Research on the experience of gendered embodiment, on the one hand, and racialized embodiment, on the other hand, has emerged as an important tradition in phenomenology thanks to the works of Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex (1949) and Frantz Fanon in Black Skin, White Masks (1952) respectively. Beauvoir’s work has been prolonged by pioneering feminist phenomenologists, such as Iris Marion Young and Sandra Bartky, who have investigated both the cultural significance of female bodily functions and the alienating effects of feminine standards of beauty for women. And those inspired by Fanon—for example, George Yancy and Alia Al-Saji—have homed in on the experiences of persons of color confronted by the white gaze or entering white spaces. While each of these lineages has contributed to expanding the discipline of phenomenology, specific descriptions of the bodily experiences of women of color have received comparatively little attention in this field. This chapter aims to fill this gap by exploring the bodily experiences of women of color, thereby making a case for expanding phenomenological work at the intersection of gender and race.

I discuss three phenomena that speak to the need for intersectional phenomenologies: body image, the gaze, and embodied resistance. These topics have received considerable attention in critical phenomenological works, either from feminist or critical race perspectives. Yet, treatments of these topics have not considered particularities about the experiences of many women of color. First, feminist studies of body image have probed the allure of thinness and the imperative to one’s control one’s hunger that are characteristic of eating disorders and diet culture, more generally. This focus, however, is not necessarily relevant to all women. As I will show, they do not speak to the experiences of many African American women. Second, both discussions of the male gaze and the racializing gaze have identified its alienating and objectifying character; furthermore, the literature in the philosophy of race focuses on the typically hateful character of the racializing gaze. Yet fewer analyses have considered how women of color are confronted by this gaze. I argue that in certain instances—most notably, with male partners in the context of interracial heterosexual relationships—they are objectified in a way that exoticizes and overly sexualizes them. Third, I explore how embodied forms of resistance to oppression may take shape for women of different races. Before broaching these phenomena, though, I would like to clarify the notion of “critical phenomenology,” within which I place feminist phenomenology and phenomenological work on racialized experience. In addition, I will define the term “intersectionality.”

In her article “Critical Phenomenology,” Lisa Guenther offers an account of critical phenomenology worth pausing over. This account contrasts classical phenomenology and critical phenomenology. Classical phenomenology articulates how experience is structured to reveal that one is not a “bare cogito,” but rather “a vector or arrow that gestures beyond itself in everything it thinks and does” (2020, 11). Guenther faults classical phenomenology with being “insufficiently critical” by “failing to give an equally rigorous account of how contingent historical and social structures also shape our experience” (12). More specifically, “structures like patriarchy, white supremacy, and heteronormativity” are “not things to be seen but rather ways of seeing, and even ways of making the world that go unnoticed without a sustained practice of critical reflection” (12). The task of the critical phenomenologists is to take into consideration “the contingent social structures that normalize and naturalize power relations” (12). Not only that, but the critical phenomenologist partakes in the effort to understand how the world may be restructured so that “new and liberatory possibilities for meaningful experience and existence” may come into being (15). Thus, critical phenomenology attends not only to the features of social life that shape lived experience, but also to the ways in which such experience may be shaped for the better. In light of these considerations, I take feminist phenomenology to be that branch of phenomenology that has historically focused on the experiences of women, and phenomenologies of racialized experience as those that have discussed how racialization constitutes lived experience. This chapter brings these branches of critical phenomenology together and develops a critical and intersectional phenomenological project.

I now turn to the notion of “intersectionality.” Intersectionality has become a dominant paradigm in analyzing oppression. This paradigm gained traction in the 1990s, thanks to the work of Kimberlé Crenshaw, who defined the term in her legal scholarship. In her path breaking article “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color,” Crenshaw sought to explore “how the experiences of women of color are frequently the product of intersecting patterns of racism and sexism” (1991, 1243). More generally, we may define intersectionality as the project of understanding how social categories, such as race, class, gender, sexual orientation, and dis/ability, intersect to shape individual experience, and of illuminating how overlapping forms of oppression create particular forms of discrimination and disadvantage. As intersectional feminist projects have demonstrated, accounts of the oppression of men of color and those of white women gloss over the specificities of the oppression of women of color, or fail to recognize their oppression entirely. Consider the following examples. To begin, not only black boys, but also black girls, typically face harsher school discipline than their white peers, but black girls tend to be overlooked in conversations about racial stereotypes and the school-to-prison pipeline (Hill, 2018). In addition, the fact that transgender women of color face disproportionate anti-transgender violence is a topic that deserves investigation.Footnote 1 Yet the dearth of scholarship on this topic speaks to a failure to address violence against women intersectionally.Footnote 2 An intersectional phenomenology of gendered and racialized embodiment would further the mission of intersectional feminism by showcasing the experiences of women of color.

1 An Intersectional Phenomenology of Body Image

This section deals with body image in women of color, specifically African American women, with the aim of uncovering aspects of their experiences that are neglected in feminist phenomenologies. I will draw on the work of Tamara Beauboeuf-Lafontant, a social scientist who has dedicated much of her career to elucidating the gendered and racialized identities of black women. To preview, Beauboeuf-Lafontant’s work shows that the image of black women as strong and able to bear the “weight of the world” on their shoulders, may motivate overeating as a coping mechanism, and cause these women to be overweight or obese. Furthermore, because of preferences within black communities, the association between femininity and slenderness is not as tight as it is for white persons. But to better illustrate this contrast, I will first survey feminist research on body image.

Since The Second Sex, feminist phenomenologists have underscored the fact that women face social pressure to adopt an extreme focus on their physical appearance. Contrary to some psychoanalysts of her time, Beauvoir asserts that cultural influences—namely, the objectification that women encounter in the eyes of others—lead them to objectify themselves: “It has sometimes been asserted that narcissism is the fundamental attitude of all women…. What is true is that circumstances invite woman more than man to turn toward self and dedicate her love to herself” (2011, 667). To support her claim, she summarizes earlier findings from The Second Sex concerning girls’ upbringing: “If she can put herself forward in her own desires, it is because since childhood she has seen herself as an object. Her education has encouraged her to alienate herself wholly in her body, puberty having revealed this body as passive and desirable” (2011, 667–668). Simply put, Beauvoir believes that feminine narcissism is a socially contingent trait of women’s psychology.

The theme of feminine narcissism has been taken up by later feminists, most notably, Sandra Bartky, whose main contributions were published in the 1980s and 1990s. In her classic essay “Narcissism, Femininity and Alienation,” first published in 1982, Bartky explains that women face what she calls “repressive narcissism.” This expression refers to the compulsion to subject oneself to punitive standards of physical appearance. Speaking of the network of corporations that sell fashion and beauty products or services, Bartky declares:

The fashion-beauty complex produces in woman an estrangement from her bodily being. On the one hand, I am it and am scarcely allowed to be anything else; on the other hand, I must exist perpetually at a distance from my physical self, fixed at this distance in a permanent posture of disapproval. (1982, 135).

Through the influence of these corporations, women learn to strive to beauty standards that are all too often out of their reach: they must be or remain very thin, have perfect nails and hair, shave or otherwise remove most body hair, and so on. Bartky recognizes that there may be a place for narcissism in our lives, and that we should not shun interest in physical appearance altogether. Thus, she concludes that a “non-repressive narcissism” would constitute a mode of resistance to oppressive “beauty work.”

Beauvoir’s and Bartky’s phenomenological research on feminist narcissism has been pursued by feminist philosophers, many of whom have studied one particularly punitive standard of beauty: thinness. For instance, in Unbearable Weight (1993), Susan Bordo analyzes women’s experiences with anorexia and diet culture. She calls our attention to the need for control that motivates restrictive eating patterns, and traces this need to anxieties about women’s role in society and “archetypal associations” between femininity and insatiable appetites.Footnote 3 The repressive character of norms of feminine thinness has continued to garner attention in feminist philosophy, for example in works by Sheila Lintott (2003), Cressida Heyes (2007), and in my own research on online platforms devoted to “thinspo, or “thinspirational” content (Leboeuf 2019a).Footnote 4 To summarize, a significant portion of the philosophical literature on feminine body image ties women’s experiences of their bodies to the pressure of living up to standards of thinness. Yet the ideal of thinness that has garnered so much scholarly attention is not as prevalent as discussions suggest. With this in mind, I now consider Beauboeuf-Lafontant’s research.

In “Strong and Large Black Women? Exploring Relationships between Deviant Womanhood and Weight” (2003), Beauboeuf-Lafontant demonstrates that African American women are generally valued for their toughness and portrayed as indomitably strong, and that this image translates into a body image that diverges from thinness. Beauboeuf-Lafontant traces the ideal of the “strong Black woman” to the “controlling image” of “Mammy” as an expression of black womanhood.Footnote 5 In her words:

Mammy was rewarded and elevated for being, simultaneously, a capable, domesticated woman and a dutiful, grateful slave. Physically removed and distinguished by her size, skin color, and age from the ides of true (white) womanhood, she embodied a deviance-a “dark heaviness”… (112).

The “Mammy” image conveys the message that black womanhood is valued for its nurturance and solidity, as opposed to its sexuality or frailty. Beauboeuf-Lafontant goes on to note that this image of strength also transpires in accounts of Sojourner Truth by nineteenth-century white feminists, who focused on her “almost Amazon form, which stood nearly six feet high” (113). This way of valuing black woman, Beauboeuf-Lafontant explains, comes to be translated in African American communities into the ideal of the “strong Black woman,” who “singlehandedly raises her children, works multiple jobs, and supports an extend family” (113). Commenting on Nama-Ama Danquah’s autobiographical account of depression, Beauboeuf-Lafontant highlights how the ideal of strong black womanhood led whites and blacks to denigrate Danquah’s avowal of depression. For instance, one white acquaintance exclaimed, “It’s just that when black women start going on Prozac, you know the whole world is falling apart,” while blacks accused her of being a “race traitor” by seeking psychiatric counseling (115).

How does the ideal of the strong black woman translate in terms of body image? Beauboeuf-Lafontant describes how “from a symbolic approach to the body and weight, we may view some overweight and obese Black woman as literally carrying the weight of the world on their bodies” (2003, 115). Based on her study body image literature and a series of interviews conducted by Jacqueline Walcott-McQuigg et al. (1995), she draws attention to the prevalence of overeating as a coping mechanism for the demands placed on black women. Moreover, she comments on the effects of overeating on their body image: given the image of the “strong Black woman,” Black women do not face the same type of stigma that some white women do for being overweight or obese (Beauboeuf-Lafontant, 2003, 115–118). Beauboeuf-Lafontant concludes:

Black women’s tendencies to mask their emotions, frustrations, angers, and fears, all in an attempt to live up to the image of the strong Black woman, contribute to some of the weight that individual Black women carry—through overeating, lack of regular exercise, or a general sense that focusing on their own health needs is trivial or selfish. (119).

In short, because of the norm of “strong Black womanhood,” black women are expected to take on burdens that lead to eating behaviors that may be detrimental to their health, thus undermining the very strength for which they are valorized.

In light of Beauboeuf-Lafontant’s research on black women, I believe that body image in women of color is a topic of phenomenological investigation that deserves further scrutiny. Whereas phenomenological descriptions of body image in women have historically stressed the conjunction of feminine narcissism and the valuation of slenderness, a symbol in the West of (white) women’s need to control their lives, Beauboeuf-Lafontant’s research emphasizes a different set of norms within African American communities. Her work thus motivates the need for phenomenologies of female body experience that take intersectionality into account.Footnote 6

2 An Intersectional Phenomenology of the Gaze

I now turn to a second phenomenon that speaks to the need of intersectional phenomenologies: the gaze. To set the stage, I address both how Beauvoir and her heirs have described the male gaze, and how Fanon and his heirs have depicted the white gaze.

In The Second Sex, especially in the chapters entitled “Childhood” and the “The Girl,” Beauvoir describes how over the course of puberty, girls begin to garner the attention of men and how the male gaze alienates them. The passage below describes a girl’s reaction to a man’s commenting on her calves:

“At thirteen, I walked around bare legged, in a short dress,” another woman told me. “A man, sniggering made a comment about my fat calves. The next day, my mother made me wear stockings and lengthen my skirt, but I will never forget the shock I suddenly felt in seeing myself seen.” The little girl feels that her body is escaping her, that it is no longer the clear expression of her individuality; it becomes foreign to her; and at the same moment, she is grasped by others as a thing: on the street, eyes follow her, her body is subject to comments; she would like to become invisible; she is afraid of becoming flesh and afraid to show her flesh. (Beauvoir, 2011, 321, emphasis in the original).

This passage offers us a glimpse into a girl’s experience of being objectified by the male gaze during puberty. Notice how Beauvoir depicts the girl as losing a transparent relationship to her body and as experiencing her body as foreign. This bodily alienation is an outcome of the experience of seeing yourself through the eyes of another—more specifically, the eyes of a dominant other. She goes on to describe how this alienation interferes with girls’ ability to engage with others and their environment: they are haunted by their appearance in the eyes of men.

The topic of the male gaze has continued to attract the interest of feminist phenomenologists. Take the work of Iris Marion Young. In “Women Recovering Their Clothes” (first published in 1988), Young discusses how the male gaze mediates women’s relation to their clothes. While her article focuses on how women can “recover their clothes”—that is, resist this mediation—it is useful to quote from her description of the male gaze:

“See yourself in wool.” Yes, I would like that. I see myself in that wool, heavy, thick, warm, swinging around my legs in rippling caresses. … But who’s this coming up behind me? Bringing me down to his size? Don’t look back, I can’t look back, his gaze is unidirectional, he sees me but I can’t see him. But no—I am seeing myself in wool seeing him see me. Is it that I cannot see myself without seeing myself being seen? So I need him there to unite me and my image of myself? Who does he think I am? So I am split. I see myself, and I see myself being seen. (Young, 2005, 63).

Young’s phenomenology focuses on the “split” between a woman’s aesthetic appreciation of her body clad in wool and that of an imagined male viewer. Her account echoes Beauvoir’s: for both authors, women’s experience involves seeing oneself seen through the eyes of another. What accounts for this split? At its origin, Young and Beauvoir would argue, lies masculine privilege; men have the license to look at women, and judge them as they please, whereas the reverse is not typically true.Footnote 7 Even if a woman were to ask herself whether her women friends would like her outfit, Beauvoir and Young would argue that the standards that she (and her friends) ultimately submit to are men’s. It is worth noting that Young, like Beauvoir, believes that internalizing the male gaze affects the ways in which girls and women experience their bodies; in fact, according to Young, it affects the very ways in which they use their bodies. In an earlier essay “Throwing Like a Girl” (first published in 1980), Young contends that feminine motility is “a transcendence that is at the same time laden with immanence” (2005, 36). She employs this term to characterize the lack of fluidity that feminine movement has; women move hesitantly, in a cramped manner, as though their movements were constrained by an external force. Relatedly, Young contends that feminine motility is marked by an inhibited intentionality, which “simultaneously reaches toward a projected end with an ‘I can’ and withholds its full bodily commitment to that end in a self-imposed ‘I cannot’” (36). Movements are performed, as though one were holding oneself back. Young attributes the differences in feminine and masculine motility to women’s tendency to view themselves through the eyes of others and objectify themselves: “The source of this objectified bodily existence is in the attitude of others regarding her, but the woman herself often actively takes up her body as a mere thing (44).

Research by feminist phenomenologists has continued to fill in the picture described by Beauvoir and Young. I name a few contributions that tie directly into Young’s or Beauvoir’s works. In Body Images, Gail Weiss (1999) adopts a critical perspective on some aspects of Young’s descriptions of female embodiment, and calls our attention to Young’s seeming privileging of transcendence in her discussion of girls’ and women’s inhibited ways of navigating the world in her essay “Throwing Like a Girl.” In “Simone de Beauvoir on the Allure of Self-Objectification,” Nancy Bauer (2015) delves into the temptation to “subvert the risk posed by other people’s objectifying gazes by preemptively objectifying ourselves,” studied by Beauvoir, and insists on its continued relevance, in particular to college-aged women. Building on the Beauvoirian idea that the body and bodily experience are socially constituted, Luna Dolezal (2015) probes the shame that many of us, not just women, feel when we see ourselves seen. In exploring the ways in which we cope with shame, Dolezal focuses on the experiences of women who undertake cosmetic surgery to lessen body shame. She does not question the motivation of those who seek beauty-enhancing (and shame-ridding) surgeries, but criticizes the rigidity of beauty standards that compel women to experience “limiting body shame”—that is, shame so restricting that it “must be overcome for life to have the possibility of dignity and fulfillment” (2015, xv).

Let us now switch gears and review the phenomenology of the racializing gaze in the Fanonian lineage. In Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon draws attention to the reifying character of the white gaze; in its face, the black man finds himself an “object among other objects” (2008, 89). Not only is this gaze reifying, but it is saturated with hatred; indeed, the chapter on the lived experience of blacks opens with the striking line: “‘Dirty nigger!’ or simply ‘Look! A Negro!’” (89). Beyond Fanon’s work, later phenomenologists have depicted the white gaze as essentializing and rigid. In “A Phenomenology of Hesitation: Interrupting Racializing Habits of Seeing” (2014), Alia Al-Saji explains in the racializing gaze is one where “one cannot but help” to feel or see the other otherwise. To quote from the work of George Yancy, in his experience as a black man, “I feel that in their eyes I am this indistinguishable, amorphous, black seething mass, a token of danger, a threat, a rapist, a criminal, a burden, a rapacious animal incapable of delayed gratification” (2008, 844). This sentence illustrates Al-Saji’s notion that the racializing gaze is blinkered both at the level of the content it recognizes and at an affective level.

Women of color may have similar experiences in the face of the male gaze or the white gaze as those just described above, but they may also encounter the male gaze as objectifying in a distinctive manner. In what follows, I describe how women of color are viewed by some men as special sexual objects in virtue of their race. My claim is that beside being objectified sexually, women of color may be regarded by men not of their own race as objects of curiosity. In order to support this claim, I present research analyzing images of women of color in print media as well as first-personal accounts of sexual objectification by men of different races.

What do mainstream media images of women of color tell us about how we view them? In “How Women of Color are Portrayed on the Cover of Magazines: A Content Analysis on the Images of Black/African, Latina, Asian and Native American (BALANA),” Connie Johnson identifies the following traits in magazine cover images of women of color: “hypersexualization, objectification, likeness to whiteness and intensified exoticism” (2015, 2). Commenting on their exoticization, Johnson notes, “In visual imagery WOC tend to be portrayed in stereotypical garb, accentuated phenotypic traits, stereotypical contextual cues, facial traits, body traits or environmental related to racial categorization” (4). In her analysis of magazine covers, she notes that hypersexualization was the most distinctive difference between portrayals of white women and women of color (20).

If we examine first-personal accounts, we discover the traits of hypersexualization and exoticization described by Johnson. First, in her poem “Truth Is…,” Alessandria Rhines expresses her frustration with her fetishization as a black woman, and denounces the treatment she and other black women receive from white men:

Don’t pat my hair. Don’t touch my skin and call it chocolate or caramel or mocha or ‘body bangin’ like butta’. .. I am not your experiment. Your diversity quota. Your cultural trophy.. .. Fetishes are for the fools who can’t tell the original from the copy. I am neither, for I am, the truth. (quoted in Leboeuf, 2018, 165).

The notion of experimentation reveals a new facet of the male gaze that is not present in Beauvoir’s description of the gaze. Rhines’ hair and body attract an unusual attention on the part of her white partner. She is viewed and treated as an uncommon sexual object; this testifies to her exoticization. Moreover, the words “bangin’ like butta’” testify to her hypersexualization. Let’s turn now to a second case. In an interview with Brittany Wong for HuffPost, an Asian American woman, Lillian, whose name was not provided for privacy reasons, discusses the types of messages she receives on dating apps in these terms: “No man has ever opened with how white women are so ‘exotic’ or opened with an assumption about how white vaginas are different from other vaginas…. None of these messages have the same intense preoccupation with race.”Footnote 8 Lillian’s account, like Rhines’, speaks both to her exoticization and her hypersexualization. To broach a third example: Luna Diaz, a Costa Rican and Dominican woman, in an interview with Kelsey Castañon for Refinery 29, recounts: “I’ve had white folks sexualize my entire existence — asking me to speak Spanish during sex or calling me ‘exotic.’”Footnote 9 Her words could not evoke more clearly the phenomenon I am addressing here.

I have said that women of color are simultaneously reduced to sexual objects and objects of curiosity. At this juncture, I should clarify what I mean by being viewed as an “object of curiosity.” In The Habits of Racism (2017), Helen Ngo contrasts “domination staring,” which is prominent in Fanon’s descriptions, with a form of looking called “baroque staring.” Baroque staring stems from curiosity. Ngo’s account draws on the taxonomy of the gaze from Rosemarie Garland-Thomson’s Staring: How We Look (2009). There Garland-Thomson explains that “[t]he urgent question, ‘What is that?’ stirs baroque starers” (50). Indeed, as I argue elsewhere, the racializing gaze can take the form of baroque staring in the face of those whom we perceive to be racially “ambiguous” (Leboeuf, 2020). To return to Rhines’ words, what is distinctive of the male gaze in her experience is the fact she is coveted as a “novelty.” This, in my mind, harkens to Ngo’s and Garland-Thomson’s discussions of baroque staring. Likewise, Lillian, mentioned above, explicitly uses the language of curiosity to depict her experience: “We are not here to satiate your sexual curiosity.” She adds: “We are not passive objects. We have our own inner lives… Asian Americans are filled with small idiosyncrasies, just like any other human ― though we shouldn’t have to convince anyone of that.” In light of their experiences, we might characterize the look in these instances as asking, “What is that?” and then adding, “I want that!” The male gaze, ever possessive, finds a special appeal in the “unusual” physical features of its conquest. In short, to account for this exoticization and hypersexualization, I believe that it is worth introducing the idea that women of color are viewed simultaneously as sexual objects and as objects of curiosity.

All in all, while the gaze has received considerable attention in phenomenology, the experiences of women of color in the face of racializing male gaze have not received the detailed, in-depth phenomenological explorations that those of “women” and men of color have garnered. Besides calling attention to this fact, I would like to add that it would be worth exploring the bodily alienation that might result from such a form of objectification. Does it differ in force or in quality from the bodily alienation that stems from other types of sexual objectification?

3 An Intersectional Phenomenology of Embodied Resistance to Oppression

In my sketch of the notion of critical phenomenology, I asserted that such phenomenologies describe how contingent social conditions have modulated and continue to condition human experience; in addition, I claimed that they face forward and look toward new possibilities for meaningful experience. This section envisages the nature of resistance to oppression from an intersectional perspective. I zero in on the possibility of embodying resistance to one’s oppression and examine how such resistance for women takes different shapes depending on race. What do I mean by “embodying resistance”? While resistance to oppression can take the shape of civil protest, legal reform, changes in economic institutions, and so on, embodied resistance differs from these in that the work of undoing oppressive social structures is engaged in via “bodily strategies.” As Chris Bobel and Samantha Kwan convey in their anthology Embodied Resistance: Challenging the Norms, Breaking the Rules (2011), such strategies are diverse: they may include embracing counterculture aesthetic norms, such as not removing certain areas of body hair for Western women, or engaging in deviant bodily practices, running the gamut from breastfeeding in public to living as a dominatrix. As was the case in the first two sections, I begin with the work of Beauvoir, but in this case, rather than following through her appropriations, I adopt a critical angle on her argument via the work of Shannon Sullivan.

Beauvoir largely focuses on the macro-level social changes that would be necessary for women’s liberation—economic emancipation, sexual autonomy, access to safe abortions, an eliminating sexual violence, and changing expectations concerning housework and childcare, among others (Beauvoir, 2011, 721–742). Yet she also alludes at several points in The Second Sex to athleticism as a form of individual resistance to oppression. For instance, in her chapter on lesbians, she notes:

Many women athletes are homosexual; they do not perceive this body which is muscle, movement, extension, and momentum as passive flesh; it does not magically beckon caresses, it is a hold on the world, not a thing of the world. (2011, 423).

As I explain elsewhere, “Beauvoir’s language suggests that she equates athleticism with the power to affirm oneself over one’s environment; rather than being an object, the athletic body is a ‘hold on the world’” (Leboeuf, 2019b, 455). I contend that the counterpoint to Beauvoir’s claim is that “to the extent that women are alienated from their bodies and invest themselves in their bodies as objects, to that extent they have a ‘lesser’ grasp of the world” (455). Women athletes offer a model for resisting oppression because their activities express a subjective, or first-personal, relationship to the body, in contradistinction to the self-objectifying attitude inculcated by society.

Athleticism, to be sure, might be a vehicle for women to combat their oppression. Nevertheless, as Shannon Sullivan argues, this strategy may not be relevant to all women—in particular, to black women. In “Race After Beauvoir,” she states that “Beauvoir’s treatment of physical activism…privileges the experiences of white middle-class females” (Sullivan, 2017, 455). She observes that black women are already stereotyped as aggressive and physically strong.Footnote 10 Discussing these stereotypes in the context of the criminalization of black girls and women, Sullivan questions the usefulness of Beauvoir’s focus on physical activism:

The relevant question is not how to help black girls develop their physical aggressiveness, even though possessing confidence in their bodily strength and actions is just as important for them as it is for white girls. Rather it is how might black girls and women put their anger and revolt in their muscles so that sexism, racism, and the increasing incarceration rats of black females are countered? To be effective, Beauvoir’s notion of physical activism needs to be (re)developed intersectionally so that it addresses the lives of black girls and women. (2017, 456)

In short, athleticism does not hold the same liberatory significance for black girls and women at present than it may have for white girls and women. Undoing oppression for black women would, thus, have to lie in creating a space for black girls and women to embody physical confidence without facing censure or overt punishment.

While I do not have a full-fledged account of how to create such a space, I will conclude by sketching some avenues for it. Let me preface, though, that this is not supposed to be a general account of embodied resistance for all women of color. Just as the avenues of embodied resistance may differ between white and black women, so too differences within the lived experience of women of color will structure the forms embodied resistance may take. I wish to pursue Sullivan’s line of criticism and imagine what embodied resistance might look like for black girls and women insofar as they are already viewed as dominant and aggressive. To do so, I will dive into some “tools” that Sonia Renée Taylor envisages in her work on reclaiming one’s body in the face of oppression.

In The Body Is Not an Apology (2018), Taylor takes aim at the shame we experience when our bodies do not live up to normative images. For her, “living in a female body, a Black body, an aging body, a fat body, and a body with mental illness is to awaken daily to a planet that expects a certain set of apologies to already live on our tongues” (11). By this, Taylor means that those whose bodies do not conform are expected to make excuses for their failure to live up to bodily standards, whether in the form of overt verbal apologies or habits, such as not taking up physical space, which speak to their marginalized status. Taylor advocates developing a “radical self-love” in the face of this form of oppression, and she offers several tools for cultivating this self-love, two of which are worth mentioning here. To begin, she believes that being in movement is an important part of a flourishing relationship to one’s body. But unlike Beauvoir, she discusses alternatives to athleticism, such as dance. For instance, she relates her positive experiences trying “West African dance…a dance for women overcoming adversity” (108). Another part of this toolkit is community, which Beauvoir does not mention in her account of athleticism. Taylor writes, “radical self-love is not a solo journey” (112). Communities offer spaces for oppressed persons to be vulnerable and recognize the commonalities in experience, and this, according to Taylor, lays the ground for resilience in the face of oppression (112–113). Her observations recall the accounts of embodied resistance collected by Bobel and Kwan: groups, either informal (for example, friends) or formal (e.g., official organizations serving different marginalized populations), play a central role in supporting efforts to combat constraining norms. The avenues toward an embodied self-love that Taylor describes may afford the means for black girls and women to reclaim their bodies and to develop the bodily confidence prized by Beauvoir. Nevertheless, there are limits to this picture: if black girls and women are to fully flourish as embodied beings, society as a whole will have to address controlling images of them, as well as abolish the forms of oppression that they face.

My aim in this paper has been to motivate the need for phenomenologies that deal intersectionally with gender and race. I have drawn our attention to three phenomena that call for intersectional analyses: body image, the gaze, and embodied resistance. I began with the observation that one of the limits of classical phenomenology was its failure to consider how contingent social and historical structures condition lived experience. What my paper reveals are some of the limits of prominent feminist phenomenology and critical phenomenologies of race. In Visible Identities: Race, Gender, and the Self (2006), Linda Martín Alcoff describes our situated identities as embodied “horizons” through which we interpret the world. The identities of the feminist phenomenologists and phenomenologists of race whose works have risen to prominence may explain the relative paucity of intersectional accounts of gendered and racialized embodiment. But if we take intersectionality seriously, as we should, then we may expand the horizons of phenomenological research.