Originally published: 1999. 2nd ed. aIncludes bibliographical references and index.

Preface (1999) Preface (1990) ONE - SUBJECTS OF SEX/GENDER/DESIRE: I. "Women" as the Subject of Feminism; II. The Compulsory Order of Sex/Gender/Desire; III. Gender: The Circular Ruins of Contemporary Debate; IV. Theorizing the Binary, the Unitary and Beyond; V. Identity, Sex and the Metaphysics of Substance; VI. Language, Power and the Strategies of Displacement; TWO - PROHIBITION, PSYCHOANALYSIS, AND THE PRODUCTION OF THE HETEROSEXUAL MATRIX: I. Structuralism's Critical Exchange; II. Lacan, Riviere, and the Strategies of Masquerade; III. Freud and the Melancholia of Gender; IV. Gender Complexity and the Limits of Identification; V. Reformulating Prohibition as Power; THREE - SUBVERSIVE BODILY ACTS: I. The Body Politics of Julia Kristeva; II. Foucault, Herculine, and the Politics of Sexual Discontinuity; III. Monique Wittig - Bodily Disintegration and Fictive Sex; IV. Bodily Inscriptions, Performative Subversions; CONCLUSION - FROM PARODY TO POLITICS