On July 1, 2022, I wrote the following entry:
“Whether I want to admit it or not, my growth is relevant, is obvious…but not when it comes to my body. Kind of. I can’t explain it. I do feel better about myself. I enjoy what I look like…and haven’t used my body as an obstacle or excuse of not trying. But that trauma from being bigger still lingers. What people think of me still stays in the back of my mind, when I get hit on in public it still surprises me…”
Phenomenology teaches us that bodies are not just biological objects but lived experiences, shaping how we perceive, move through, and make meaning of the world. It is the “science of the essence of consciousness.” It is with that then, that we recognize that our Western society has nothing to prepare us for this type of perspective. We are forced to live so physically in our world that we often resort to theories and philosophies to provide cushioning and comfort, but it us that must invoke that change. This is where we feel stuck. The tools and unlimited opportunities but too many fixed mindsets to put it into action. It’s something we feel when we’re 16 and likely what we’ll feel when we’re 60, the outside pressure of constantly separating one’s body from the mind.
What my 16-year-old mind didn’t realize was that there was an exact name for my feeling, an effect of society’s demands: Feminine Motility. How women may move if they must. That’s the feeling you get, anyway. We describe this detached feeling of our body as Ambiguous Transcendence, where we are both separated but bound to our body. The verbal “I can” which ultimately becomes “I can’t” under Inhibited Intentionality, and the Discontinuous Unity, where one severs their capacity in the body from the possibility of the world. At every more we are controlled, questioned, and doubted from something we can’t see but recognize.
It’s an unbelievable reality to merely stumble upon one day, usually in your adolescence. I think that’s the point too, to get you when you’re your most fragile, mentally. It feels damning, but then you get older, and at some point your mind aligns with your physical age and I think that’s what it means to enter adulthood and understand Phenomenology. To recognize that our body is a biological being, but also something that transcends beyond the physical world and our social boundaries. Moving (both emotionally and literally) from childhood to adolescence to adulthood is a painful process, one we can’t understand until we’ve been through it.
Unruly Bodies 
I love that you mention the lifelong pressure that is put on women to split our minds from our bodies. While this is imposed upon us by society and community, the constant presence of this force seeps into our subconscious and sometimes causes us to further reinforce the split in an effort to get away from being “controlled, questioned, and doubted.” One can see the terms ‘not like other girls’ or ‘girl boss’ and contemplate that this may be the subconscious split of someone who wants their mind to be their defining feature, not their body. There are so many spaces and places in which women are expected to convince others, and even themselves, that the mind can be ‘separated’ from the body that is imposed with an endless amount of expectations. One is expected to ‘surpass’ the restrictions placed upon them by gender, race, and any other factor deemed to be outside of an arbitrary ‘default’ and ‘prove’ the worth of one’s mind. The words ‘despite,’ ‘even though,’ and ‘regardless’ should not be used when speaking of the success of non-white, non-male individuals, but as Kosut and Moore note, we cannot escape that our viewable bodies are “invested with meanings” regardless of what we internally feel or think. As such, we only have to ‘justify’ why our minds should be considered because our bodies conflict with the rules and norms established by Eurocentric, patriarchal powers. Very powerful post!