Through examination of the functions of language and cross-cultural readings of literature - from African queer reading to postcolonial Shakespeare - Rooney explores the nature of the real, providing:

• a way out of some of the current deadlocks of feminist theory
• an anti-essentialist approach to gender in which both male and female readers may address a consciousness of the feminine
• a platform for postcolonial and postmodernist thinkers to engage in a dialogue around the status of the performative in regard to the other
• a new theory of poetic...