Within the sociology of the body phenomenological approaches focus on how we experience our bodies. Phenomenology is the study of experiences, usually done via description. Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s (2003/1945) work is central. He understands subjectivity as located in the body. He is going against Cartesian models which say that subjectivity is located in the mind (I think therefore I am). One way of putting his approach is to say that we know about ourselves as in the world through our bodies. Mauss is one sociologist who pursued this phenomenological approach, for instance describing the different ‘techniques of the body’ such as ways of walking in different cultures. Most of these techniques are gendered, in that men and women learn to use their bodies differently. As he remarks: ‘Nor can I understand how women can walk in high heels’ (Mauss, 1973: 83). However, more specific phenomenological consideration of gendered embodiment is famously found in a piece by feminist philosopher Iris Young.
Young’s (1990) essay ‘Throwing like a girl’ is a well-known use of a phenomenological approach to understand how women come to experience their bodily capabilities as limited within patriarchy. She is careful to note that not all women adopt the restricted ways of using their body that she outlines. To use the throwing example on which she focuses, clearly some women such as champion netballers, softballers, javelin throwers and so on can throw very well. Some men are not so good at throwing. However, these are individual exceptions to overall general patterns of bodily movement that are heavily gendered. In relation to throwing, Young presents observations of girls as not putting their whole bodies into the motion in the way that boys do. Girls are more likely to throw from the hand and wrist, instead of from the shoulder. This failure to use their bodies really effectively is true generally of women’s embodiment, they remain much more ‘closed’. She suggests that women do not think they are capable of throwing or heavy lifting and when they try they do not poise themselves in ways that make full use of their muscles, balance and bearing. Women also do not feel entitled to take up ‘too much’ space. Young thus characterizes feminine
embodiment as showing an ambiguous transcendence, an inhibited intentionality and a discontinuous unity with its surroundings.
When Young says that feminine embodiment is characterized by ambiguous transcendence, she is using a combination of ideas from Merleau-Ponty and Simone de Beauvoir about to what extent we can transcend or ‘go beyond’ our mundane bodily existence. For Merleau — Ponty transcendence is not about escaping bodily constraints in the way others such as de Beauvoir deem problematic for women as bodies; he argues that transcendence is about opening out the body in fluid actions on the world. But Young says that women do not trust their bodily capacities and therefore keep their bodies ‘closed’ to the world. A woman ‘often lives her body as a burden, which must be dragged and prodded along and at the same time protected’ (Young, 1990: 148).Thus women, you might say, lack a sense of confidence in the ability of their bodies to fulfil their intentions.
Intentionality means believing that you can use your body to appropriate your surroundings to fulfil your intentions. It is about believing that you can do something. Women typically lack a complete sense ofm ‘I can’ when it comes to using their bodies; they therefore have inhibited intentionality. When preparing to throw, for example, they freeze up or hesitate and the throw fails to succeed as it should (Young, 1990). This is aggravated, Young says, by the way in which women experience their bodies in relation to their surroundings.
Young (1990) argues that femininity involves a discontinuous unity of the body with itself and its surroundings. Merleau-Ponty (2003/1945) claims that by having an aim and moving towards it, the body unites itself and its surroundings. Young suggests that women do not have this sense of continuity between body-subject and environment. For example, women use only their wrist and forearm in throwing, instead of using their whole body; the rest of their body remains fairly immobile, as though it is not connected. This lack of connection means that the woman’s intentions are not effectively translated into her surroundings.
All these problematic aspects of feminine bodily existence can be traced to the way in which women are objectified within society and tend to experience their bodies as objects, rather than as instruments. Women cannot go beyond their bodies because they are always referring back to them as the object instead of the originator of motions, as not entirely under their own control, and as things to be looked at. Women experience their bodies as fragile things that are slightly foreign and more of a hindrance than a help in engaging in ‘the world’s possibilities’ (Young, 1990: 150).Thus Young is very clear that women’s experiences of their bodies are not a product of some biological essence of femininity but are socially conditioned, produced by the constrained
situation of women within a sexist society. She argues that ‘[w]omen in sexist society are physically handicapped. Insofar as we learn to live out our existence in accordance with the definition that patriarchal culture assigns to us, we are physically inhibited, confined, positioned, and objectified’ (Young, 1990: 153). Young argues that girls are socialized into a bodily timidity and learn to restrict their movements more and more as they grow up, but socialization is only part of it. They also become used to the idea that their bodies are there to be looked at. In addition, women learn to fear bodily invasion in the form of rape, or of lesser unwanted physical contact which women must often endure. They are often touched by men in situations where it would not be deemed appropriate for them to touch others. Thus women contain their bodies and struggle with them.
Young’s work on ‘throwing like a girl’ may illustrate that women take part in ‘making’ their own bodies by conforming to social constraints, but also demonstrates that how women learn to experience their bodies ‘makes’ them powerless. Young is focusing on bodily experiences oriented towards tasks ‘that involve the whole body in gross movement’ and she wonders herself whether what she says would apply equally well to other forms of bodily experience or even other tasks (Young, 1990: 155, 156). Much of the essay allows us to think about the particularity of women’s bodies and how we learn to inhabit and use those bodies. However, in the end she returns to a structuralist argument that insists that women’s bodies are determined by the social constraints of a male dominated society. This recalls de Beauvoir’s assertion that the body is a problem for women. Young is using phenomenology to make sense of women’s embodiment, but in saying that feminine bodies remain objects she is departing from the fundamental point of Merleau-Ponty’s theory, which is that people must be understood as body-subjects. Women act, but in their very actions they reproduce a restricted femininity which constrains their ability to act. Bourdieu has faced similar problems in his attempts to use habitus to escape structural determinism and incorporate phenomenology into sociology (Howson and Inglis, 2001), but there are useful insights emerging from feminists who have drawn on the ideas of Pierre Bourdieu to make sense of women’s embodiment.
One well-known feminist use of Bourdieu, elaborated on in Chapter 7, is Bev Skeggs’s (1997) argument that working class women’s habitus — their ways of thinking and doing things — is organized around notions of respectability. Her work draws on rich ethnographic study of English working class women to illustrate how they negotiate their sense of themselves principally in relation to ideas about what is respectable. Working class women are always aware that they are being judged in relation to such ideas and that the judgements are usually not based on knowledge of them as rounded individuals, but made on the basis of their appearance. One of Skegg’s (1997: 88) participants who sends her child to private daycare in a wealthy suburb succinctly describes the problem:
With the mums at school I couldn’t compete clothes wise with all their designer labels and that, I don’t even recognize. I do make some effort because I want to be accepted so I get changed when I go to pick him up.
I wouldn’t go in my slobby jogging suit that I live in. I do want to make an effort. … I don’t want them to look at you and say they’re the poor ones and it’ll reflect on the kids and they won’t be invited round to play so it’ll be bad for them. You want to be accepted.
As this suggests, working class women are having to deal with stereotypes of women of their class as polluting and unworthy of respect. Bodies carry the markers of class and ‘are the physical sites where the relations of class, gender, race, sexuality, and age come together and are em-bodied and practised’ (Skeggs, 1997: 82). Those working class women trying to be judged respectable invest in their bodies as a form of cultural capital. Cultural capital can be thought of as wealth in the form of knowledge and ideas. Bourdieu notes that cultural capital has an objectified and an institutionalized state as well as an embodied state. The objectified state refers to knowing about valued things within society such as the ‘right’ books, the institutionalized state refers to qualifications which legitimate the type of knowledge you have as socially valuable. The embodied state refers to how we think and act, for example speaking with a ‘refined’ accent, having ‘elegant’ manners, or wearing ‘classy’ clothes.
Although use of Bourdieu does allow some reflection on the ways in which women experience their bodies, it makes sense of those experiences in terms of habitus as ingrained. Bourdieu’s framework is one in which social structures, such as class, determine people’s habitus. The ways people walk, talk, eat, speak, and dress are learnt by people as members of particular class groups. They become automatic and taken for granted and are very difficult to overcome. In fact Skeggs allows the women in her study a little more agency than Bourdieu does in his work. She conveys a sense, to paraphrase Marx, of the women she describes as making history but not in circumstances of their own choosing. They struggle to occupy femininity, because it is a virtually impossible ideal, from which their working class position bars them. They struggle to display their bodies and themselves as ‘feminine’ because they see some benefits in doing so, although there is also the risk of loss. The women had taken their supposedly ‘natural’ feminine knowledge and done courses on caring at local colleges in the hope that they might convert those educational qualifications into economic capital. They also invested a great deal in their appearance. If they could get the ‘right’ clothes and the ‘right’ look, they could feel they had some sense of control over their lives. If they could manage to achieve a glamorous femininity on nights out they might receive the cultural validation of being desired by men, and possibly the economic and cultural capital they might be able to accrue through alliance with a male partner. But doing femininity was hard work for the women in the study. As Skeggs (1997: 116) puts it, femininity was seen as ‘a structural inconvenience which was difficult to avoid’.Working class women quite literally could not afford to ignore femininity, not necessarily because it would bring gains but because they could draw on femininity to stop their situation getting any worse. And that is the extent to which agency is thought possible, even from a phenomenological perspective. Phenomenology may offer an appreciation of gendered bodies as they are experienced, but it is difficult to maintain this focus from within sociology, which always brings us back to structures which construct and constrain those experiences (Howson and Inglis, 2001).
Conclusion
It has been a crucial aim of the sociology of gender to establish that inequalities can be challenged because they are the result of social processes, not ‘natural’ bodily differences. Feminists and social science scholars in the late twentieth century tended to see bodies as natural biological entities upon which cultural (gender) meanings were inscribed. Later, especially under the influence of Foucault, an appreciation developed of how cultural meanings and practices actually produce bodies in particular ways. Little was said about how people experience their bodies. For the feminist movement women’s experience of their bodies was crucial, but 1970s’ feminist attempts to understand that experience often became coagulated by essentialism and dualism. More recent work utilizing phenomenology thinks through women’s active involvement in disciplining their bodies both around and in resistance to social norms.
It is difficult for sociologists not to slip back to insisting on material social conditions as finally determining of bodies/subjects. However, if bodies can be constructed as material entities as well as imagined and symbolic objects, and perhaps in other ways such as interactive, space producing, fluid instruments, then it may be more possible to think of people as constantly remaking (see Seymour, 1998) their bodies — if not always in positive ways and not in conditions of their own choosing.