The three innovative analyses gathered in this volume offer an up-to-date theoretical and wide thematic scope, foregrounding specific gender perspectives (such as masculinity or intersex studies) and combining theoretical premises influenced by gender studies with critical approaches taken from film theory, media studies, and deconstructivism. The individual chapters subject canonical texts (the novels of Edith Wharton and the films of Alfred Hitchcock) as well as contemporary literature (Jeffrey Eugenides' Pulitzer Prize-winning Middlesex) to a critical analysis with regard to their construction and negotiation of gendered identities. In the process, the authors interrogate gendered subject positions, the limits of binary sex/gender models, gendered metaphors and narrative strategies, as well as received notions like authenticity, the signature convention, or the auteur concept.
