Girls learn to be positioned in space rather than to constitute it

Evidence

Growing older, the girl learns to behave modestly and decorously. Boys run, seize, climb, grasp, punch; they literally grab hold of the physical world and wrestle with it. Girls wear pretty dresses and dare not run in case they get dirty. Later, they wear high heels, corsets and skirts; they grow long fingernails which they have to worry about breaking. They learn, in countless small ways, to hesitate about damaging their delicate persons if they do anything at all. As Iris Marion Young later put it in ‘Throwing Like a Girl’, a 1980 essay applying Beauvoir’s analysis in more detail, girls come to think of themselves as ‘positioned in space’ rather than as defining or constituting the space around them by their movements. — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 671

Categorization

• DEFINE: Explains Young’s ‘Throwing Like a Girl’ concept of being ‘positioned in space’ — a key phenomenological formulation of gendered embodiment.
• ADDENDUM: Strongly connects to the immodesty article’s theme of clothing as gendered bodily constraint (heels, corsets, fingernails).
• XREF: connects to: Adolescent girls’ attributed faults express their passive dependent situation, not biology — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 902; Space is not freedom but permanent construction through contested social interactions; Girls’ bodily vulnerability in public space blocks their self-assertion where boys gain sovereignty. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1950 (+1 more)

Broader Connections

• Adolescent girls’ attributed faults express their passive dependent situation, not biology #expands (0.78) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 902
• Space is not freedom but permanent construction through contested social interactions #complicates (0.75)