ABSTRACT
A feminist phenomenology of sexual violence against women and girls calls for the need to shift both our theoretical and empirical focus from a world that exists objectively out there, to the specifics of a woman's concrete, living experience. The routine intrusions explored below are those that many women struggled to remember in the particular, and yet were lived by all of the participants as the unremarkable backdrop to being a woman in public. Ordinary interruptions, verbal intrusions and the gaze were the intrusive practices most commonly experienced by participants in public space, and those most often discounted. Creepshots and photographs make literal Simone de Beauvoir's claim that the look takes hold of the perceived image, and this is the concern expressed so clearly by Luella above. Following Beauvoir, participants are describing here the experience of the embodied self as a foritself, and the impact of mens intrusion in forcing a return to the materiality of the body.
