Table Of ContentRethinking Feminist
Phenomenology
Rethinking Feminist
Phenomenology
Theoretical and Applied
Perspectives
Edited by Sara Cohen Shabot and
Christinia Landry
Published by Rowman & Littlefield International Ltd
Unit A, Whitacre Mews, 26–34 Stannary Street, London SE11 4AB
www.rowmaninternational.com
Rowman & Littlefield International Ltd. is an affiliate of Rowman & Littlefield
4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706, USA
With additional offices in Boulder, New York, Toronto (Canada), and Plymouth (UK)
www.rowman.com
Selection and editorial matter © 2018 by Sara Cohen Shabot and Christinia Landry
Copyright in individual chapters is held by the respective chapter authors.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any
electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems,
without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote
passages in a review.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN: HB 978-1-78660-373-9
PB 978-1-78660-374-6
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Shabot, Sara Cohen, editor.
Title: Rethinking feminist phenomenology : theoretical and applied
perspectives / edited by Sara Cohen Shabot and Christinia Landry.
Description: Lanham : Rowman & Littlefield International, 2018. | Includes
bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018025563 (print) | LCCN 2018040095 (ebook) | ISBN
9781786603753 (Electronic) | ISBN 9781786603739 (cloth : alk. paper) |
ISBN 9781786603746 (pbk. : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Phenomenology. | Feminist theory.
Classification: LCC B829.5 (ebook) | LCC B829.5 .R485 2018 (print) | DDC
142/.7082—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018025563
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American
National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library
Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992.
Printed in the United States of America
Contents
Acknowledgments vii
The Water We Swim In:
Why Feminist Phenomenology Today? 1
Sara Cohen Shabot and Christinia Landry
PART I: FOUNDATIONAL PERSPECTIVES 11
1 Subject and Structure in Feminist Phenomenology: Re-reading
Beauvoir with Butler 13
Beata Stawarska
2 Gender Essentialism and Eidetic Inquiry 33
Gayle Salamon
3 Intersectional Ambiguity and the Phenomenology
of #BlackGirlJoy 51
Qrescent Mali Mason
4 Doing Time in a For-Profit Space: Renegotiating Identity in the
Prison-Industrial Complex 69
Gail Weiss
PART II: ETHICAL AND POLITICAL PERSPECTIVES 85
5 Toward a Feminist Phenomenological Ethics 87
Christinia Landry
6 Phenomenology and Politics: Injustice and Prejudices 103
Christina Schües
v
vi Contents
7 Hannah Arendt, Gender, and Political Judgment:
A Phenomenological Critique 121
Sonia Kruks
8 Fat Temporality, Crisis Phenomenology, and
the Politics of Refusal 137
Kristin Rodier
PART III: EMBODIED PERSPECTIVES 153
9 Edible Mothers, Edible Others: On Breastfeeding as Ambiguity 155
Sara Cohen Shabot
10 On the Existential Damage of School Shootings 171
Anna Cook
11 Overturning Feminist Phenomenologies: Disability, Complex
Embodiment, Intersectionality, and Film 187
Jenny Chamarette
12 Feminist Visions: Theater and Women Spectators 209
Lior Levy
Index 227
About the Contributors 235
Acknowledgments
We would like to thank the following people and institutions who made this
book possible: the University of Haifa and Wilfrid Laurier University for the
generous funding and support; Marie Deer for her editorial assistance; Christine
Daigle for her always-pertinent advice and friendship; Sarah Campbell, Rebecca
Anastasi, and Isobel Cowper-Coles at Rowman & Littlefield for their flexibility,
helpfulness, and interest in our work; and numerous anonymous reviewers.
vii
The Water We Swim In: Why Feminist
Phenomenology Today?
Sara Cohen Shabot and Christinia Landry
Almost seventy years have passed since Simone de Beauvoir initiated a dis-
cussion on women’s lived experiences in The Second Sex, offering one of
the first non-neutral, gendered phenomenological analyses. Her work implic-
itly acknowledges that perception and its corollaries, cognition, mobility,
sensation, and affectivity, are also gendered. Additionally, it was Beauvoir
who called our attention to the fact that what we hitherto knew as “normal”
experiences were not normal at all but rather were the experiences of a very
specific kind of subject—a male subject. These are no small achievements
and, although Edith Stein and Hannah Arendt also worked in what we now
call feminist phenomenology, it was effectively Beauvoir who revolutionized
the way we think about the subject of experience as one who is always and
already sexed and gendered.
Thirty years later, in the now-canonical “Throwing Like a Girl: A Pheno-
menology of Feminine Body Comportment, Motility, and Spatiality,” Iris
Marion Young uses Beauvoir’s analysis to engage specifically with women’s
embodied experiences of space, mobility, and bodily comportment to explain
how girls and women within patriarchal societies experience their embod-
ied selves as strange, alienated, “not one” or rather as not “in concert” with
their intentional subjectivities. Indeed, there is a breakdown in their opera-
tive intentionality that asserts, borrowing from Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s
conception of the “I can” body, an “I cannot” body. As Young argues, this
is how girl’s and women’s embodied experience is a dramatically frac-
tured experience, one that frequently perceives the body as an object—an
impediment to reaching one’s goals—instead of experiencing the body as
the vehicle through which one may move, disclose, and inhabit her world.
Therefore, girl’s and women’s embodied existence is experienced as a
conflict with one’s self as transcendent, as capable of agency and activity.
1
