 The descriptions which Beauvoir offers us of the female body as lived, are in marked contrast to the valorization of that body which we find in the writings of sexual difference theorists: “What is at stake in the debate … is the positive project of turning difference into a strength, of affirming its positivity” (Braidotti 1994: 187). Engagement with female embodiment, the goal of which is to give positive accounts of it, are found in two different strands of feminist thought: Anglo-American radical feminism (particularly in the late 1970s and 80s) and psychoanalytic feminism, drawing on the work of Freud and Lacan. Sexual difference theorists, whether working from a radical feminist tradition or from a psychoanalytic feminist tradition, insist on the specificity of female embodiment, a horizon which becomes invisible when the male is taken as the norm of the human. For many of these theorists sexual difference is fundamental and immutable. Braidotti claims “being a woman is always already there as the ontological precondition for my existential becoming as a subject” (1994: 187).