A Rehabilitation of the Body as Home: Reconstructing Young’s Feminist Phenomenology

Abstract

This essay investigates Iris Marion Young’s account of female bodily experience and reconstructs her feminist phenomenology with the aim of reinterpreting and enriching the tradition of embodiment using feminist critique. It offers a clearer, more cohesive reconstruction of Young’s phenomenology by referencing three essays where she considers a particular aspect of women’s lived bodily experiences. It considers three recurring themes that appear in and are developed in the three main essays by Young referred to throughout the study. It presents personal, lived experience as political, thus encouraging social cooperation and women’s solidarity through collective meaning-making and a recovery of our bodies. The paper closes with an epilogue and personal narrative that serve as an example of the practical importance and impact of studying and further developing a feminist phenomenology. This reconstruction of Young’s feminist phenomenology reestablishes the body as the self and the importance of the body (and home) as the foundation of one’s rootedness in the world and of all experience. It calls for the body and bodily experiences to be considered as mundane, ambiguous, but nonetheless, significant aspects of human existence. It offers a more constructive way of interpreting and experiencing the lived female body, in particular, as her home.

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Keywords

phenomenology, feminism, embodiment, lived experience