Throwing Like a Girl

Introduction

The essay appeared in the journal Human Studies in 1980 and later gave its title to Young’s collection of 1990. Starting from the psychologist Erwin Straus’s observation that girls throw differently from boys, Young rejects explanations from anatomy and turns to Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of the lived body and to Beauvoir’s analysis of woman as Other. She describes three features of feminine motility: ambiguous transcendence, inhibited intentionality and discontinuous unity with one’s surroundings. Many women, she argues, learn to experience their bodies as fragile objects to be looked at and protected rather than as capacities for action. Young returned to the essay twenty years later; it is a standard text of feminist phenomenology.

Connections

Builds on

• Phenomenology of Perception1945 · Maurice Merleau-Ponty
• The Second Sex1949 · Simone de Beauvoir

More works by Iris Marion Young

• 1990Justice and the Politics of Difference