This wide-ranging study of sexual dissidence returns to the early modern period in order to focus, question, and develop issues of postmodernity, in the process brilliantly linking writers as diverse as Shakespeare, Gide, Wilde, and Genet, and cultural critics as different as Augustine, Freud, Fanon, Foucault, and Monique Wittig.

The book shows how the literature, histories, and sub-cultures of sexual and gender dissidence prove remarkably illuminating for current debates on literary theory, psychoanalysis, and cultural materialism. Central topics include homophobia, the gay sensibility, transvestite literature in the culture and theatre of Renaissance England, homosexuality, and race.