Moving beyond the surface: a poststructuralist phenomenology of young women's embodied experiences in everyday life

Abstract

This article examines experiential accounts of young women's embodied experiences in everyday life, using a narrative and visual approach. The life history interview was aided by the use of photographs as a means to access specific memories of embodied experiences, rather than generic accounts of ‘the body’. In so doing, young women constructed two versions of embodied experiences: ‘the female body as surface’; and ‘being an embodied self through movement’. The data suggest that these young women live through a set of contradictions, in which an embodied sense of self and agency is either denied through the treatment of their bodies as a surface through a heteronormative male gaze, or more fully realised through non-sexualised physical movement. Based on the analysis, we argue that theories of subjectivity cannot afford to disregard embodied existence as a grounding for subjectivity, and that conceptualisations of gender, sexuality and agency should incorporate theories of embodiment.

Keywords:

• embodiment
• femininity
• agency
• surface
• movement
• sexuality

Notes

1.This point is consistent with findings from a second, forthcoming study, conducted as part of the research, on heterosexual women's experiences of embodying pleasure in everyday life. In the study, women recorded experiences of and talked about moving in outdoor spaces as pleasurable, and constructed this way of being similar to that of their childhood experience of embodiment.