From the Disordered Mind to the Socialized Lived Body: Agoraphobia Through the Lens of a Radical Feminist Phenomenology

This thesis explores the potential to reconceptualise agoraphobia through a radical feminist phenomenological framework, moving away from a strictly medicalized understanding of agoraphobic lived experiences. A radical feminist phenomenological framework is developed by reading Iris Marion Young's account of women's bodily existence in a patriarchal society through Sarah Lucia Hoagland's theoretical framework of "protection and predation". The early lived experiences of agoraphobic women are then read through this theoretical framework, suggesting that agoraphobic women are socialized into aspects of female bodily existence during their early childhoods. The unpredictability of this early childhood familial environment is argued to play a role in the manifestation of this socialization process and in the experience of female bodily existence. This thesis argues that agoraphobic lived experiences arise as a result of this socialization process, which presents an understanding of these experiences as socialized lived bodily experiences.