Document Type
Article
Publication Date
2023
Abstract
You’re grabbed on the way to the convenience store. You hear sexually-charged comments while riding on your bike at 15-years old. That hyperconsciousness you felt about your outfits at home lingers with you after you’ve moved out at 19. It shouldn’t be a surprise to many of us to learn that the female-presenting body does not appear to belong entirely to its subject - at least not ontologically, which leaves its mental scarring and bleeds into the physiological experience regardless. Your individual identity is torn away, distorted and sexualized, and given back to you to wear as the Ideal Female - Hint: she looks like an Instagram model - until you have ‘aged out’ of it. This phenomenological notion of imposed signification on bodies is certainly not new and reminds us of Fanon’s demonstration of his essence preceding his existence as a Black man, as well as Du Bois’ description of the double-consciousness experienced by racialized people. Like a rushing tide, this imposed signification continues to infect today’s developing minds through misogynistic, totalitarian-like ideologies that ground contingent gender roles in Nature or History (namely alt-right or ‘incel’ ideologies) to give them a higher form of legitimacy. As a result of this insidious education, the spatial environments of female-presenting bodies are constricted much like they were back in the time of those twentieth century philosophers. We see women become both the subject and the object, contrary to Merleau-Ponty’s distinction - being able to perceive themselves not just from the peripheral, but from the third-person. Following from this, the expected behaviours of our given body and that of our own body may begin to converge, blurring the lines between authentic and inauthentic experience.