‘Throwing like a girl’?

In Throwing Like a Girl philosopher Iris Marion Young argues that feminine experience, marked by a fundamental contradiction between subjectivity and being a mere object, can be observed in woman's distinctive engagement with spatiality. Composed of both an apprehension of and response to space, this spatial awareness permeates female daily life, quotidian actions and cognitive calculations alike. In contrast to non-verbal communication studies, Young refrains from assigning movement a purely mechanical function. Nor does she invoke the binary that typically aligns speech with conscious, cognitive experience and movement with the unconscious, the libidinal, or the emotional. The performance of such strongly gendered actions by both male and female bodies offers up a powerful representation of the feminine as a gendered construct. Young's categories, in and of themselves, could not have unpacked these differences. Even as Hollywood moves into the transnational as a salient repertoire of the feminine, the local histories of those who access it substantially influence its meaning.