Feminist and Queer Phenomenology: Perspectives on Embodiment

Simone de Beauvoir is often cited as the founder of feminist phenomenology. In Volume 2 of her groundbreaking word The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir argues that the patriarchal culture and society define woman as the Other on every level, framing her as the inessential correlate to man (de Beauvoir, 2011). In a way, de Beauvoir considered the sexed and gendered body as a phenomenological object for the first time (Bergoffen & Burke, 2021).

In her detailed observations on female children and young girls, de Beauvoir analyses the ways in which women are raised to prefer a specific, gendered way of inhabiting the body. They are given different ideas about which activities they and their bodies are suited for and the ones which are suitable for them. Little girls are encouraged to play with dolls and are also treated like a doll—being encouraged to look pretty, wear nice clothes, do their hair, and so on (de Beauvoir, 2011). They are shaped to be feminine by these societal processes, conditioned to be passive and submissive. Patriarchal forces attempt to deprive the female individual of subjectivity to the extent that even the female child thinks of her own body as a “passive object” or an “inert given object” (de Beauvoir, 2011).

She describes a woman as a free subject trapped by her “situatedness as a woman” and abjectly denies a natural or eternal “feminine essence” that results in differences in women’s behaviours and psychology (Young, 1980). It was central to her argument to present an alternative to arguments for equality that erased the factor of sexual difference while acknowledging how patriarchal ideologies exploit these differences to the advantage of men. One of the effects of this exploitation and oppression was to deprive women of their “can do” bodies (Bergoffen & Burke, 2021).

Iris Marion Young, writing a few decades after Beauvoir, frames the questions of female embodiment in the context of bodily activities that engage the body as a whole and relate to its general comportment or orientation. In her text Throwing Like a Girl, Young engages in a phenomenological analysis of how young girls and women use their bodies to achieve “a definite purpose or task” (Young, 1980), especially the eponymous throwing. At the beginning of this essay, Young points to studies which suggest that girls and boys throw in different ways and that women, when attempting physical tasks, frequently fail to use the physical possibilities of their bodies. 

Inspired by de Beauvoir, she argues that any female individual who “enacts the existence of women in patriarchal society” (Young, 1980) is living a contradiction. As a free subject, as a human, she can participate in transcendence. But as a woman, she is denied this potential as well as her subjectivity. This “tension between transcendence and immanence, between subjectivity and being a mere object” (Young, 1980) is developed by Young into the modality of ambiguous transcendence. The second modality of inhibited intentionality occurs when a female individual considers engagement with a task and considers the possibilities of carrying it out, she projects a general “I can” but a personal “I cannot” at the same time.  

Additionally, she observes that girls often do not make “full use of the body’s spatial and lateral potentialities”, including not bringing “their whole bodies into the motion” while throwing. This is the third modality of discontinuous unity in action. The hesitation in engaging the entire body in the task results in a lack of ease and naturalness while performing many tasks, as women “frequently fail to summon the full possibilities of our muscular coordination, position, poise, and bearing” (Young, 1980). This is not a reflection of the differential capacity of the feminine body then, but rather an underestimation of its capacity.  

In addition to girls and women having a lack of confidence in their bodies’ capacities, there is also a greater fear of (the body) getting hurt. Young declares that women “often experience our bodies as a fragile encumbrance, rather than the media for the enactment of our aims” (Young, 1980). The female body can feel like a burden to be “dragged and prodded along, and at the same time protected” (Young, 1980). This is because of the contradiction caused by a woman’s simultaneous experience of her body as a thing and as a capacity. 

Young observes that women are “self-conscious” about looking awkward or too strong, which is because female bodies are not only a source of capacities but also objects that exist to be “looked at and acted upon” in a passive way (Young, 1980). This female lived embodiment can act as an obstacle to intentional engagement with the world (Lennon, 2010).  

Young and Beauvoir both highlight the situatedness of the female body and the cultural and social influences on the female situation, especially on the socialisation and conditioning that is subjected to young children. Young argues that it is in the process of “growing up as a girl” that the modalities of feminine comportment, motility and spatiality start to manifest themselves in the female person’s embodiment (Young, 1980). Beauvoir echoes a similar sentiment: the young girl “is trained into a different way of inhabiting” her body, with the consequence of her spontaneous movement inhibited, her exuberance restrained, and so on. 

The processes of conditioning and socialisation for young girls, as described by Young and Beauvoir, result in an embodiment characterised by inhibition, self-objectification, and subjugation. Yet these perspectives remain binary, in the sense that neither of them as feminist philosophers move beyond the categories given by the gender binary. What is also necessary is a queering of phenomenology, where queering refers to interpreting human existence from a perspective that rejects traditional categories of gender and sexuality.

In this groundbreaking work, Sara Ahmed demonstrates how queer studies can put phenomenology to productive use. Focusing on the “orientation” aspect of “sexual orientation” and the “orient” in “orientalism,” Ahmed examines what it means for bodies to be situated in space and time. Bodies take shape as they move through the world directing themselves toward or away from objects and others. Being “orientated” means feeling at home, knowing where one stands, or having certain objects within reach. Orientations affect what is proximate to the body or what can be reached. A queer phenomenology, Ahmed contends, reveals how social relations are arranged spatially, how queerness disrupts and reorders these relations by not following the accepted paths, and how a politics of disorientation puts other objects within reach, those that might, at first glance, seem awry.

Ahmed proposes that a queer phenomenology might investigate not only how the concept of orientation is informed by phenomenology but also the orientation of phenomenology itself. Thus she reflects on the significance of the objects that appear—and those that do not—as signs of orientation in classic phenomenological texts such as Husserl’s Ideas. In developing a queer model of orientations, she combines readings of phenomenological texts—by Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Fanon—with insights drawn from queer studies, feminist theory, critical race theory, Marxism, and psychoanalysis. Queer phenomenology emerges as a philosophical and theoretical framework at the intersection of queer theory and phenomenology. 

In the philosophical canon, many groups are marginalised and unrepresented, and this disparity is crucially relevant in phenomenology, as the domain hinges on the embodied subjectivity of individuals. Hence it’s important to capture the complexities and diversities of lived experience. Feminist and queer phenomenology both can be read as part of a project to queer phenomenology, to serve as a corrective lens, to understand the orientations of phenomenology itself and to realign it.

Author Bio - Simran is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy and a writer from Pune, with a BA in Philosophy from Fergusson College and an MSc in Cognitive Science from IIT Gandhinagar. Their research interests include gendered embodiment and gender dysphoria, sexual and gender-based violence, feminist and queer philosophy, contemporary phenomenology, and 20th Century French philosophy. Recently, they were awarded the Transformative Arts and Research Initiatives Fellowship at the Centre for Studies in Gender and Sexuality at Ashoka University, where they worked on a project in trans phenomenology criticizing and re-orienting the current pathological understanding of gender dysphoria.