The groundbreaking thought and enduring legacy of Iris Marion Young

Abstract

Iris Marion Young is lauded as a pioneering feminist philosopher and social theorist of sport. Steeped in Merleau-Ponty, she sought to consolidate and supplement de Beauvoir’s feminist iteration of existential phenomenology. Existential phenomenology affirms the body-subject or ‘lived body’, in existential unity with the flesh of the world, as the defining structure of human experience, in contrast with earlier phenomenologists such as Husserl and Heidegger, for whom the body presents itself only indirectly. Young’s approach to women, physical agency and sport gets luminous expression in her essays, (the acclaimed) Throwing like a girl and The exclusion of women from sport. The former argues that the different throwing styles of the sexes result from a gender socialisation that stunts women’s bodily agency. The latter argues that this socialisation is continuous with women’s material and conceptual exclusion from sport, the latter dominated by an ideology that not only downgrades feminine qualities such as expression and grace but that is also bad for sport and men. This Special Issue essay considers whether Young’s treatment commits to the normativity of male bodily agency tout court. It also considers the force of Young’s conceptual framework and the relevance of Young’s treatment in the present. We argue that there is robust reason to deny that Young commits to the normative primacy of male bodily agency. We argue also that the framework of Throwing like a girl should not be undersold and that significant augmentation is available in the comparatively neglected The exclusion of women from sport. We argue, finally, that Young’s perspective remains relevant, not only because of the legacy of her world, but also because of the (potentially liberating) gender manoeuvring that female athletes (in the broadest sense) sometimes have physically no choice but to perform.