ABSTRACT
Simone de Beauvoir begins her analysis of women's living experience in the second volume of The Second Sex by detailing the formative years of a woman's life, from childhood through sexual initiation and adulthood. Beauvoirian theory explores the experiences of participants both before and during their adolescence, alongside Merleau-Pontys insights of habituated embodiments. Like Beauvoir, June Larkin, Carla Rice and Vanessa Russell also located the pervasiveness of mens intrusion in public as an integral part of normal female development. As a survivor of childhood sexual abuse, Clares agency can be seen as arising out of a situation where her body has been experienced as the source of mens intrusion. Experiences of mens intrusion both before and during adolescence led to modalities of habitual embodiment whereby women's projected intentional arc included within it the possibility of intrusion. Merleau-Ponty suggests that part of what is revealed in exploring women's bodily practices in public spaces is an embodied knowledge of mens intrusion.
