What is feminist phenomenology?

Thinking birth philosophically

Johanna Oksala

In one curious and exceptional fragment from 1933 Husserl discusses sexuality phenomenologically. Even if his taciturnity and his heterosexual prejudices concerning sexuality hardly make him a very original thinker on the topic, this fragment is interesting in re­lation to the question of the phenomenological importance of women’s experiences. Starting from himself as a man, Husserl has serious problems accounting for pro­creation and ultimately for the birth of a child:

I start from myself as a man and from my human monad which contains implicitly my immediate surrounding human world. The question arises concerning the intentionality of copulation. In the fulfillment of the drive, immediately viewed, there is nothing concerning the child which is created, nothing concerning what will have the well known consequences in the other subject: the fact that the mother will give birth to the child.1

Husserl ends the fragment, however, confident that a phenomenological investigation into the structure of his own experience would nevertheless clarify the phenomenon of pregnancy reflected in it:

in the explication from the side of my being in the world as a man, I experience what in the world reveals itself through further inductions, I experience what concerns the physiology of pregnancy. Teleology encompasses all of the monads. What occurs in the motherly domain is not limited to it, but is reflected throughout. But I arrive at this only as an ego that recognizes itself as a scientific man in mundane life and questions my and our monadic being and from there goes systematically further.2

Husserl’s problematic comments on pregnancy and birth form a background against which it is possible to recognize the ground-breaking importance of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex. Sara Heinämaa has recently argued that in presenting a philosophical description of women’s experiences and the world as experienced by women Beauvoir’s book was a response to Husserl and his followers (Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Levinas and Heidegger) and their shared implicit assumption that sexual difference is irrelevant to our descriptions of experience.3 In contrast, Beauvoir shows that the neglect of women’s descriptions of their own bodies has serious consequences for philosophical reflection. The problem is not only that explanations of women’s behaviour and sexual relations are thereby biased. What is worse, from a philosophical point of view, is that the neglect limits our understanding of human experience, its scope and its structures. It has led us to present and accept as universal and essential features that belong only to a subclass of all experience – the experiences of men.4

However, if Husserl has problems accounting for pregnancy and birth, Beauvoir is notorious for her negative descriptions of them. She describes the fetus, for example, as a ‘parasite’ that feeds on a women’s body and as ‘a growth arising from her flesh but foreign to it’.5

She and the child with which she is swollen make up together an equivocal pair overwhelmed by life. Ensnared by nature, the pregnant woman is plant and animal, a storehouse of colloids, an incubator, an egg; she scares children who are proud of their young, straight bodies and makes young people titter contemptuously because she is a human being, a conscious and free individual, who has become life’s passive instrument.6

More recent phenomenological descriptions of preg­nancy and birth have compensated for these descriptions by emphasizing the positive aspects of motherhood. The aim of these descriptions is still, for the most part, the same as Beauvoir’s: to include women’s experiences in the phenomenological inquiry. Carol Bigwood, for example, argues that descriptions of pregnancy and birth are important in challenging the various ways in which male modes of embodiment are privileged in our thought and practices.7 Feminist phenomenology has an important role in reminding us that there is a whole region of experience that philosophers have failed to think.

But, despite the importance of these phenomeno­logical descriptions of women’s experiences, this development is in danger of making feminist phenomenology a study concerned with regional sub-themes in phenomenology more generally, understanding it as only complementing and deepening phenomenological accounts of lived embodiment with accounts of female embodiment.8 From this perspective, feminist accounts of pregnancy and birth, for example, can add some missing descriptions of embodiment to the phenomenological project, but they do not change the core of it in any essential way.

The aim of this article is to question this per­spective and to suggest that the challenges facing feminist phenomenology are more fundamental. Does the study of experiences, such as being pregnant or giving birth, which are traditionally understood as feminist issues and relegated to the margins of phenomenology, not change the phenomenological project in any fundamental way? Do they simply deepen or complement it while leaving intact that which has previously been discovered? This article attempts to show that an analysis of these experiences does not simply point to the need to complement phenomenology with vivid descriptions of labour pains, for example, but suggests a need to rethink radically such fundamental phenomenological questions as the possibility of a purely eidetic phenomenology and the limits of egological sense-constitution. I argue that a careful study of these questions reveals a different understanding of feminist phenomenology, no longer a faithful assistant to the phenomenological project concerned with marginal or regional sub-themes in it, nor a complementary practice adding gender-specific analyses of experience to it. Rather, feminist phenomenology should be understood as a critical current running through the whole body of phenomenological thinking and reaching all the way down to its most fundamental tenets.

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