The body-knowledge of fear

A woman walking home on foot in the evening holds a bodily knowledge of danger that the man walking down the same street does not share. I propose the concept of body-knowledge to name this knowledge that inscribes itself through exposure, and the epistemological asymmetry it reveals.

A woman walking home on foot

A woman walks home on foot, in the evening. She hears footsteps behind her, slightly quickens her pace, crosses to the other side of the street to put it between herself and the person walking behind her, glances at his silhouette out of the corner of her eye, listens for any change in the rhythm of his steps. She holds her keys in her hand, ready. In a few seconds, she weighs several possible routes against how much ground still separates her from her door. She does not experience this as a decision; her body has been doing it on its own since she was thirteen or fourteen.

A man walking down the same street feels none of this. He walks while thinking about what he will do tomorrow, about the conversation he just had, about the film he will watch tonight, and the steps behind him are just steps that he does not register as a signal. No bodily protocol is available to him for what the woman ten metres away is going through, and this absence of registration, he takes for the world’s normal state.

This scene is ordinary, it repeats itself in varying forms millions of times every evening, and it is what brings me to formulate what follows, because it touches on a question of knowledge.

What Polanyi calls tacit knowledge

In 1966, in The Tacit Dimension, Michael Polanyi coined the concept of tacit knowledge, also rendered as embodied knowledge. His thesis is that we always know more than we can say. When a doctor recognises a difficult diagnosis at a glance, or when a musician improvises in a given style, they draw on a knowledge that cannot be reduced to rules they could formulate, a knowledge that has settled into their body through exposure and repeated practice.

What Polanyi describes for the professions, I would like to displace toward what female bodies know about sexual and sexist danger, and more broadly toward what minoritized bodies know about the danger that is specific to them. This knowledge is learned neither in books nor in the institutions that claim to prepare children for life. It is learned through parental warnings, through accounts of situations in which other women have been assaulted, through the first hand on one’s bottom on public transport at the age of thirteen, through the unpleasant comment at the street corner, through the fear endured on the underground at midnight. It then settles into one’s posture, one’s gaze, one’s way of walking, one’s continuous calculation of routes and hours.

This knowledge is real, it saves lives or spares lives from being deeply harmed, it guides action in pertinent ways, and it has every characteristic of knowledge save that it cannot be reduced to a propositional statement.

From Descartes to feminist theory

Modern Western epistemology, from Descartes to today’s philosophers of science, has privileged explicit and demonstrable knowledge, and treated as suspect anything that passes through the body or through practice. This hierarchy has had significant political effects, in that the knowledge of women, of working-class people, of colonised peoples has been systematically disqualified in favour of knowledge that could be written down in the proper format, that of educated Western men.

The phenomenological turn, with Edmund Husserl and then Maurice Merleau-Ponty, partially corrected this bias by rehabilitating the role of the body in perception and knowledge, and this correction takes on its full scope within contemporary feminist theory. Iris Marion Young, in Throwing Like a Girl (1980), shows that female corporeality is structured from childhood by an apprenticeship in restraint and self-protection. Sandra Bartky, in Femininity and Domination (1990), analyses how the fear of the male gaze shapes posture, gait, and one’s occupation of space. Sara Ahmed takes up these analyses in Living a Feminist Life (2017) and extends them to racialised bodies.

All these authors converge on this point. There is a knowledge of danger that inscribes itself in the bodies of those who are exposed and structures their relation to the world, a knowledge that remains largely invisible to those who do not share it.

Epistemological asymmetry

It is this invisibility that produces what I call epistemological asymmetry. When a woman tells a man that she is afraid in certain situations, two attitudes are possible on his part. He can take this fear for what it is, a bodily knowledge of the world, and adjust his own behaviour and his own reading of situations accordingly. He can also take it for a subjective and exaggerated emotion, which he dismisses in the name of his own experience, an experience that gives him no reason to fear anything at all.

The second attitude is statistically the more frequent, and its logic is easy to grasp. The man in question feels nothing, his bodily experience teaches him nothing that resembles what the woman describes, and from where he stands he does not see why there would be anything to fear. He then constructs, in perfect good faith, the thesis that women’s fear is disproportionate, manufactured by the media, or fuelled by a victimhood discourse.

This construction is unanswerable, but only on condition that bodily experience is held to be a universal criterion. If every body felt the same thing in the same situation, then the absence of fear in one would indeed imply the absence of grounds for fear in the other. But this presupposed universality is false, because bodies are not equivalent, do not have the same history, and have not been exposed to the same things. The body-knowledge of one is not the body-knowledge of another, which is also why the absence of fear of the king of the savanna says nothing about the actual safety of his prey.

The concept of body-knowledge

I propose, then, the concept of body-knowledge to designate this form of knowledge that inscribes itself in a person’s body through repeated exposure, guides their action in pertinent ways, and cannot be transmitted by a propositional statement.

The concept takes up elements from Polanyi’s tacit knowledge, Merleau-Ponty’s body schema, and Donna Haraway’s situated knowledge, but it articulates them on a particular terrain, that of the knowledge minoritized bodies acquire of the danger that is specific to them. It has four properties.

First, it is acquired and not innate. A five-year-old girl does not yet have the body-knowledge of sexist fear; she learns it progressively, through repeated micro-experiences and through absorbing the bodily knowledge of the women around her.

Next, it is non-transmissible, in the sense that it cannot be conveyed by a statement. A woman may try to explain to a man what she feels in certain situations, she cannot make him feel it, and this limit is not a failure of teaching, it belongs to the very nature of this kind of knowledge.

It is also true. It says something about the real world. When a woman judges that a situation is dangerous, she does sometimes err, as any empirical knowledge does, but on average she does not err, and the available statistics confirm what bodies know.

It is finally political. Its mass disqualification by institutions and by ordinary men is one of the mechanisms through which violence against women has been able to last so long without being treated as a social problem, and as long as the body-knowledge of victims remains disqualified in favour of the non-body-knowledge of the dominant, the status quo reproduces itself.

Thinking from situated bodies

Recognising body-knowledge first requires us to modify our protocols of debate. When someone testifies to a bodily knowledge, the rational evaluation that would demand proofs in the explicit sense has to be suspended. The testimony is itself the proof, because it is all this kind of knowledge can produce, and demanding additional proof, in this context, amounts to denying the very kind of knowledge being offered.

It also requires us to acknowledge our own ignorances. Every body has its body-knowledge and every body has its non-body-knowledges. A man may hold a precise body-knowledge of long-term unemployment if he has lived it, and that knowledge will remain invisible to those who have not, women and men alike. A Black person may hold a body-knowledge of police stops that no white person can acquire through reading. A disabled person may hold a body-knowledge of the city’s inaccessibility that the able-bodied do not perceive. Body-knowledge is therefore not the privilege of one particular group, it is the property of every situated body, and its contents vary with the situations that body has lived through.

For those who are not exposed to a given danger, recognising body-knowledge finally requires a particular work on oneself. This work is not to be confused with the superficial empathy that consists in imagining oneself in the other’s place; it demands something more difficult, which is to acknowledge that the other knows something I will never know, and that this difference is what gives common knowledge its very structure, far from being a flaw in it. There is no view from nowhere from which a single observer would see all possible dangers; there is a multiplicity of bodies, each in contact with what threatens it, and knowledge does justice to its object only on condition of articulating these multiplicities without reducing them.

What MeToo made visible

This analysis bears on very contemporary phenomena. Since the eruption of #MeToo in 2017, social media have made massively visible testimonies that previously circulated within the private sphere alone, and this movement has pooled women’s body-knowledges on an unprecedented scale. But the same platforms have also spread an antifeminist reaction that takes the form of a frontal disqualification of body-knowledge: “You are exaggerating, you are generalising, your statistics are biased.”

Philosophy has, in this context, something to bring that is not of a moral order. It is not a matter of taking sides, but of saying what this kind of knowledge is, how it is acquired, what it is worth, and why its systematic disqualification is wrong in terms of knowledge itself, on top of being unjust. The concept of body-knowledge seems to me a usable instrument for this work.