Rethinking Feminist Phenomenology: Theoretical and Applied Perspectives PDF
Preview Rethinking Feminist Phenomenology: Theoretical and Applied Perspectives
Rethinking Feminist Phenomenology Rethinking Feminist Phenomenology Theoretical and Applied Perspectives Edited by Sara Cohen Shabot and Christinia Landry Published by Rowman & Littlefield International Ltd Unit A, Whitacre Mews, 26–34 Stannary Street, London SE11 4AB www.rowmaninternational.com Rowman & Littlefield International Ltd. is an affiliate of Rowman & Littlefield 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706, USA With additional offices in Boulder, New York, Toronto (Canada), and Plymouth (UK) www.rowman.com Selection and editorial matter © 2018 by Sara Cohen Shabot and Christinia Landry Copyright in individual chapters is held by the respective chapter authors. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: HB 978-1-78660-373-9 PB 978-1-78660-374-6 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Shabot, Sara Cohen, editor. Title: Rethinking feminist phenomenology : theoretical and applied perspectives / edited by Sara Cohen Shabot and Christinia Landry. Description: Lanham : Rowman & Littlefield International, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018025563 (print) | LCCN 2018040095 (ebook) | ISBN 9781786603753 (Electronic) | ISBN 9781786603739 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781786603746 (pbk. : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Phenomenology. | Feminist theory. Classification: LCC B829.5 (ebook) | LCC B829.5 .R485 2018 (print) | DDC 142/.7082—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018025563 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992. Printed in the United States of America Contents Acknowledgments vii The Water We Swim In: Why Feminist Phenomenology Today? 1 Sara Cohen Shabot and Christinia Landry PART I: FOUNDATIONAL PERSPECTIVES 11 1 Subject and Structure in Feminist Phenomenology: Re-reading Beauvoir with Butler 13 Beata Stawarska 2 Gender Essentialism and Eidetic Inquiry 33 Gayle Salamon 3 Intersectional Ambiguity and the Phenomenology of #BlackGirlJoy 51 Qrescent Mali Mason 4 Doing Time in a For-Profit Space: Renegotiating Identity in the Prison-Industrial Complex 69 Gail Weiss PART II: ETHICAL AND POLITICAL PERSPECTIVES 85 5 Toward a Feminist Phenomenological Ethics 87 Christinia Landry 6 Phenomenology and Politics: Injustice and Prejudices 103 Christina Schües v vi Contents 7 Hannah Arendt, Gender, and Political Judgment: A Phenomenological Critique 121 Sonia Kruks 8 Fat Temporality, Crisis Phenomenology, and the Politics of Refusal 137 Kristin Rodier PART III: EMBODIED PERSPECTIVES 153 9 Edible Mothers, Edible Others: On Breastfeeding as Ambiguity 155 Sara Cohen Shabot 10 On the Existential Damage of School Shootings 171 Anna Cook 11 Overturning Feminist Phenomenologies: Disability, Complex Embodiment, Intersectionality, and Film 187 Jenny Chamarette 12 Feminist Visions: Theater and Women Spectators 209 Lior Levy Index 227 About the Contributors 235 Acknowledgments We would like to thank the following people and institutions who made this book possible: the University of Haifa and Wilfrid Laurier University for the generous funding and support; Marie Deer for her editorial assistance; Christine Daigle for her always-pertinent advice and friendship; Sarah Campbell, Rebecca Anastasi, and Isobel Cowper-Coles at Rowman & Littlefield for their flexibility, helpfulness, and interest in our work; and numerous anonymous reviewers. vii The Water We Swim In: Why Feminist Phenomenology Today? Sara Cohen Shabot and Christinia Landry Almost seventy years have passed since Simone de Beauvoir initiated a dis- cussion on women’s lived experiences in The Second Sex, offering one of the first non-neutral, gendered phenomenological analyses. Her work implic- itly acknowledges that perception and its corollaries, cognition, mobility, sensation, and affectivity, are also gendered. Additionally, it was Beauvoir who called our attention to the fact that what we hitherto knew as “normal” experiences were not normal at all but rather were the experiences of a very specific kind of subject—a male subject. These are no small achievements and, although Edith Stein and Hannah Arendt also worked in what we now call feminist phenomenology, it was effectively Beauvoir who revolutionized the way we think about the subject of experience as one who is always and already sexed and gendered. Thirty years later, in the now-canonical “Throwing Like a Girl: A Pheno- menology of Feminine Body Comportment, Motility, and Spatiality,” Iris Marion Young uses Beauvoir’s analysis to engage specifically with women’s embodied experiences of space, mobility, and bodily comportment to explain how girls and women within patriarchal societies experience their embod- ied selves as strange, alienated, “not one” or rather as not “in concert” with their intentional subjectivities. Indeed, there is a breakdown in their opera- tive intentionality that asserts, borrowing from Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s conception of the “I can” body, an “I cannot” body. As Young argues, this is how girl’s and women’s embodied experience is a dramatically frac- tured experience, one that frequently perceives the body as an object—an impediment to reaching one’s goals—instead of experiencing the body as the vehicle through which one may move, disclose, and inhabit her world. Therefore, girl’s and women’s embodied existence is experienced as a conflict with one’s self as transcendent, as capable of agency and activity. 1
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