Young, Iris Marion

Me quedo en las notas y no lo habia subido ....

Young, I.M. 1990 Throwing Like a Girl and Other Essays in Feminist Philosophy and Social Theory. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

She proposes that there is a particular modality in how women move and use space in contemporary western societies, even though there are many differences in practice. For this she takes both Merleau Ponty’s ideas on the importance of bodily motion as a way of enacting volition and in the perception of the world, and Simon De Bouvoir’s ideas on the way women become attached to the immanence in patriarchal systems which restricts their capability of acting as free subjects. She describes the women motility as exhibiting and ambiguous transcendence, an inhibited intentionality and a discontinuous unity with the environment. She points to the fact that women generally lack the self confidence needed to perform an activity, which generally results in having less practice and less ability than men. Women also are taught to be afraid of being hurt, or doing something shameful, and thus become defensive and self conscious. She sees the objectification of women’s bodies as a source of this insecurity, which is in tension with the self perception of her bodily capacities. Ambiguos transcendence because, following Merleau Ponty transcendence is located in the body’s interaction with the world “the lived body as a transcendence is pure fluid action the continuous calling forth of capacities that are applied to the world” (148), the active dimension of this transcendence is what in feminie motility becomes ambiguous as women is tied to the immanence of her body as object. Inhibited intentionality because rather than realizing intentionality through motility they predetermined as incapable (I cannot) “the body’s capacity and action structure its surroundings and project meaningful possibilities of movement and action which in turn call the body’s motion forth” (149) but in women when the whole body has to be involved there is a contradiction between the volition and a stiffness deriving from the inhibited intentionality. It has a discontinuous unity with the environment as long as it cannot totally succeed in projecting volition towards and end through her body, and thus unite herself with surrounding, rather that becoming a subject through body movement (and not in-itself) she is an object of the motion acted upon , is self-referred because of the doubt of her own capacities, and because she is self conscious of an external (masculine) gaze (which further enhances distance from the own body). If the lived space is a result o body motility and the interactions this motility makes possible, feminine experience space as enclosed, as having a dual structure (space continuity between the here and there or what can be reached is experienced partitioned, “there” is available to others but not to women), and in which women are positioned. “Feminine spatiality is contradictory insofar as feminine body existence is both spatially constituted and constituting spatial subject.” (152) As long as feminine motility is self refered and constrained, it thus exists in space (and not through). As she is constrained, loked and acted upon, her motility becomes defensive of her space. All this is thus related with the situation of women in a patriarchal system and to the way they become socialized in it.