind of Grayson's point around like measuring something against the standard of the non-oppressed.
Anna 51:13
Right! Yeah. Yeah. And so, yeah, I love the way that Grayson was talking about critique of oppressive structures, which we're getting here from Young, but also about the way that she doesn't flag the sort of hierarchy of ways of being. So there isn't a question like what does feminine embodiment do? What can feminine embodiment do and what does that comportment allow us in the world as -- maybe a different kind of skill, maybe just a different way of being – all of those things? Why is one way better, not just contextually it seems here, which is, I think, part of what Grayson's pointing out – right? -- Iris Marion Young is not talking about that contextually. She's sort of like, “no, throwing like boys is better.” Full stop.
Kristin 52:08
Yes, for sure. And I was thinking about this, about the connection between what Megan was saying and what Grayson is saying is this idea of like, well, if Megan's on this hike and is, you know, hesitating, doubting herself, you know, whatever. You know, people do get injured on hikes. And so maybe we need to be doing a little bit more doubt or maybe don't take the scary steep whatever, you know, like these things are good, are also good for us and in certain ways. And there are some people who should be less confident.
Anna 52:44
Yeah. At least like reasonable options to consider in a range of options, whatever our particular range of options is.
[both laugh]
[music plays]
Kristin 52:57
So, you were going to talk about what it’s like when the ball's coming at you?
Anna 53:02
Yeah. So one of the things that Iris Marion Young talks about here is the difference in embodiment between like, I don't know what we would call this, like, having a ball come at you like a girl or having a ball come at you like a boy? But we can think about what happens when a ball is coming towards us. What do you do in that situation and why and how? And what are your possibilities depending on what your body is like and what sorts of movements you have available to you. So one of the things Young tells us is that what we often describe as “masculine comportment” involves, in this case, confronting the ball, “meeting it with one’s own,” she says, “counter motion.” And what we often describe as a feminine response or comportment is a reaction to do something like “that’s coming at me!”, so that, and I'll quote her here, “the immediate bodily impulse is to flee, duck or otherwise protect ourselves from its flight.” End quote. And of course, again, depending on how we are embodied, fleeing and ducking and protecting ourselves varies quite a lot. And also, whether or not we're able to engage in counter motion or confrontation varies quite a lot. But this sort of way of being, in this case I think there are these different ways of being with a ball in the world. Think about, you know, those moments when a ball is coming at us, how do we respond to the ball?
Kristin 54:44
[laughs] Yeah! And I was thinking about, you know, two things you can really get hurt. And then the other one being that catching a ball is hard. I had great coaches growing up training us, you know, “eye on the ball! eye on the ball! You're looking at your glove or you're looking at the person who threw it. No! Eye on the ball and your hand will catch it.” Right. And so that's a training thing. But also, you have to sort of let go of the way you're looking, doing it.
Anna 55:18
That's such a good point. I hadn't really thought about. I was always taught “eye on the ball” also. And just as you were talking, I was thinking, “Oh, right. What actually is to happen there is it has to be just the ball and me in that moment.”
Kristin 55:31
And I think Young is going to say something like it's not like the person who, you know, experiences the ball coming at them and then can't catch it is in their mind saying, “I look bad.” It's totally embodied. You know, it's kind of that [being] overlaid with imminence. So so it can be trained differently, I think.
I was actually thinking about, you know, a lot's changed. Like, I'm a generation or more kind of younger than Young, and, you know, things have changed a lot. But now I'm a parent, I'm a parent of an eight-year-old, and I'm going to soccer games and ball hockey games and the parents are really, you know, I am guilty! You know, you I mean, your kid is going to have more fun, score goals and be part of the action, if they go to the ball instead of running away from the ball when it's coming at them. So part of the competitive piece of the game is saying, you know, “challenge the ball! get on the ball!” you know, so you hear a lot of that coming from the stands. This is going back to your initial discussion about sports being uncomfortable, as I hope I'm not a bad sports parent, but…
Anna 56:55
No. I think I think I just have a sensitive system to noise, so I don't think… I think it’s just… [laughs]
Kristin 57:03
[laughs] Which is very fair. Those games can be quite, quite rowdy. But, you know, you kind of there is a point in that development that I've been watching in the last eight years is the difference between sort of running alongside the ball, versus backing off from the ball coming at you versus being willing to go at it. And a lot of being willing to go at it means you might get hurt. And so when you kind of can overcome that or push through that, then you're you're meeting it with counter emotion.
Anna 57:41
Meeting it with counter motion, yeah! The challenge!
You don't have parents on the sidelines saying, like, “develop a relationship with the ball! be in relation with the ball!”…. [no!] “challenge it! There's one kind of relation to have with it!” But, but of course you're absolutely right. Like, to play the game, you do have to have a certain kind of relationship with the ball. That's… you have to be with the ball in a certain way. I think that's absolutely right.
[music plays]
Jane Dryden 58:14
Hi, my name is Jane Dryden and I'm a philosophy professor at Mount Allison University. I'm excited to speak about Iris Marion Young’s “Throwing Like a Girl,” because I think it's a great essay, even though I came to it kind of late! This is embarrassing to admit, but until I was already a professor, I really didn't think about bodies at all as a philosophical topic. My own relationship with my own body is awkward. I like fashion, but I tend to go for fun or interesting clothes or jewelry that draw attention away from my actual body. I kind of wish I was a disembodied consciousness who could optionally wear cute frocks and only be seen if I choose to. I really feel called out by Young's description of an objectified bodily existence toward the end of the paper. But anyway, so I've been interested in autonomy and freedom for about as long as I've done philosophy. And along with that, I've been interested in the social structures, practices, and institutions that enable or constrain our autonomy and freedom.
Embarrassing!: I never thought the ability to do things had much to do with actual ummmmmm… bodies! So fast forward through a lot, a growing interest in philosophy and disability made me have to start actually taking bodies seriously and bodily freedom really seriously. But if we think about what opens up our freedom, our possibilities, we also have to think about what shuts it down. And so what I want to highlight from Young's essay is the simple phrase “I cannot.” Maurice Merleau-Ponty describes that we encounter possibilities the world affords us not with, “I think,” but with “I can,” with a sense of what we and our bodies are going to do in and with the world. And that's great, in The Phenomenology of Perception. But Young, of course, describes the way that, due to socialization and social factors, women project an inhibited “I cannot.” So Young describes this as self-imposed. But it's a complicated thing, because it's also super habituated. And so, at a certain point of that habituation, it's not like we can suddenly do otherwise. I really do “throw like a girl”. And even if now, in my mid-forties, I deliberately try to take up a bunch of space and unrestricted myself, I have the body I have with decades of habit, sediment and into it. Further, the “I cannot,” can be, like, inhibited intentionality, but it can also be the response of someone with a body that is not accommodated by its surroundings. So I'm really interested in how, in talking about disability, in talking about chronic illness, in talking about aging, we can really play with this back and forth of the “I can” and the “I cannot.” It's also the case that vulnerable bodies might need to be careful about what they can approach with an “I can.” So I might know that if I do too much on one day, then the next day I won't be able to do very much at all. For COVID conscious bodies, for instance, an “I cannot” might be an act of resistance. You know, “I cannot do that. It will not be safe. I choose a safer existence.” So I really love the way that Young's essay opens up possibilities for exploring how different kinds of bodies might navigate the world and what they can and can't do.
One more thing: I included this essay a few years ago in an undergraduate seminar on Philosophy of Bodies. And it was interesting because a bunch of my students, especially a bunch of my female students, really wanted to push against it. Like they kept saying, “Well, I'm an athlete, I don't do this, I don't do that.” And it's like, “okay, let's that's great. You know, decades have gone by since Young's essay.” But one of my students who teaches fencing said, in fact that when he teaches younger girls, they really, really get into it. But older girls indeed were often nervous to fully extend themselves. And this fits really well with what Young says, especially about the sort of spatial kind of aspect, you know, when you think about fencing, really extending that, that arm, the body. Anyway, I really just wanted the excuse to end with the mental image of a bunch of little girls running around with swords completely unafraid in the world. All right. Thank you.
[music plays]
[Anna & Kristin laughing hard]
Kristin 1:02:40
I want that image!
Anna 1:02:44
I know, I know!
Kristin 1:02:48
I think Young would, too!
Anna 1:02:50
I think so, too! Oh, my goodness.
Kristin 1:02:53
Funny. Yeah. It makes me think about how they, you know, they do those studies on, you know, asking girls, you know, do you think he can be president? And like they say, in equal measure to boys, you know, under a certain age – I think it's nine or ten – “yes.” And then it's you know, it drops off after 11, like drastically. You know, like there's quite a change.
But here talking about, like what a body can do based on how you are habituated over time is so…
Anna 1:03:25
And what it cannot do based on how you are habituated, I guess, too, right?
Kristin 1:03:28
Yeah. And how the world we live in affords certain kinds of habituations, in that we don't just think our way out of them and…
Anna 1:03:44
Yes! That is that is the crucial bit of that, isn't it? We don't just think our way out.
Kristin 1:03:50
… but yeah, I find that we really tell stories about embodied changes kind of with an epiphany narrative, often, and it really isn't like that. So it's great to hear Jane say, you know, if I were to go out there tomorrow and try to throw a ball, you know what I'm up against… I'm up against all the times that I've been inhibited. Like, there's a weight to our habits. They form momentum, they're sedimented, and they allow us to do things, but they also are restrictive. It's just very kind of interesting thinking about bodily habits being constrained by not being accommodated. And so how do we support the development of possibilities, in others, in ourselves that are different from the what our body needs?
Anna 1:04:45
Right. And how do we pay attention? I mean, it strikes me that there's a sort of attention paying that we can develop in order to be picking up on that about ourselves, but also about the people around us, so that we can come up with creative options or do different activities or all of the things that are available to us, and we pay that kind of attention.
Kristin 1:05:08
Yeah. And I was thinking about… Jane was talking about autonomy and freedom, and I want to be able to do things, you know? And I was thinking about Cressida Heyes's work, about, you know, “actually, I also just want to check out. I want to be less agential.” So, you know, it does sort of sometimes feel like when you're involved with, you know, resistance politics, social justice politics, there's a hypercritical posture to yourself when maybe, back to Grayson's point, maybe that that criticality needs to be pointed outward at whatever standards were being measured at and working on some some solidarity, but also just kind of backing off of that sort of scrutiny.
Anna 1:05:56
Yes. For some of us, I was thinking about how for some of us, the “I cannot” is often so fraught because we are habituated to always, always “can,” for lack of a better way of putting it. And so to say or to be in a place of “I cannot,” and to work out different ways of understanding that, and also just notice in ourselves the habituated response to not- doing is also kind of really interesting space…. Also [laughing] the space in which there are girls running around with swords.
Kristin 1:06:49
Yeah. And. I was thinking about girls running around with swords and the people who need more “cannot”…
Anna 1:06:59
That's right!
Kristin 1:07:02
Could you not?!
[Anna laughs]
Kristin 1:07:06
Those two things, you know. There's so much there. And I love the idea that our freedom is just not unrestricted… that whatever our freedom is, it is enabled through, but also restricted by these embodied habits and that they take time to change. They take others. They take supports. They take structural changes, you know, economic changes.
Anna 1:07:40
Absolutely. What Jane's saying here connects back through to what we were talking about earlier, but also through what Grayson was articulating and what Megan was articulating. And that is maybe something about the value or the knowledge of really having a sense of yourself always as object in addition to being subject. It's not true that we are ever able to surpass ourselves as embodied creatures. That just isn't true. And so I often think about the ways that these sorts of analyses kind of draw attention to, but as Grayson’s saying, maybe don't even take seriously enough, the sort of knowledge that might in this case feminine bodily existence expresses it's a knowledge, of oneself in the world as object. And as limited by being an embodied creature in a world we do not fully control. We don't fully control the world. So even if we fully control our bodies, right, we don't decide just how things are going to go. And knowing that really deeply seems to me to open up a whole lot of other possibilities for how to be in relation with [both laugh] projectiles, but also with like, well, everything else.
Kristin 1:09:13
Yeah, there's a sense of just attending to our bodily ambiguity of subject-object is showing to us the ways that one shouldn't be at the expense of the other.
Anna 1:09:30
Yep. Yep. And also interestingly, I think, the ways in which oppressions don't just happen to ourselves as objects or objectified, or as subjects, but to us as, as both of those things, both of those things get co-shaped and co-formed, and we can pay really close attention to that maybe more easily by thinking about our embodied experiences than we can when
we're thinking about our mental processes or how we think about things.
Kristin 1:10:05
Yeah. And for me, it opens up questions of what does it mean to do an act of collective resistance, then?
Anna 1:10:12
Yes! Beautiful.
Kristin 1:10:13
What are we doing together with our bodies to find and afford for others and ourselves certain possible. Not necessarily competitive ones in sports [laughs], but… possibilities.
Anna 1:10:25
But maybe those two, right? Maybe those are part of a… rich tapestry of human possibility.
[music plays]
Well, thank you, gorgeous listeners, and to all the people who got in touch with us after the first episode released with comments and suggestions and tips and ideas. And Kristin, this is such a good time! I am off to edit tape for the first time. So I am really hoping that the sparkly sound unicorns will be with me!
Kristin 1:11:03
Enjoy. I'm here for support. I'm sure it'll be great.
Anna 1:11:11
I'm really looking forward to it, actually. And on that note, if you would like to contribute or give us ideas for our next episodes or to find transcripts, show notes and other goodies, please go to our website thinkingbodiespod.com. This is, again, a DIT experiment, so we're happy for the feedback and participation.
Kristin 1:11:31
Please contact us. Let us know if you'd like to participate or if you have ideas. Like Anna said, we're open to ideas and we'll sign off by giving special and unending thanks to Megan Dean, Jane Dryden and Grayson Hunt. I'm always blown away by what our contributors send to us.
Anna 1:11:57
It is… blow-away-able. Yes. It really is.
Kristin 1:12:01
All of the references for what we discussed today on this episode are on our website, along with… my concept map.
Anna 1:12:10
Kristin’s fantastic concept map of Iris Marion Young’s argument! She [Kristin] is a legend, and this is one of the ways in which she is a legend.
Thank you so much, too, to the Amplify Podcast Network for all of your mentorship and getting this podcast created. You can find us at all the podcast spaces. Please subscribe or leave a review.
[music plays]
[out take]
Kristin 1:12:37
Ya. It's not quite right. It was better in the other version, but that's okay. So. Introduce yourself.
Anna 1:12:43
Okay! I'm Anna Mudde. Nope! I’m going to do that again.
[music fades]