In 1990, the same year Iris Marion Young published Justice and the Politics of Difference, she also published a volume of essays called Throwing Like a Girl and Other Essays in Feminist Philosophy and Social Theory. The title essay in this volume, along with several others in the same volume, explores a range of women's embodied and sentient experiences, using a style of phenomenology explicitly indebted to the work of Simone de Beauvoir and Maurice Merleau-Ponty.

Each essay begins from Young's own experiences in order to depict what she judges to be pervasive and significant—although not necessarily universal—aspects of Western women's experience. These include, in the title essay, those specifically “feminine” styles of bodily comportment that are most often expressive of what she calls women's “inhibited intentionality” in such activities as throwing, carrying, walking, and so on (1990, 147). In another essay, “Breasted Experience,” she describes women's experiences that range from women's discomfort over the objectification of their breasts under a masculine gaze, to experiencing their breasts as a site of private sensuous pleasures, to their erotic pleasure in nursing their babies—an eroticism that, she notes, challenges the strongly policed border between sexuality and motherhood. “Breasts are a scandal because they shatter the border between motherhood and sexuality,” she writes. “Nipples are taboo because they are quite literally, physically, functionally undecidable in the split between motherhood and sexuality. One of the most subversive things feminism can do is affirm this undecidability of motherhood and sexuality” (1990, 199).

Political theorists, including feminist political theorists, have generally paid much less attention to these essays in Throwing Like a Girl than to Young's other seemingly more “political” works. Her interest in phenomenology is often assumed to be something of a minor sideline when compared to her pathbreaking work on justice and democracy. However, I argue, such a presumption is misguided. It leads to a one-sided reading of Young that fails to grasp the synthetic nature, what I shall call the binocular quality, of her investigations of injustice. For the essays in Throwing Like a Girl are not purely works of descriptive phenomenology, and Young does not engage in phenomenology simply for its own intrinsic interest. Rather, in each essay she productively uses phenomenological description as an entry point for radical social critique. For each essay focuses on how women's structurally subordinate social position comes to be felt and lived at the site of embodiment; and each also considers how women might endeavor to offer resistance to this subordination or, more positively, to find pleasure in and to revalue their embodied experiences.

In 2005, Young chose to republish these core essays, together with several more recent essays in a phenomenological vein, in the volume On Female Body Experience: “Throwing Like a Girl” and Other Essays. This was the last book she published before her death, and I want to reflect here on the significance of her persistent use of phenomenological methods in her final years, even as she was continuing to explore issues of large-scale structural injustice.Footnote ¹ Two linked sets of concerns, one more activist in orientation, the other more theoretical, motivated Young's long-standing commitment to phenomenology. The first is what may be called a “politics of evocation.” She writes, in the Introduction to On Female Body Experience, that a key purpose of her essays is “simply expressive.” It is, she says, “to give words to meanings often unspoken, in ways that I hope evoke recognition and even a little bit of pleasure” (2005, 3).Footnote ² The second is a “politics of method,” in which she proffers a friendly critique of the postructuralist erasure of the “experiencing subject.”

The Politics of Evocation

What Young calls “evocation” is the work of bringing to voice experiences that are formative of women's embodied subjectivity, but that generally are denied public articulation and are often lived unreflectively by women themselves. This evocation of women's embodied experiences remains, she argues, of political importance in a world where women are still for the most part denied spaces to speak of themselves. Indeed in “Menstrual Meditations,” a new essay she wrote specifically for inclusion in On Female Body Experience, Young discusses menstruation in terms of “closeting,” and she argues that the enforced secrecy surrounding menstruation produces intense experiences of shame and is profoundly oppressive of women. The good news is that women are now offered formal equality in public spaces, such as schools and workplaces—but it is offered only on the impossible condition that they conform to the norm of a body that does not bleed. For such places “assume a standard body with standard needs, and that body does not menstruate” (2005, 113). As a result, “women as menstruators live through a split subjectivity in so far as we claim the public face of normalcy and a fear of exposure of the private fluidity of our flesh. Given the dominant disembodied norms of clean and proper, it is difficult for me not to experience my being as defiled and out of control” (2005, 109).Footnote ³

Beyond the transgressive politics of speaking out publicly about these taboo experiences, Young hopes that her evocations will also meet with recognition from other women, perhaps inspiring them to make demands for change that may assist in altering societal notions of the “normal” body. These changes may include demands for fuller access to bathrooms for working women, more accommodation of the needs of those who suffer cramps or other debilitating menstrual symptoms, and an end to practices of “outing” or ridiculing menstruating women as a form of harassment. “What we need may not be special treatment for women, but rather a shift in the norm for equal treatment,” she writes (2005, 115).

“Giving voice” to experiences of oppression may now seem, on the face of it, a rather old-fashioned feminist strategy and one that is often dismissed as essentializing. Young would agree with those who warn that the claim to speak authoritatively from the self-proclaimed ground of “women's experience” may result in insufficient attention to differences among women. Phenomenology has sometimes been thus criticized, with Beauvoir being a frequent (although, in my opinion, inappropriate) target.Footnote ⁴ However, Young's work on justice and democracy is, of course, profoundly attentive to matters of difference, and it is not surprising that a similar attention also informs her uses of phenomenology.

Phenomenology for Young may best be thought of, I suggest, as a powerful tool for investigating the “obverse” or the “lived” side of women's involuntary location in gender (and other social) structures, for example, in structures that reproduce heteronormativity, or in segmented labor markets, or in consumer relations that constitute women as a market for particular commodities, such as tampons or vaginal deodorizers. Most women in this society are involuntarily located within “gender” as the passive, and often unrecognized, set of unifications that, following Jean-Paul Sartre, Young calls “series.” Thus, it is plausible to assume that they will, without having a common “essence,” still to one extent or another share certain lived experiences.Footnote ⁵ However, the extent to which women's location in such series may give rise to commonalities of experience remains an open question; and it is one that she urges should not be foreclosed a priori by constructing differences as exclusive categories.

Thus, Young begins from her own experiences on the heuristic presupposition that they are both idiosyncratic and general, perhaps best conceived on the musical metaphor of there being “innumerable” (and creative) variations in the performance of the “same” piece of music. As she put it in Throwing Like a Girl, “I think of the description of experiences as being like musical notation; it is the ‘same’ for each instance of its performance. But the music exists only in its particulars, and the particular performances vary in innumerable ways” (1990, 16).

Accordingly, Young “evokes” her own experiences not as evidencing universal truths, but rather in the mode of an appeal. They function as an appeal to others to engage in conversations about their as-yet unarticulated experiences, conversations which may—or may not—confirm her own experiences. For, she writes, “we can discover as much about our experience by saying ‘It is not like that for me’ … as by saying ‘yes, I feel that too’” (1990, 17). So in response to the question “Why is it important that we also approach forms of structural injustice phenomenologically?” one important answer that Young offers is that such an approach enables us to encounter our differences from others as well as our points of connection.

We could also say that Young's phenomenology invites us to enlarge our imagination in ways that more fully encompass sentient experience, further extending in an embodied register what Hannah Arendt called “representative thinking.”Footnote ⁶ As such, phenomenology also has a profoundly democratic impetus. For it challenges the adequacy of purely structural analyses, in which problems are diagnosed and political agendas then are arrogantly constructed a priori and top-downward.Footnote ⁷ Furthermore, a phenomenological method insists that we attend to spaces of personal, and even idiosyncratic, agency as they may emerge within structural constraints. Young writes: “However limited the choices or the resources to enact them, each person takes up the constrained possibilities that gender structures offer in their own way … . Gender as structured is also lived through individual bodies, always as personal experiential response and not as a set of attributes that individuals have in common” (2005, 25–26).

(Post)structuralism

“Giving voice” to women's lived experience has also become methodologically suspect for some allied, yet somewhat different, reasons since the poststructuralist turn in feminist theory. Phenomenology, with its focus on the disclosure of subjective meaning, is now often dismissed as a naive neo-Cartesianism. It is cast as inimical to feminist and queer projects of discursive destabilization that have claimed to put into question the very notion of a “subject” of experience. Young is respectful of much of this poststructuralist work, and indeed it informs much of her better-known writing, operating, for example, in her idea of heterogeneous publics in Justice and the Politics of Difference. She writes in the Introduction to On Female Body Experience that today, “after reading Lacan, Foucault, Derrida, Kristeva, Deleuze, Irigaray, and Bourdieu, we cannot be so innocent as to believe that phenomenology can discover a ‘pure’ embodied experience prior to ideology and science” (2005, 8). If by phenomenology one were to mean a project of evoking experiences that surge up from the inner depths of an “authentic” subjectivity, a subjectivity that purportedly subsists anterior to all discursive and cultural practices, then Young would strongly agree with its poststructuralist critics. But such is not her version of phenomenologyFootnote ⁸ and she argues, to the contrary, that although always idiosyncratic, lived experience is always, to a high degree, also socially and culturally constituted.

In her works of phenomenology, Young shows us why the poststructuralist turn to discursivity and to the treatment of bodies as texts or surfaces of inscription remains insufficient, its evident strengths for feminist theorizing notwithstanding. For even if one grants, as indeed she does, that “the subject” is discursively constituted, or that it comes into existence as an “effect” of normalizing practices, this still does not make its experiences any less meaningful. Nor does it make the “lived” aspects of subordination any less painful, or resistance any less possible. Thus, I take Young's work to constitute an appeal for a more ecumenical kind of theorizing than is common today. Indeed, she argues that, far from being mutually exclusive, poststructuralist and phenomenological approaches may be used to “complement” each other. She writes: “an existential phenomenological approach aims to speak from the point of view of the constituted subject's experience, in ways that complement but do not duplicate the observational methods of Foucault, Butler, or Bourdieu” (2005, 8).

Young's Binocular Vision

Young attempts, quite uniquely, I think, to develop what I call a binocular view of injustices: She endeavors synthetically to view both structural injustices and the idiosyncratic-yet-shared lived experiences that they may induce as one. She calls for the development of styles of feminist theorizing, and for methods of investigation, that move back and forth, fluidly, between the large-scale “structural” or “poststructural” and the subjectively “lived” aspects of women's subordination, between “gender” and “lived body”—until it may be seen how each twists into and comes to inhere in the other.Footnote ⁹

A passionate struggle against injustice was always what drove Young's scholarship as much as her activism; and, because injustice is at once structural and experiential, it must be comprehended and resisted as both at once. Thus, phenomenology was never a minor sideline for Young, but rather was always integral to her entire politico-intellectual project. To ignore this aspect of her work is to fail to grasp the profound binocular depth of vision Young possessed, or to see the full political and theoretical import of her legacy to us.