1 - Growing Up As Girls

Summary

In her essay, ‘Throwing like a girl’, Iris Young (1990) applies Simone de De Beauvoir's notion that women in patriarchal societies live a contradiction to the ways girls and boys from a very young age use their bodies. De Beauvoir suggests that patriarchal societies define woman as other, as not much more than her body, as ‘the object for the gaze and touch of a subject, to be the pliant responder to his commands’. Against this immanence of womanhood, this confining of experience within the body, is transcendence, ‘the free subjectivity that defines its own nature and makes projects’ (Young 1990:75). Thus, femininity means being something while masculinity means doing things. But given a woman also has a human existence, she too ‘is a subjectivity and transcendence’ (Young 1990:144). When women use their bodies they express this contradiction between immanence and transcendence. They use only a part of their bodies to accomplish a task, holding back. They react to the approach of a thrown object rather than going forward to meet it. They express a fear of getting hurt. They use up much less space than their bodies are capable of being in. When using their bodies, women are both in them, making them do things, but also standing outside them, seeing them as objects.