Abstract
This essay argues that Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of embodiment can be an extremely helpful ally for contemporary feminist theorists, critical race theorists, and disability studies scholars because his work suggests that the gender, race, and ability of bodies are not innate or fixed features of those bodies, much less corporeal indicators of physical, social, psychic, and even moral inferiority, but are themselves dynamic phenomena that have the potential to overturn accepted notions of normalcy, naturalness, and normativity. Taking seriously Merleau-Ponty’s insistence that our bodies (rather than our consciousnesses) are the means by which we directly engage with the world, I suggest, encourages us to be attentive to how an individual’s or group’s gender, race, and bodily abilities differentially affect how their bodies are responded to by other bodies. The responses of others, in turn, directly influences the significance of an individual’s (inter)actions within that situation. This essay provides a critical examination of specific feminist philosophers, critical race scholars, and disability theorists who creatively utilize Merleau-Pontian insights to illustrate, and ultimately combat, the insidious ways in which sexism, racism, and “compulsory able-bodiedness” (McRuer in Crip theory: cultural signs of queerness and disability. NYU Press, New York, 2006), impoverish the lived experience of both oppressors and the oppressed, largely by predetermining the meaning of their bodily interactions in accordance with institutionalized cultural expectations and norms.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
For an account of “compulsory able-bodiedness” and its close connection with heteronormativity, see Robert McRuer’s Introduction to Crip Theory, ps. 1–32.
Merleau-Ponty (2012, p. 139).
Young (2005, p. 36).
Young (2005, p. 38).
Young (1998, p. 286).
Young (2005, p. 43).
Young (2005, p. 43).
Although one could argue that the “Twenty Years Later” piece is itself dated since it appeared in 1998, I have found that Young’s observations concerning the persistence of contradictory modalities of “typical” female embodiment continue to hold true today. I personally witness the strong identification of female undergraduate students with the contradictory bodily modalities Young discusses in the initial article each fall when I teach “Throwing Like a Girl” in my Philosophy of Race and Gender course at The George Washington University. Even in the second decade of the twenty-first century, both young men and young women have no trouble recognizing stereotypical styles of feminine bodily movement such as throwing, lifting, bending, walking, and running “like a girl” that adhere closely to Young’s original descriptions.
By contrast, the refusal to embody female styles of movement, I would argue, often occurs as a result of thinking about how one has been trained to move and consciously choosing not to fulfill those expectations. This leads to the strange consequence that seeking to move more “naturally” by not restricting one’s movements to comply with accepted feminine norms, usually occurs through a most “unnatural” process, namely through conscious reflection upon habitual gendered patterns of motor behavior that need to be unlearned in order to be replaced with more fluid and expansive styles of comportment that maximize one’s bodily capabilities.
Young (2005, p. 34).
Young (2005, p. 36).
Such limits include legal, political, social, as well as physical barriers to women’s full motor participation in the world. Prohibiting women from driving (as in Saudi Arabia), confining them to their homes and preventing them from attending school or having a profession (as in Afghanistan under the Taliban) or forbidding women soldiers from engaging in direct combat (as in the United States until 2013), are all different ways of illustrating to women that they are not viewed as capable of doing the same things that men can do.
While Beauvoir’s and Young’s influence on Butler’s account of gender performativity is much more explicitly affirmed by Butler and by her commentators, I would argue that Merleau-Ponty’s insights are more crucial to this work as well as to Butler’s later work than is usually acknowledged. Indeed, Butler’s defense of Merleau-Ponty against Luce Irigaray’s critique of “The Chiasm” chapter of The Visible and the Invisible, in Butler’s essay, “Sexual Difference as a Question of Ethics: Alterities of the Flesh in Irigaray and Merleau-Ponty” significantly accuses Irigaray of a “dismissive and contemptuous” reading of his work that denies its indebtedness to it. “This,” Butler claims, “involves her in a spectacular double-bind: thinking against him within his terms, attempting, that is, to exploit the terms that she also seeks to turn against him in an effort to open the space of sexual difference that she believes his text seeks to erase.” (Butler 2006, p. 108, my emphasis) On Butler’s reading of this chapter from Merleau-Ponty’s final, unfinished work, Merleau-Ponty does not, contra Irigaray, reduce the Other to the self-same, but rather, affirms that the Other, as Other “constitutes him internally” such that “[t]o have one’s being implicated in the Other is thus to be intertwined from the start, but not for that reason to be reducible to- or exchangeable with- one another.” (Butler 2006, p. 123) In a sense, what I am proposing is that Merleau-Ponty is one of the important Others to which Butler’s own work is indebted and that her theory of gender performativity takes up his emphasis upon the primacy of doing and opens up new possibilities for thinking gender, racial, and sexual differences through it.
Clearly they are racialized as well though Butler doesn’t address race in this early piece.
I would go even further and say that for Butler, as well as for Young, this ungendered body ultimately isn’t even a masculine body but a masculine fantasy of a masculine body that is really no one’s body at all.
Butler (1989, p. 253).
Also, given that the title of this essay signifies that it is about Beauvoir’s “philosophical contribution” to our understanding of gender identity and acquisition, it is, perhaps, an unlikely place to find a defense of Merleau-Ponty. Nonetheless, my claim is that not only is this defense there, but that it is worthy of further critical examination.
Butler (1989, p. 254, my emphasis).
Merleau-Ponty (2012, p. 141).
Merleau-Ponty (2012, p. 195, my emphasis).
Merleau-Ponty (2012, p. 482).
Fanon (2008, ps. 90–91, my emphasis).
Fanon (2008, p. 90).
The original Lhermitte passage is quoted along with the subsequent observation by Fanon in Fanon (2008, p. 91).
I’m using this particular expression to indicate that, in contrast to a psychic trauma, which might be triggered by an external event but which primarily impacts a single individual, an existential trauma is never restricted to an individual or group but affects/infects the entire society in which they live.
Fanon (2008, p. 91).
Yancy (2004, p. 121).
Merleau-Ponty (2012, p. 99, my emphasis).
Garland-Thomson (2011, p. 591).
From ADA TITLE 42, CHAPTER 126, Sec. 12101 (http://www.ada.gov/pubs/adastatute08.htm ). Of course, just because an employer is legally obligated to provide specific accommodations for an individual’s disability such as a handicapped restroom, special computer software, etc., doesn’t mean that the individual who requires this accommodation still won’t be blamed for the extra trouble or expense associated with it. Thus, these two models should not be seen as completely separate from one another but as often uncomfortably co-existing together, with political correctness on the side of the social model but with a continued stigmatization of the individual who has the disability that is more in keeping with the medical model.
Garland-Thomson (2011, p. 593).
Garland-Thomson (2011, p. 592). I should note that although I am claiming that Garland-Thomson is using Merleau-Pontian language, she does not cite Merleau-Ponty in this work. That is, Garland-Thomson’s invocation of what might be viewed as a classically Merleau-Pontian form of expression (i.e., “a dynamic encounter between flesh and world”) is something I am drawing attention to, and not a connection that Garland-Thomson is making herself.
Garland-Thomson (2011, p. 592).
Garland-Thomson (2011, p. 595).
Garland-Thomson (2011, p. 596).
Garland-Thomson (2011, p. 598).
Garland-Thomson (2011, p. 597).
Garland-Thomson (2011, p. 600).
Garland-Thomson (2011, p. 601).
References
Americans with Disabilities Act. (1990) (1990 with 2008 Amendment). http://www.ada.gov/pubs/adastatute08.htm. Accessed 5 August 2014.
Butler, Judith. 2006. Sexual difference as a question of ethics: alterities of the flesh in Irigaray and Merleau-Ponty. Feminist Interpretations of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, eds. Dorothea Olkowski and Gail Weiss. University Park: Penn State Press.
Butler, Judith. 1989. Gendering the body: Beauvoir’s philosophical contribution. In Women, knowledge, and reality, ed. Ann Garry, and Marilyn Pearsall, 252–262. Winchester, MA: Unwin Hyman Inc.
de Beauvoir, Simone. 1996. The coming of age, trans. Patrick O’Brian. New York: Norton.
Fanon, Frantz. 2008. Black skin white masks, trans. Richard Philcox. New York: Grove Press.
Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie. 2011. Misfits: A feminist materialist disability concept. Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy, 26(3), 591–609.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 2012. Phenomenology of perception, trans. Donald A. Landes. London: Routledge.
McRuer, Robert. 2006. Crip theory: Cultural signs of queerness and disability. New York: NYU Press .
Yancy, George. 2004. A Foucauldian (genealogical) reading of whiteness: the production of the black body/self and the racial deformation of Pecola Breedlove in Toni Morrison’s The bluest eye. In What white looks like: African-American philosophers on the whiteness question, ed. George Yancy, 107–142. NY: Routledge.
Young, Iris Marion. 2005. On female body experience: “Throwing like a girl” and other essays. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Young, Iris Marion. 1998. ’Throwing like a girl’: Twenty years later. In Body and flesh: A philosophical reader, ed. Donn Welton, 286–290. Malden: Blackwell Publishers.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Weiss, G. The normal, the natural, and the normative: A Merleau-Pontian legacy to feminist theory, critical race theory, and disability studies. Cont Philos Rev 48, 77–93 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11007-014-9316-y
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11007-014-9316-y