If Merleau-Ponty is unconvincing in positing a fixed ground of primordial perception that, though embodied, is “unchanging, given once and for all,” and shared or “known by all”; if he is wrong in elevating this ground into a universal normative ideal of spontaneity whose recovery should be somatic philosophy's prime aim, then let us turn to theorists more sensitive to the diversity of embodied perception and the historicity of somatic norms. Insisting that variant historical, social, and cultural factors differently mold our experience as embodied subjects, such thinkers further argue that a culture's dominant forms of discourse tend to obscure or demean divergent subjectivities so as to universalize the consciousness of socially privileged subjects as naturally normative and definitive for the entire human race. Should all somatic subjectivity be assimilated to the kind described by philosophers who typically generalize from their phenomenological experience as privileged adult males in the prime of life? A philosophical account of body consciousness must confront the question of difference.

Simone de Beauvoir ranks among the most original and influential theorists of difference. A longtime philosophical friend and collaborator of Merleau-Ponty, she effectively challenges the ahistorical universalism of his approach to embodiment by exploring the problems of bodily difference (in women and the elderly) and by exposing the ways that historically dominant hierarchies of power shape our somatic experience and define the norms of bodily being.