Analysis Of Iris Marion Young's Essay Throwing Like A Girl

Iris Marion Young’s essay “Throwing Like a Girl” examines the unique causes and characteristics of feminine bodily comportment. This examination requires Young to create her own applicable definition of femininity using the elements of Simone de Beauvoir’s theory of feminism and Merleau-Ponty’s theory of phenomenology that she agrees with. However, she must also alter and discard the elements of their theories that she disagrees with. The resulting definition of femininity includes both the societal constructions that define a woman’s situation as well as how women typically react to and interact with that situation.

Young praises Simone de Beauvoir’s overall theory on the experience of women, stating that she provides “an account of the situation of women with remarkable depth, clarity,

Her principal complaint about Merleau-Ponty’s claims concerns his lack of specificity. She states that Merleau’s account of “the relation between the lived body to its world…applies to any human existence in a general way” (141). Simply using phenomenology to explain and provide and account of general human experience, however, is not effective enough for what Young wishes to argue in her essay. Instead of simply using Merleau-Ponty’s concepts of phenomenology in a general sense, Young uses it to specifically aid in defining femininity and the application of that definition. She explains this by stating “there is a particular style of bodily comportment which is typical of feminine existence, and this style consists of particular modalities of the structures and conditions of the body’s existence in the world” (141). Young takes it upon herself to use phenomenology in order to specifically examine and analyze female bodily comportment in a way in which Merleau-Ponty never