Living Alterities by Lee Emily S

Author:Lee, Emily S.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Published: 2014-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

4. Hesitation and Bodily “I Can”

My appeal to hesitation as a means (albeit partial) for interrupting racializing and objectifying habits of seeing may appear problematic.65 For hesitation is an ambiguous phenomenon. Though hesitation may make habit visible and allow its reconfiguration, the experience of hesitation also seems to undermine agency—one’s sense of oneself as an “I can”—and to install a passivity at the heart of the activity of the embodied subject. More troubling, hesitation tracks social positionality. On the one hand, those in positions of privilege hesitate the least; indeed, the projective sense of ease and mastery of one’s surroundings, presumed by the “ontological expansiveness” of white privilege, seem to foreclose hesitation.66 On the other hand, hesitancy in bodily movement and action tends to characterize the lived experience of systematic oppression. This is the case for the internalized (or “epidermalized”) experience of antiblack racism, as Fanon describes it, an experience in which the racialized body is felt to be “amputated” or “distorted,” paralyzed through the fragmenting effects of reification.67 Hesitation is also typical of “feminine” bodily comportment in our culture, as Iris Marion Young has shown. It is by rereading Young’s landmark essay that the phenomenology of hesitation I offer can be further nuanced.

In “Throwing Like a Girl,” Young provides a compelling account of the inhibited and contradictory modalities of women’s movements in our culture. Young shows how women perceive two sets of (im)possibilities with respect to the same intentional goal: an “I cannot”—socially constituted as “feminine” yet experienced by women as self-referred—is superposed on an imaginary and generalized, human, “I can.”68 These contradictory projections result in a lived tension within one’s body in the context of teleological action; one feels oneself, anonymously and generally, called on to act, yet at once feels one’s concretely feminine body to be incapable of such action.69 Young’s analysis of the sources of this specifically feminine “I cannot” points to the role of habituation. Such habituation is both privative (enforced by lack of practice) and “positive,” so that, Young argues, in growing up as a girl one learns a style of acting that is hesitant, fragile, and constantly self-referred—one learns to move through the world like a girl.70 But habituation arises within a social horizon that motivates particular habits and that habit reinforces and actualizes in turn. Hence the root of “feminine” hesitancy is located, for Young, in the societal patriarchal gaze that systematically positions “feminine” bodies as mere objects, and in response to which women come to live their bodies on such terms.71

To take seriously, following Young, the inhibiting effects of social objectification on women’s agency means understanding the hesitancy of “feminine” embodiment as more than the tentative suspension of habit. This hesitancy has to be conceived not as the indeterminacy within habit, but as the overdetermination of “feminine” body schemas and habits. This overdetermination can be linked to the exclusionary logic of objectifying, sexist and racist, vision that “cannot see otherwise than objects”—that cannot see beyond or beneath its objectifying constructions.72 In

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.