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The consequence: “Feminine existence … often does not enter bodily relation to possibilities by its own comportment toward its surroundings in an unambiguous and confident ‘I can.’”³³³

In our grammar, we are calling this kind of bodily meaning an enactment. For women, as Young continues her reading of the wider meanings of female comportment, there is “a latent and sometimes conscious fear of getting hurt, which we bring to a motion. That is, feminine bodily existence is self-referred in that the woman takes herself as the object of the motion rather than its originator.” This, in a larger context where

patriarchal society defines woman as object, as a mere body, and that in sexist society women are in fact frequently regarded by others as objects and mere bodies, … the ever present possibility that one will be gazed upon as a mere body, as shape and flesh that presents itself as the potential object of another subject’s intentions and manipulations, rather than as a living manifestation of action and intention … The threat of being seen is, however, not the only threat of objectification which the woman lives. She also lives the threat of invasion of her body space; … feminine spatiality is in part a defense against such invasion.³³⁴

The repetition of this engendered experience is captured in the twenty-first century as #MeToo. From the microdynamics of localized enactments, the whole question of comportment must delve this deep and travel wide into context, parsing the extensive frames reference in social life where bodies-as-media enact meaning.

Notwithstanding the painful repetitions of gender, in the century after de Beauvoir’s and Young’s insights, the “strikingly obvious” of womanhood has become obviously complicated. Meanwhile, the phenomena that de Beauvoir considered “perhaps superficial” and possibly transient are showing no signs of imminent disappearance.

The signs of gendered difference are today everywhere, but they fit less comfortably the woman/man dualism. In terms of the old dichotomies, a man or a woman might be equally good or not at throwing a ball. Heterosexual man and heterosexual woman can be more or less “effeminate” or “butch,” and so can homosexual men or women. Add to these a panoply of other boundaryless sexualities and their attendant comportments: genderqueer, asexual, bisexual, bigender, gender-fluid, gender non-conforming, pansexual, cisgender, transgender, transsexual, transvestite, non-binary, androgyne, agender, asexual, aromantic, intersex, and when none of these categories fits or another cannot be found, just “other.” The range of differences within a named group is often as great as the average differences between groups. Or the comportments may be misleading.

These differences also defy the old sex/gender dualism, a dualism of biology/culture, embodiment/mindedness. Now the words of classification, apparently clear when the dualisms seemed to work, begin to fail us. Bodily enactments demand of us ever-more nuanced parsing. Elsewhere, we have coined and applied the word “gendre,”³³⁵ pushing the bipolar associations with the word “gender” in the direction of range and complexity captured in the word “genre.”³³⁶

And where words fail us, all may be well, because in their appearances and enactments bodies can speak for themselves. In Peter Gärdenfors’ nice turn of phrase, “the obvious goes without saying,”³³⁷ and perhaps today it may be wise to say less. But, we would add, the obvious never goes without meaning.

As much as they are designs in natural and social history, bodies are open to redesign, as media as well as meaning. Deeper than the second skin of fashion are tattoos, body piercing, the sculptable body of plastic surgery, and sex reassignment. Layered over by the subtleties of gesticulation and enactment, the old gender bipolarity is becoming anachronistic, not that it ever worked terribly well. Not even a spectrum will work now, because these differences can’t be located along a line.

Nevertheless, de Beauvoir and Young still have much to offer a grammar of the body. They provide a methodology for parsing embodied meanings. The only difference we may find today is that the meanings we uncover in our parsing have changed – though also often, tragically not. “When I use the word ‘woman’ or ‘feminine’,” cautioned de Beauvoir, “I obviously refer to no archetype, to no immutable essence; ‘in the present state of education and customs’ must be understood to follow most of my affirmations.”³³⁸

Maurice Merleau-Ponty was de Beauvoir’s contemporary and, with her and Jean-Paul Sartre,^§MS3.1.2b co-editors of the seminal journal, Les Temps Moderne. In his Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty says, “Consciousness is being-towards-the-thing through the intermediary of the body. A movement is learned when the body has understood it, that is, when it has incorporated it into its ‘world’ … Consciousness is in the first place not a matter of ‘I think that’ but of ‘I can.’” This was the basis for his critique of traditional philosophies of cognition and language-centered theories of meaning: “the corporeal schema presents great difficulties to traditional philosophies, which are always inclined to conceive synthesis as intellectual synthesis.”³³⁹

Where Descartes had said, “I think therefore I am,”^§MS3.1.2g we suggest this alternative, one that centers embodied meaning in the universe: “I can therefore I am.” Then, de Beauvoir’s agenda is for everyone, to make “can” a reality for all: “The same drama of flesh and spirit, and of finitude and transcendence, plays itself out in both sexes; both are eaten away by time, stalked by death … ; and they can take the same glory from their freedom; if they knew how to savor it, they would no longer be tempted to contend for false privileges.”³⁴⁰

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³³¹ Simone de Beauvoir, 1949 [2011], The Second Sex, translated by C. Borde and S. Malovany-Chevallier, New York: Vintage Books, p. 24.

³³² Erwin W. Straus, 1966, Phenomenological Psychology: The Selected Papers of Erwin W. Straus, New York: Basic Books, pp. 157–58.

³³³ Iris Marion Young, 1980, “Throwing Like a Girl: A Phenomenology of Feminine Body Comportment, Motility, and Spatiality,” Human Studies 3(1):137–56, pp. 143, 146.

³³⁴ Ibid., pp. 148, 154.

³³⁵ Mary Kalantzis and Bill Cope, 2016b, “Learner Differences in Theory and Practice,” Open Review of Educational Research 3(1):85–132.

³³⁶ Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis, eds. 1993, The Powers of Literacy: Genre Approaches to Teaching Writing, London, UK: Falmer Press and Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press.

³³⁷ Peter Gärdenfors, 2014, Geometry of Meaning: Semantics Based on Conceptual Spaces, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, p. 93.

³³⁸ Simone de Beauvoir, 1949 [2011], The Second Sex, translated by C. Borde and S. Malovany-Chevallier, New York: Vintage Books, p. 328.

³³⁹ Maurice Merleau-Ponty, 1945 [2002], Phenomenology of Perception, translated by C. Smith, London: Routledge, pp. 160–61, 159, 164.

³⁴⁰ Simone de Beauvoir, 1949 [2011], The Second Sex, translated by C. Borde and S. Malovany-Chevallier, New York: Vintage Books, p. 859.

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Kalantzis, Mary, and Bill Cope. 2020. Adding Sense: Context and Interest in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press. pp. 131–134. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108862059

Iris Marion Young’s “Throwing Like a Girl” §AS1.4.3d