 Alcoff is drawing attention to the salience which particular bodily features have in our experiencing of our own bodies and the bodies of others. This links her work to that of other theorists who explore this relation with reference to the notions of both “body image” and “bodily imaginaries”. Weiss (1999) begins her exploration of body images with the work of Merleau-Ponty (1945 [1962]) and Schilder (1935 [1950]), though castigating both for ignoring the difference that sexed and raced positionality make. For Merleau-Ponty our body image or body schema is the awareness we have of the shape or form of our body: “my posture in the inter-sensory world, a form” (Weiss, 10). Such an awareness is not as of an objective anatomical body, but the body in the face of its tasks, a body in which some aspects stand out and others are invisible. It is by means of such body schemas that we are able to act intentionally in the world, and, although they most commonly operate at a pre-reflective level, they constitute our sense of ourselves as corporeal beings. In the work of Schilder the multiple nature of such body images and their dynamic nature is stressed. For him the phenomenological account is interwoven with a psychoanalytic one. Our corporeal or postural schema is formed, in part, by the emotional and imaginative significance which is given to parts of the body by our personal relations with others, and by the significance attached to corporeal features in the social domain: “the touches of others, the interest others take in the different parts of our body, will be of enormous importance in the postural model of the body” (Weiss 1999: 16). This, ensures that our body image is formed by the way the body is experienced and emotionally invested rather than cognitively represented. This is what for many writers is captured by the notion of the bodily imaginary. (Gatens 1996, Lennon 2015). Feminists employing the concept of the bodily imaginary,(influenced by the work of Irigaray discussed above), therefore, stress that the way we have of experiencing our bodies invests particular contours with emotional and affective salience. Gatens (1996), in exploring the notion of bodily imaginaries, also draws on the work of Spinoza. For her the imaginary body is 