 A return to an interest in feminist phenomenology, in the footsteps of Beauvoir, started with the work of Bartky and Young in the late 1970s, but became widespread only in the 1990s. At the center of phenomenological accounts of embodiment is the lived experience of the body. For such writers embodiment is our mode of being-in-the-world (Young 2005: 9). The notion of experience is treated with great suspicion in the poststructuralist framework within which Butler is primarily positioned. The suspicion is a consequence of empiricist uses of the term, in which experience is tied to a “myth of the given” whereby body and world are offered to us in an unmediated way. The experiences to which phenomenological writers draw attention are not, however, of such a pure kind. For they are experiences of bodies in situations, in which it is impossible to disentangle so called “natural” and “social” elements. For as Merleau-Ponty points out, 