"Merleau-Ponty has, of course, been accused by his feminist critics of expunging gender differences. It has been pointed out that his theory of embodied subjectivity, of the "body-subject," presupposes a generic body that is male, and that it excludes consideration of the way different social identities mark our bodies. Merleau-Ponty is said to offer an account of "human" existence in which embodiment may provide the ground for a "primordial" intersubjectivity only because he has, from the very start, erased differences.3 Merleau-Ponty does indeed present "the" body as masculine (this becomes most apparent, of course, in his discussion of the body in its "sexual being"). However, I shall argue that the sexism is not so constitutive of his theory as to preclude his work from being creatively taken up for feminist ends. On the contrary, I argue, his account of embodiment may accommodate, and indeed illuminate, gender (and other) differences that he does not dwell on himself."