Abstract
Introducing Husserl’s phenomenology of the body, the author argues that this approach can negotiate the different—and sometimes conflicting—manners in which we experience sexual embodiment. Following through several levels of embodiment as evident in Husserl’s analyses, the author argues that different aspects of the body’s materiality, sexuality, and sensory and concrete experience are constituted within each level. Thus, although the experiences of each level filter into and influence the others, we can understand our embodiment in very different ways in spite of (and along with) any apparent conflicts. The body is a unified whole of these experiential levels, from fundamental sensory experience through the social and discursive constitutions of sexual embodiment.
Excerpts from Sullivan’s diaries accompany the theoretical discussion in a way that Sullivan himself might engage in the theory.
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Notes
- 1.
I have published an earlier version of this example elsewhere (Rodemeyer 2008).
- 2.
This division is more complex than I make it out here, although my analyses in this chapter begin to break down this simple distinction. See also Rodemeyer (2014). Once again, I apologize for my reference to “the transsexual,” as well as “the intersexual,” in this article. I hope to have avoided repeating such egregious errors in this book.
- 3.
All pagination refers to the translation of Husserl’s Ideas II (1989) by R. Rojcewicz and A. Schuwer.
- 4.
A more extended and technical version of the following analyses was presented at the University of Graz, in a paper entitled “Phenomenological Gymnastics: An Analysis of Levels of Embodiment,” December 10, 2015. I thank the coordinators and the participants of that workshop for their feedback.
- 5.
See Al-Saji (2010) for a critical assessment of Merleau-Ponty’s interpretation of Husserl’s example: “Merleau-Ponty reads the touching-touched experience as a relation of subject and object—of for-itself and in-itself which are mutually exclusive to one another. In this context, my hand can be either absolute subject, ‘alive and mobile,’ touching and exploring the world; or it can be touched by my other hand, and descend into a passivity that does not even feel itself as such. It seems that the touched hand loses its affectivity; it cannot feel its being touched while my other hand consciously palpates it. At that moment, the touched hand becomes an object, a ‘bundle of bones and muscles.’ Its power to touch, and its awareness of itself, is there only in memory and anticipation, waiting for the next instant when it can regain this power and, touching the other hand, reduce it to the status of an object.” (Al-Saji 2010, 21).
- 6.
To elaborate, in the formation of my embodiment, I feel the surface of my fingers while touching an object, and I also feel the thickness and movement of my fingers, hand, and arm as I slide my fingers along. These sensations group together since they are distinguished from all experiences of objects that do not have this inner sense of thickness, movement, and sensation. The body begins to appear, then, as a particular object—the only one that is sensed in this way. This is the “primordial” formation of the body as Leib. This formation is then unified with my sense of self, a perceptual perspective that is mine.
- 7.
Husserl’s analysis is not without its difficulties. However, the issue of solipsism is not the topic of these analyses. Moreover, the topic has been dealt with extensively in the secondary literature, from Martin Heidegger and Alfred Schutz to Simone de Beauvoir, and many more in phenomenology as well as feminist theory and other areas.
- 8.
Husserl understands the term “perspective” quite literally here. It is a spatial perspective, not a personal one. Simply put, I do not gain insight into another person’s experiences, history, culture, embodiment, etc. by imagining myself in her place; rather I simply understand that her spatial position provides another angle on the world than the one I have. Husserl makes clear that I cannot access the other person’s thoughts or her direct experiences (see, e.g., Husserl 1989, 171–2).
- 9.
The objectification of women and people of color is usually a background presumption in most theories in the humanities and social sciences today. De Beauvoir’s seminal text, The Second Sex (1953), was a crucial work that launched such discussions from the perspective of feminist philosophy; Franz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks (1968) was similarly influential with regard to critical race theory. Butler (1999) and Foucault (1980), as we have been discussing, developed this notion with regard to sex, gender, and embodiment in general, which resulted in subsequent focused areas, such as queer theory, transgender studies, and disability theory.
- 10.
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Rodemeyer, L.M. (2018). A Phenomenology of Embodiment. In: Lou Sullivan Diaries (1970-1980) and Theories of Sexual Embodiment. Crossroads of Knowledge. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-63034-2_6
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