Moving beyond the surface: a poststructuralist phenomenology of young women's embodied experiences in everyday life

This article examines experiential accounts of young women's embodied experiences in everyday life, using a narrative and visual approach. The life history interview was aided by the use of photographs as a means to access specific memories of embodied experiences, rather than generic accounts of 'the body'. In so doing, young women constructed two versions of embodied experiences: 'the female body as surface'; and 'being an embodied self through movement'. The data suggest that these young women live through a set of contradictions, in which an embodied sense of self and agency is either denied through the treatment of their bodies as a surface through a heteronormative male gaze, or more fully realised through non-sexualised physical movement. Based on the analysis, we argue that theories of subjectivity cannot afford to disregard embodied existence as a grounding for subjectivity, and that conceptualisations of gender, sexuality and agency should incorporate theories of embodiment.