that does not have its origins in [women's] intentional capacities” (152).38 Certainly, women also exist as intentional subjects who can and do transcend their immanence, but, because of their prominent objectification, they do so ambivalently and with greater difficulty. That is, feminine spatial experience in our culture, Young suggests, exhibits “an ambiguous transcendence, an inhibited intentionality, and a discontinuous unity with its surroundings. A source of these contradictory modalities is the bodily self-reference of feminine comportment, which derives from the woman's experience of her body as a thing at the same time she experiences it as a capacity” (147). Women, therefore, tend to inhabit space tentatively, in a structure of self-contradiction that is inhibiting and self-distancing and that makes their bodies—as related to their intentionality—less a transparent capacity for action and movement than a hermeneutic problem. As a consequence, women in our culture tend not to enjoy the synthetic, transparent, and unreflective unity of immanence and transcendence that is a common experience among men.
Although “any” body lives worldly space as encounters with both “opacities and resistances correlative to [the body's] own limits and frustrations” and with a horizon of open possibilities for action, to women, for whom “feminine bodily existence is an inhibited intentionality,…the same set of possibilities that appears to be correlative to [their] intentions also appears to be a system of frustrations correlative to [their] hesitancies.” A woman's possibilities for action and self-realization of her projects—even mundane ones like finding her own way from here to there—are certainly perceived as possibilities but, more often than not, “as the possibilities of ‘someone,' and not truly her possibilities” (149). Correlative to this ambiguous transcendence and inhibited intentionality, Young also stresses the “discontinuous unity” experienced by women—both in relation to themselves and to their surroundings. There is an intentional gap between the space of “here” that is the spatial “position” I can and do occupy and the spatial “positing” of a “yonder” that I grasp in its possibilities but, as a woman in our culture, do not quite comprehend as potentially mine. Examining this sense of “double spatiality” (152), Young glosses various psychological studies that show women as more “field-dependent” than men. Males demonstrate “a greater capacity for lifting a figure out of its spatial surroundings and viewing relations in space as fluid and interchangeable, whereas females have a greater tendency to regard figures as embedded within and fixed by their surroundings.” Young suggests that women's field dependence is hardly surprising, however, in a cultural context in which women tend to live space in a structure and mode of partial estrangement: the space of her “here” is substantial and rooted in her objective carnality, but it is discontiguous with the space of a “yonder” that seems the unfamiliar and abstract province of others. Thus, as Young puts it, for feminine existence “objects in visual [that is, projected] space do not stand in a fluid system of potentially alterable and interchangeable relations correlative to the body's various intentions and projected capacities. Rather, they too have their own places and are anchored in immanence” (153).
Materially embedded and positioned in a worldly space usually experienced as discontinuous and not of their own making, women find asking for directions from others a familiar, mundane, and reassuring activity that provokes no existential crisis. Rather, it creates social continuity as a substitute for fragmented spatial contiguity. Furthermore, asking for directions is also consistent with regularly living one's body in the world as a hermeneutic problem. Men, however, cannot generally accept negotiating space as a hermeneutic problem. They disavow the possibility of being lost, even if they sometimes do admit to being spatially “mistaken.”39 Unlike women, who often view maps as arbitrary in relation to their own bodies (the “You are here” on the library map, to me, the confusing equivalent of Magritte's painting about representation, This Is Not a Pipe [1926]), men see maps as confirmations of and continuous with their spatial location. Thus, maps, for men, do not offer “solutions” to a present disorientation; rather, they are taken up as potential and future extensions of a bodily being that always knows (or should) where it stands in the world. For a man in our culture to acknowledge being lost in worldly space would be to generate an existential crisis—for he would be admitting he was lost in the very intentional spaces his agency had supposedly posited. He would be admitting also to an experience in which he perceived the ground beneath his feet (here) as discontiguous with the projected space of his intentions (yonder). Given the threat it poses to the literal grounding of male identity, being lost is an experience of space that men struggle to repress. Refusal, denial, disavowal, displaced anger thus both manifestly affirm this experience and fend off the existential vertigo, panic, and loss of identity it provokes. (In this regard it is particularly telling that in the aforementioned film The Blair Witch Project, there is a significant scene in which one of the lost male filmmakers rages at the uselessness of their map and throws it away in a nearby stream.)
Among the three different forms of being lost we have seen that “not knowing where you are” is the most global and existentially threatening and “not knowing how to get to where you want to go” the most local and mundane. In the scenario about Tom and Mary recounted in the epigraph that began this section, given his assumed “mastery of the universe,” Tom hears Mary interrogate the very subjective ground of his existence and identity when she suggests that he ask for directions, and he is defensive and coldly furious at the implication that he doesn't know where he is. Mary, however, used to moving herself about as an object in unfamiliar spaces not of her own making, makes reference to that other much more mundane, localized, and, to her, familiar form of being lost—“not knowing how to get to where you want to go”—and, both consciously and somatically, she cannot comprehend either Tom's excessive reaction or the shape of the cosmos he is presently in danger of losing. In a culture where Tom and Mary posit and are positioned in space differently, in which they live and value their embodied relations with space differently, is it any wonder that they don't understand each other, the space of being lost (or mistaken) now become the shape of the distance between them?
After north betrayed my body and my forward-looking purposiveness to become an abstract sign, after I lost my child's confidence that I was the compass of the world and became a girl, I never developed a really sure sense of direction or geography. Both “direction” and “geography” seemed to me the discontiguous and arbitrary systems of others rather than projected possibilities for the fluid orientation of my own being. Now definitely field-dependent, I have to walk through a space and have it become a concrete and contiguous here for me if I am to later remember it as coherent. I also feel more secure locating an unknown place if I follow a narrative trajectory involving a series of grounded landmarks rather than the abstract schematic orientations of a map. Even then, however, sometimes I experience the metallic taste of fear when I try to follow someone's directions to somewhere new and an anticipated McDonald's on a corner or the carwash to follow on the left don't appear quite soon enough to assure me that I am, indeed, going the right way. It is at these moments that I force myself to remember what I've disclosed here, take a deep breath, and attempt to posit the world before me as a set of possibilities that are not inherently terrifying. What really dissipates my anxiety, however (and also makes me smile), is remembering that, despite the fact it was Hansel who had “a sense of direction,” Gretel was the one who killed the wicked witch, sprung her brother, and found the way out of the forest and safely back home.
1. As a child I also had a problem with “right” and “left” since my “sides” didn't enjoy the hierarchical privilege of my “front.” Although it seemed clear that north was always in front of—and never in back of—me, the designations “right” and “left” (as well as east and west) seemed arbitrary, directions one had to remember rather than orientations one lived. So, regularly, I wore mnemonic Band-Aids on the fingers of my left hand to guide me through the tasks of my childish life—like putting my right hand over my heart (on the left side) to say the Pledge of Allegiance at school. See, for elaboration of this typical phenomenon, Yi-Fu Tuan, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
