The concept of experience has been mobilized within feminism as an authoritative basis from
which to challenge various knowledges concerning womens lives (especially biomedical
knowledge) precisely because knowledge hierarchies and orthodoxies typically dismiss womens embodied experiences as non-authoritative. The modern, Western mode of thought has displaced carnal knowing by cognitive apprehension that privileges knowledge produced through mental endeavour (Mellor and Shilling, 1997). Modern forms of embodiment provide no means of validating knowledge because of the way the body is equated with senses and knowledge with a disembodied mind. Accordingly, experience has become a buzzword for the individual, unique (ibid.). Yet female embodiment and womens lesser distance from the grotesque have, for some feminists (e.g. Shildrick, 2002) provided a potential means of access to carnal knowing (or a wild zone, see Showalter, 1985) not perhaps shared by men. A recuperated concept of experience denotes the erasure of carnal knowing and of sensory understanding, of the division between body and mind, which modern forms of organization and relations create. However, while as argued in Chapter 2, the concept of experience has been displaced by new feminist theories of the body, other feminist trajectories such as phenomenology and Foucauldian scholarship imply the concept of lived/embodied experience, as an effect of social and political practices, contexts and relations could be developed to construct reliable knowledge in service of the broader conversation in society that pragmatism characterizes. While experience has been exiled from the feminist canon (though not from empirical research) as essentializing, reductive and individualiz Embodying gender/gendering the body 145 5.qxd 15/03/2005 14:38 Page 145 ing, feminist focus on experience within disciplines such as sociology, anthropology and geography has typically been deployed as a means to an end and the aim of focusing on womens experience(s) has been to develop a better and more reliable understanding of subordination and oppression (Stanley and Wise, 1993; Skeggs, 1997). In relation to theories of the body, the concept of experience has been argued to be a necessary corrective to the claims and partial visions of theory (for instance, see Nettleton and Watson, 1998; Williams and Bendelow, 1998). It is used as an analytical device to achieve some leverage on theoretical claims and begin the process of examining them more closely. The use of the concept of experience
needs to be part of feminist writing on the body because it serves as
a constant reminder of the historically contingent nature of mind/body dualism and therefore, provides a way of persistently highlighting the importance of the particular, the local and the pragmatic. Raymond Williams (1975) in Keywords defines experience as (i) knowledge gathered from past events, whether by conscious reflection or by consideration and reflection; (ii) a particular kind of consciousness, which can in some contexts by distinguished from reason or knowledge, which might include what some writers refer to as embodied knowledge. Scotts (1992) discussion of experience notes the centrality of the visual metaphor in Williamss definition, which is itself a product of historical change and like other feminists, is suspicious of epistemological confidence in the visual because it connotes a distanced, non-situated subject who plays the god trick, by creating an illusion of disinterested objectivity. However, as Gatens reminds us, Merleau-Pontys philosophy of embodiment invites a consideration of vision as developed through and occurring within embodied, active orientations to the world. The production of knowledge in this way of seeing is tied to experience, where experience is understood as an active, embodied, particular engagement with the world and inseparable from the contexts and circumstances in which engagement takes place. Such an understanding of experience thus includes not only thought and reflection based on observation but also feeling. For Williams, feeling implies a sense of subjective witness, those immediate, true and authentic responses to events and circumstances not only associated with inner thoughts but also, perhaps as Burkitt (1999)
would have it, derived from a material world.
Moreover, Williamss concept of structures of feeling tried to capture actively lived and felt social experience as it interacts with and defies conceptions of formal, fixed and official social forms. For Williams, structures of feeling denoted a practical consciousness of a present kind (Williams, 1977) and he was especially concerned in his analysis of subjectivity to avoid the reduction of specifically lived experience in the present to an account of social forms rooted in the past. He was concerned to establish a methodology that did not segregate the social from the sub-